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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 30 2019, @07:20AM
Seriously - as others have mentioned, look at a barebones Wordpress install. It's the plugins and plugins for plugins that give WP a bad rep. They're an absolute mess, and if one conflicts with another, you're in trouble.
You really don't want to run rehash (Soylent's platform) for a simple blog. It's a fork of Slashcode (that runs Slashdot) and slashcode has been hacked, abused, fondled, caressed, punched, whipped and gently cajoled into submission so many times over the years that it's anything but simple or lightweight.
If you're running the base install with no plugins (maybe Akismet for spam filtering on comments) it's very lean, has low system requirements and is pretty secure. The vast majority of security vulnerabilities you see in Wordpress are from plugins.
There are an endless range of themes for you - and even the base theme is OK for a simple blog. Wordpress now keeps itself up-to-date, so that's one less thing you need to worry about and you can get it installed and running in 5 minutes. There's a heap of support for it and if, down the track, you want to migrate to something else it's easy to do.
Almost everything you have on your wish list there is in the base install of Wordpress.