A few days ago I purchased gentoo.org.au (no, don’t bother looking, it doesn’t point anywhere yet :p).
I have been investigating various programs to help manage the webspace. Started off looking at various CMS programs:
- Joomla – can’t say it grabbed me at all. The default setup is way too messy, and even after fidling with the seconds for 5 minutes couldn’t improve it.
- Drupal – much cleaner interface, and default, this actually creates reasonably sexy pages without much effort.
- Geeklog – looked, moved on quickly.
However people in #gentoo-au have recommended that a CMS may be overkill and to try out a wiki. So it looks like I will be experimenting with phpwiki and mediawiki over the next few days.
Well, you could always roll your own (
http://planet.gentoo.org/developers/seemant/2006/10/04/communities_django_is_one) with django (
http://www.djangoproject.com) or, if you must,
http://www.rubyonrails.org.
What are you requirements for the site and what are your goals?
For simple sites I can recommend SAPID – http://sapid.sf.net
Seemant,
I currently don’t possess the coding skills to user django or rails, but I will look into them and maybe learn 🙂
Serge,
Currently I don’t have any clear goals or requirements for the site. It simply needs to be a place where I (and others) can organise Gentoo related social/development meetings. Basically, it needs to be low-maintance, sexy and easy to use.
You could also give DokuWiki (http://wiki.splitbrain.org/doku.php) a try. Seems to be nice an clean and offers a lot of plugins (even for blogging and such).
Also, if you are able to use Python on your webspace, MoinMoin would be my favourite option.
Drupal++.. When considering Drupal, do take a browse through the modules on the drupal.org site. Drupal itself is a platform, and the power behind it lies in the modules allowing more cool functionality. Plus, the 4.7 release has been a huge leap for the project. See a post of mine on some of the pros/cons of 4.7: http://staff.osuosl.org/~cshields/?p=150
Cheers!
disclaimer – I work for the OSL, and we host drupal. I am not a drupal developer. I have deployed a few drupal sites, including the migration to drupal for osuosl.org
Hrm, you haven’t said what you plan on using the website for, which makes it a bit tricky to provide a good recommendation 🙂
I’d recommend Drupal; it’ll grow as the site grows, and it’ll allow you to make the site a great portal for Gentoo in Australia. There’s nearly 200 plugins for it last time I counted, and they have one of the better track records on security.
Ubuntu use moinmoin (python-based wiki), which is quite nice. We could always use a Gentoo theme for that 🙂
Best regards,
Stu