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The A.S.S. (the company behind the recent production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in which I played, about which I really will do a longer post asap) is talking about putting together a website, and I've volunteered to help.
My instinct is to design and code the thing from scratch, like I did for the Second Shift site, but I'm beginning to think that that's old fashioned (or is it?). For a site that doesn't need to do anything special, just text, photos, and videos, should I just deploy a CMS and be done with it? If so, which one? I kind of like the Stranger Ways site, which
natbudin put seemed to put together practically overnight with WordPress, though my ideal would be extensible using Python instead of PHP (though that's just a preference-- can do PHP fine).
Anyway, suggestions?
My instinct is to design and code the thing from scratch, like I did for the Second Shift site, but I'm beginning to think that that's old fashioned (or is it?). For a site that doesn't need to do anything special, just text, photos, and videos, should I just deploy a CMS and be done with it? If so, which one? I kind of like the Stranger Ways site, which
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Anyway, suggestions?
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Date: 2011-06-21 01:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-21 01:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-21 03:36 pm (UTC)1) Saves time
2) easier to hand off when you eventually do.
3) Reinventing the wheel means reinventing all the bugs other things have already solved, which is a big security nightmare.
Third party open source products are sufficiently capable and attractive and usable that there is almost no good reason to build by hand, no matter how satisfying that might feel as a project.
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Date: 2011-06-21 02:17 pm (UTC)I've also heard good things about Drupal, but I know pretty much nothing about it. I think
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Date: 2011-06-21 02:46 pm (UTC)If you are going to use Wordpress, I highly recommend beginning with the Toolbox theme and writing a child theme based on it. I didn't do that for the Stranger Ways site, but I did for the PLOT site, and it made things a lot easier to customize.
I've also used Radiant on a few sites (Alleged Entertainment and the Journey marketing site both use it). It's got some cool ideas in it, and being a Rubyist, I like working with it, but it's not as easy to get going with as Wordpress, and frankly is probably not worth the trouble unless you're deeply invested in Rails.
The other thing I've worked with a bit is nanoc, which is one of the new bunch of static site compilers (the most popular of which is Jekyll). The idea here is that you write your site using some simple text-ish format like Markdown, write a template to stick the content into, run the compiler, and rsync the HTML files it generates up to your web server. Then you've frontloaded all the computation work and your site loads really fast. If you think you can get away with having all your pages be static HTML, then this is possibly worth looking into.
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Date: 2011-06-21 02:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-21 04:40 pm (UTC)My health blog is tumbler.
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Date: 2011-06-21 07:45 pm (UTC)Second shift site is functional and easy to navigate.
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Date: 2011-06-21 11:07 pm (UTC)What you really don't want is to be the only person who can update the site. Then you'll get urgent emails months later when you're in the middle of 10 other projects saying that you need to put something up THAT weekend. This can also happen if you, say, decide to design a CMS from scratch.
There are plenty of good CMSes that aren't WordPress. I imagine there are some that are written in Python too; I just can't think of any right now.