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Hello fellow Soylentils, I could use some of your insights and suggestions.
I am looking for a lean, mean, and safe open source solution that implements a small blog where I can rant and rave to my heart's delight to my two followers.
To set the scene, I am not looking for something big and/or unwieldy, which basically rules out the major platforms like Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress. The software is going to be self hosted on my existing web server, which already runs Linux with Apache2, MySQL, PHP, Perl, and PostgreSQL (LAMPPP?) on a Debian platform.
I would like the following features:
- Open Source
- Safe (i.e. well tested against hacking)
- Reuse of my platform components (see above)
- Small server footprint (the server is, in fact, a Raspberry Pi 3B+)
- UTF-8 compatible everywhere (not like some systems — cough /. cough — where comments cannot contain UTF-8 directly)
- Sane use of CSS
- Displays properly on all platforms (PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones, ...)
- Easy to set up
- Select features (e.g. whether users can comment on posts or not)
- Select a design (with a number of templates, preferably)
- Tweak the design to include my details
- Add menus (Home page, Archive, Contact, ...?)
- Add pictures
- Define how many entries on the home page before the oldest entry gets bumped to the Archive
- Possible sidebar for non-blog information
- Possibility of displaying adverts in the future
- Easy to use
- Log in (only going to be used by one user, me)
- Make a blog entry
- Enter subject
- Enter and format blog text (font, size, colour, attributes, ...)
- Upload and embed pictures/illustrations/figures in text with captions
- Add links to text and pictures
- Set the time when a post goes active (now or specific time in the future)
- Publish it
- Edit a blog entry
- Change any and all elements of the entry
- I am a bit ambivalent regarding user comments as I do want to moderate them but will only have time to do that in batches, which means that I may have unwanted comments on the site for some time or, alternatively, people will not see their comments displayed until I have accepted them some time later.
[Ed. addition follows.]
I am not familiar with the minimum resource requirements for running SoylentNews, but if it would not reasonably fit on a single RPi, maybe adding one or two more would suffice?
What suggestions do YOU have for our fellow Soylentil?
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Monday July 29 2019, @05:55PM (4 children)
Just don't try to make WordPress do something it wasn't designed for. It's got a nice interface, but the backend is held together by duct tape and paperclips.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by Chocolate on Monday July 29 2019, @09:53PM
Once you get past the initial So Pretty! OMG! Form data fields! and Plugins! you may find that collecting and using data in a serious manner is a PITA. A friend of mine was spending hours each week fixing mangled HTML in the back end while trying to keep the front end working. It was awesome as a quick standup for formups and user posts but in the end he shut it down due to the time required to administrate it. Another friend went the Drupal way to the point that a coder now maintains the site. That site has an income so it is doing well but it gives you can idea of the potential costs. Quick and easy to set up does not always translate into cheap in the long run. Even phpBB has its issues.
Bit-choco-coin anyone?
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday July 30 2019, @03:56AM (2 children)
Um, I guess it's the online culture to make generalized criticisms, but could you cite some specific facts?
Like what about the backend is fragile?
And what was it designed for? CMS AFAIK.
It's possible that too many people equate bad WP themes with WP itself.
I don't mean to be a WordPress shill. I've been admining it for 13 years now, keeping it updated, and it's been stable.
Biggest hurdle is probably picking through themes, but it's so easy to try different ones.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Tuesday July 30 2019, @02:59PM (1 child)
It's been a few years since I've been deep into Wordpress, so I don't remember details and things might have improved since then. But my takeaway is that it is designed to be a blog platform where privileged users can write posts, editors can edit them, and everyone else can just comment on them. There is some facility for static pages and navigation that makes sense for a blog site.
If that fits your model, great! You might even be able to use or make plugins that extend that core functionality successfully. But making plugins is where the pain begins; there often aren't plugin hooks in the right places, so you have to hook into broader access. It's easy to do something the wrong way, and your custom plugin will do weird things when interacting with other plugins.
The data model itself is brittle, too. If you venture outside of the core blog site concept, you will not have fun. Say you wanted to approximate a web forum. You might find yourself giving everyone permission to make posts in order to facilitate starting threads, and then have trouble locking them down from messing with the front page (or at the very least remembering that you need to do so). You might have trouble making the original post and the replies look and feel the same. You might have trouble getting comments as much editing power as the original posts. You might have trouble making the new thread page look like the front-end instead of the wp-admin style.
All of this is to say: don't make a web forum out of Wordpress. Make a blog. Maybe even a small news site or some other concept that has a clear separation between website staff that can create posts and everyone else that can create comments. But if you think you might need to venture beyond that concept, look for something more flexible and generic.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday July 30 2019, @06:54PM
WordPress, of course, started out as a blog. But for whatever reason it took off. Maybe simply "viral syndrome"? Or maybe it was the easiest to write themes and plugins for? All I know is there's some statistic that says more than half of all websites run on WordPress.
Most of the users of the sites I (backend) admin are just using it as a static site with an easy CMS UI. (frankly I think it's clunky, but I don't tell them that.)
Several of the ones I admin are ecommerce and it's trivial to install.
A lot of the problems you mentioned have been cleaned up. Maybe my only irritation is that some permissions are ON by default, like "anyone can post" or some such. As a rule I go through and check things like that before going live with a new site. It's trivial to shut off all non-admin inputs (no posts, no pingbacks or trackbacks, etc...)
I can not disagree with you re: WP as forum. Haven't tried it that way, and nobody has asked me for it. A quick websearch only gives stale opinions and comparisons, but there are lots of forum plugins (to try...).
WordPress and its world have come a llllooooonnnnngggggg way baby.