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My first web page was back around 1994, hand coded, learning HTML by trial and error. In retrospect we had things easy.
That was followed by a number of years of Dreamweaver, a program that worked very, very well for me for some moderately big sites, then later several years of Wordpress based sites because it was fast and easy.
It's time again to upgrade our sites, and what I'm hoping to find is an open-source package that will do what Dreamweaver did, but bring that ease of use into an age of CMS and responsive design. My specific goals are below.
[More after the break.]
- Our sites tend to run to fifteen or twenty pages, don't require blogs, comments, or forums. They're informational and business oriented.
- We seem to do a big redesign every other year, with content more or less static. There's likely to be one big update each year, and minor changes off and on.
- Because we're not using the package on a daily or even weekly basis, anything complex or arcane tends to get forgotten, and has to be relearned next time that you need it.
- One of the great things about Dreamweaver was the ease of designing and using a page template. I really liked that.
- One of the reasons for moving away from Wordpress - aside from a recent upgrade borking one of our sites - is a feeling that there are about a million Wordpress sites out there, all of which look decidedly Wordpress.
- We're also mildly concerned about security. Because we're not monitoring the sites every day it's likely we will miss anything unpleasant that creeps in.
- I've spent a few hours with Drupal and Joomla a couple of years ago, but hit the wall pretty fast. They seem to be what I would like to use, but I just don't have the time these days to work through what seems to be fairly obscure and difficult learning curve. I just know that there's some underlying logic, but I've yet to find it. (That may have improved since then, and I'm up for looking at them again.)
- I've also looked at a couple of the on-line design package like Weebly and Webflow, but they're fairly limited from what I can see, or want me to cough up a monthly subscription for full features.
- Yes, I want the whole she-bang hosted on a server that I control. Yes I'm happy installing stuff, configuring stuff, and mucking about.
- An active user forum is a big plus for me.
Ultimately I guess what I'm looking for is the Holy Grail - a program or application that will let me get something professional up and running fairly fast, then leave lots of room for tweaking and improving any and all aspects of it.
(Score: 2) by marcello_dl on Monday December 28 2015, @12:33PM
Copypasting from the other site: don't worry, the comment is mine, I can.
...use a lightweight framework that does not impose many restrictions on the structure. Radiant [radiantcms.org] for rails is the classic one, but I prefer wolfcms [wolfcms.org] because it is a bit easier to deploy and has no domain specific language for templating, you embed PHP. Radiant needs an extension to do that.
In such frameworks you could start with your hand crafted html or template and refine like this:
- Put your hand made html pages in the CMS tree. The advantage is that you can login to the server to edit and upload content without much fuss (watch out for upload limits in php.ini though)
- Separate design (using layouts) from content, so that less repetition and more consistency is achieved.
- Automate navigation so adding a page to the tree updates the links and the site map.
- Use either the DB or the page parts (they are like db fields, the page is like a record) to further separate content from presentation, so that even unskilled people can add content.
- Refactor functionality in plugins so they get reusable (if you're getting a pro)
....
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday December 28 2015, @01:03PM
That's a good answer, but in addition, draw a venn diagram thingy where "after I cross this line of adding numerous extensions and addons, I've basically reimplemented mediawiki the very hard way so wipe and install vanilla mediawiki". And all the other alternatives of course.
Radiant shows a general design pattern fail of "we're not as complicated as the other guys but we have 50 bazillion addons you can zoo keeper / cat herder over to turn our simple thing into something far more complicated and labor required than our supposedly too complicated competition that does all that in vanilla with no extensions". Vanilla Radiant's main selling point is vanilla is easy, but in practice after people add 50 extensions its worse than just starting over with something complicated. Can't increase simplicity by adding stuff.
I guess by analogy given extremely flexible tools and infinite hardware power, its possible to emulate everything, but its not necessarily a good business idea to emulate everything when you could just install the real thing and be simpler/faster.
(Score: 2) by marcello_dl on Tuesday December 29 2015, @12:49AM
Yes, in practice you have the "tame the big CMS but live happily ever after" vs the "port html exactly as is, take advantage of the framework as much as you need, but tame the possible extensions pool later".
There still are two pluses in the second approach, first that your existing HTML/JS/CSS/PHP skills have more headroom with minimal frameworks. Don't want to use "layouts", "snippets"? No prob. Second, that when the minimal framework upgrades it usually doesn't change as much as big CMS do, or at least have done in recent years.