Sep
13
The Summer of the CMS Moronathon
Filed Under CMS and Blogs
Some things are easier than others, and there’s a good argument to be made for having idiot-proof documentation for everything, especially when it comes to technical things. The idea hit at the beginning of Summer to do a personal type site using a Content Management System for the first time. It started with a post back in July asking for opinions at Search Engine Watch Forums:
Since then, it’s been over two months of looking at options for CMS and blog scripts on and off, as time permitted, installing, trying and uninstalling several of them multiple times. A lot of people are hunting around for CMS options lately, like in this discussion at WebmasterWorld
The search was finally narrowed down to five contenders: Mambo, Drupal, Blogger, NucleusCMS and WordPress. What it’s finally come down to, after the lengthy process of evaluation and elimination, is that there will probably have to be more than one site, with WordPress being the obvious choice for this purpose. Without going into the features and flaws of the others, aside from Blogger, which has them naturally, WP is by far the easiest to handle for creating search engine friendly URLs, and also search engine friendly page titles in the archives.
Thanks to Alex, one of the developers, who keeps an archive, there are dozens of WordPress template styles to choose from, and installing them couldn’t be easier, though it takes figuring out on your own how to do it. It’s also comparatively simple to make modest modifications to the styleshieets
There’s an active wiki for support, though you have to know what you’re looking for. At this point the documentation is sketchy - like this example from the WordPress Docs
For more information about Trackbacks see Trackback explained. (Which doesn’t exist yet.)
It’s actually kind of cute, isn’t it? I actually started to feel like a moron it was taking so long to find something simple enough, and if this can be up and running this fast, it doesn’t get simpler. As a matter of fact, as an alternative to relying on tech-type folks to write some idiot-proof instructions, it just might take the right idiot to put their hand into it. I think I might know just the right idiot.