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Website creation advice

K

Khanmots

Gawd
Joined
May 12, 2007
Messages
905
I'll start by saying that while I'm horribly new to anything related to putting together a site I'm not new to programming/design in general (I'm a software engineer that works on embedded systems).

So... I barely know (maybe) what a CMS is, I barely know any html, and I am completely ignorant when it comes to CSS or javascript, etc.

However, given that, and given a willingness to learn and an expectation that I won't be at the point of having anything presentable for months... where do I start?

And... since you probably need to know something of reqs.

I'm wanting a newsy/bloggy area allowing for multiple contributers. Articles would need to be linkable and search engine friendly.

I'm wanting a forum. Threads/posts being linkable would be helpful and search engine friendly, but not necessary. (but it seems stupid not to)

I'm wanting the area for the main content, again, allowing for multiple contributors, with different contributors having different levels of access/control. This would definately need to be direct-linkable to a chunk of content, be search engine friendly, and searchable. A "smart" search is necessary (i.e., corrects mispellings, etc).

Unfortunantly I realize that this is probably nowhere near enough in the way of requirements to really get me started, but, I don't really know enough to get to where I have well defined reqs. So... point me at what I need to learn so I can! :)

Thanks!
 
You don't need to know HTML or anything to get that stuff set up.

I suggest looking into Wordpress for your content publishing and see if it fits your needs.
For forums, take a look at SMF and phpBB. Both are free and well-supported by their respective communities.
 
From the little reading I've done I think that drupal would be a much better fit than wordpress... but the last time I even looked at doing anything with a website was back in '96 or something, and things are drastically different now. Got a lot to come up to speed with, and right now I'm not even sure I'm headed in the right direction :)
 
I think you should investigate Joomla - fairly sure that it can do everything that you want, its open source and there are heaps of talented people out there writing mods for it that you can grab for free ... I use either Wordpress or Joomla on my sites depending on the requirements.
 
My understanding of Joomla/Mambo is that it isn't search engine friendly, doesn't allow for fine control over access, and that it doesn't allow for as much control of the design. While the last could be good for a noob like me, the first two sound like significant drawbacks for what I'm wanting.

What I am seeing though is that y'all think it would be a good idea to go the CMS route rather than say pylons or RoR? Or am I misunderstanding what the various types of tools do?
 
Well, if your goal is just to set up a usable website, then by all means use Wordpress and phpBB/SMF or so. If your goal is to learn to make such CMSs, then you should write it yourself :)

I'm writing a new CMS at the moment which'll be used for my company's site as well as those for clients, yet I'd much rather use an existing CMS, if one existed which I thought was suitable. Alas, it didn't exist, so I have to write my own :)
 
I have found modxcms to be very user friendly and very easy to get the desired output (seo friendly and all) it's got a very active community to help with any/all problems related to the system.

It lacks a built in forum, but I consider that a good thing as they should focus on the cms and leave the forums for groups such as smf/phpbb. Oh, there is a nice smf bridge to share users between the two systems if desired.

It's also very easy to create templates for the system and they have a few decent templates in their repository.
 
Khanmots said:
My understanding of Joomla/Mambo is that it isn't search engine friendly
Click to expand...

As long as you have a distinct URL for each page, there isn't much to 'search engine friendliness'. A lot of SEO 'tips' you see floating around the web are either outdated, or just plain wrong-headed superstition.

With that said, you could do a lot worse than Drupal. It's definitely got its warts (many types of changes are painful to move from a development/test environment to a live server, it's hard to tell which contributed modules are good & which are complete crap, the core developers seem to be somewhat disconnected from the community & keep pushing forward with new versions while the community is still catching up with 2-3 releases back...). Essentially, it'll give you everything you want, multi-user CMS/blogging system, forums, multi-level access controls, built-in index/search...

Probably the most frustrating thing for you, as an experienced software engineer will be the documentation - most of the stuff I've seen around the PHP/MySQL world is written at a very basic level. For every article you see that assumes you actually understand programming, there's a dozen that tell you how to make a DB connection and process a form - when you get into Drupal, half of what you find is screencasts produce by & for code-phobic designers.
 
ameoba said:
As long as you have a distinct URL for each page, there isn't much to 'search engine friendliness'. A lot of SEO 'tips' you see floating around the web are either outdated, or just plain wrong-headed superstition.
Click to expand...

Well, my understanding is that joomla doesn't create a unique URL for each page... but I could well have hit bad information.

ameoba said:
Probably the most frustrating thing for you, as an experienced software engineer will be the documentation - most of the stuff I've seen around the PHP/MySQL world is written at a very basic level. For every article you see that assumes you actually understand programming, there's a dozen that tell you how to make a DB connection and process a form - when you get into Drupal, half of what you find is screencasts produce by & for code-phobic designers.
Click to expand...

Well, stuff about how to make a DB connection and process a form could be quite handy... I'm a real noob about web stuff or even DB stuff (although strangely proper normalization isn't an issue). My programming experience is more based around system control and low-level IO stuff with a whole lot of systems-level analysis and design experience mixed in.

Anyways, I'm guessing that codephobics will amount to a lot of the user-base for any CMS... so quite a lot of the documentation will be tailored to that audience. Probably a good thing from my perspective as it won't assume that I know the difference between... say... a POST and a GET :p

Elledan said:
Well, if your goal is just to set up a usable website, then by all means use Wordpress and phpBB/SMF or so. If your goal is to learn to make such CMSs, then you should write it yourself :)
Click to expand...

I have no interest in learning to write CMSs :) I'd much rather fiddle around with learning to write a solid device driver or some such. :D
 
I agree that standard Joomla is not search engine friendly - but if you install the SEF (Search Engine Friendly) addon the urls will be very SEF.
I have had a lot of success with Joomla especially in Google, although now I am focusing on Wordpress as it suits my requirements. Goodluck with whatever you end up selecting :)
 
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