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For those who write articles on CMS, a question.

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40hz:
If I have one criticism with that it's that focusing on that concept derails as much as it helps.
-Paul Keith (September 28, 2009, 10:46 PM)
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I feel your pain. ;D

But if you know of any way to get around that, please let me know. I've been trying for years to prove myself wrong on that score. But no matter how hard I've tried, in the end, it still keeps coming back to a [bash/test/repeat] cycle if I want to get something done. True, I've optimized part of the process through experience so I'm a lot more efficient about it as time goes on. But I'm still nowhere closer to Nirvana than I ever was when it comes to computers.

(Hmm...maybe I should use a different word? Bash sounds so inelegant and chaotic when it's actually quite the opposite in this context.)

OK, that being said, I agree with sri in his comment above. If you want to learn one thing only, go with Wordpress. It's conceptually easy to grasp, has the most extensive feature set, and can rapidly be morphed into just about anything with little more than some thought and a few plugins.

Hmmm...that sure sounds like a "bash" solution to me! ;D

Paul Keith:
(Hmm...maybe I should use a different word? Bash sounds so inelegant and chaotic when it's actually quite the opposite in this context.)
--- End quote ---


IMO, that's one way to get around that.  :Thmbsup:

It's one of the dropped topics I was originally going to post in GOE. Ended up posting some of the current examples I have here:

http://thinksimplenow.com/happiness/the-power-of-language/#comment-63510

Yeah, I often hear praise of Wordpress but because I'm not focused specifically on learning the system right now as opposed to writing articles, I don't really feel it's advantageous to cash out on an application especially when I'm unemployed.

Also from what little I've seen of Wordpress in the previews, I don't think it will really show me all the difference between a chronological blog and a mult-page static site so that's still something I have to learn elsewhere. (somehow)

 

40hz:
Also from what little I've seen of Wordpress in the previews, I don't think it will really show me all the difference between a chronological blog and a mult-page static site so that's still something I have to learn elsewhere. (somehow)
-Paul Keith (September 28, 2009, 11:32 PM)
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If you want to get some hands-on, bop on over to the Bitnami website:

http://bitnami.org/stacks

They have preconfigured stacks for all the major LAMP/WAMP apps. Most are available for either 'real' or virtual machine installation. Just download and run. You can get Wordpress or Joomla installed and working in under 10 minutes. Ditto for about 20 more apps. All are free for the download.

For those who write articles on CMS, a question.

Bitnami has been criticized for occasionally being behind the curve with revision levels so I wouldn't want to use them to do an actual production server installation. But for trying out or learning something, they're pretty hard to beat.

Paul Keith:
Thanks!

Edit: I forgot to ask does the Wordpress stack (I don't really know what stacks is) support everything from simulating adding Adsense, Wordpress plugins, Writing from Windows Live Writer-like editor to the stacks or is it just a simulator for the barebones service?

tranglos:
Wordpress, Joomla, MediaWiki, raw XHTML/CSS, Drupal, postNuke, Typo3 (learning how to use this is equivalent to doing a PhD)...I have tried them all.

WordPress is the best. Whether you want a one page site or multi-page static site or of course a blog, nothing can beat WordPress.
-sri (September 28, 2009, 10:47 PM)
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I have to agree. For the last two weeks I've been wrestling with Joomla, then set up a (separate) blog site in Wordpress. It was such a relief. Everything "just works" in Wordpress. The ajaxy adminstrative UI is awesome, functional and clean. All the settings I wish to change are right where I expect to find them, and they make sense. The documentation is exhaustive and written with a dash of humor, which is always welcome. And though I had previously only read php code, never written a script, I wrote a simple widget for WordPress, from scratch, within a couple of hours yesterday.

And WordPress has smarts! I was editing a page in html view, and pasted a few paragraphs of text but forgot to wrap them in p tags. Switched to the page view, and the display was correct! My text was properly divided into paragraphs. WordPress did what I meant, not what I told it to do. It was "smart" and did the right thing.

That said... and I'm beginning to hate this phrase, but that said, I don't (yet) think I can use WordPress for my main site. All the templates I've seen display the menu of pages as static and fully expanded. That works for 10-20 pages, but not for 50 or more, with levels of nesting. It's just not convenient trying to find your way around a fuly expanded, long menu of dozens, maybe hundreds of pages eventually. Joomla, by comparison, got the menu right (but little else).

And WordPress seems strangely slow to load on the front-end. Slower than Joomla, even for simple pages with no images. There's the SuperCache plugin; I read the docs and didn't quite like the caveats.

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