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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 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.