CMS recs?

[usernamenumber]

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?

Comments

[laurion]

Wordpress is eminently suitable, because it is also easy for other people to add content. Drupal is the tool of choice for a lot of people, but I feel requires more front-loaded work setting it up. Once it is set up it is quite beautiful, but out of the box WordPress is probably an easier tool. Of course, this means it is up to you how much work you feel this project is getting from you.

[usernamenumber.livejournal.com]

Ideally I'd build the thing myself because I think it's fun, but alas I just don't have time, and that doesn't seem to be the way the game's played any more. Even pro webdevs seem to be quite happy to just deploy a (customized) CMS where nothing fancier is required.

[laurion]

People don't build it themselves for a few reasons:
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.

[lediva.livejournal.com]

Seconded on Wordpress. It's what I use for both improbable.com and the in-game sites for Future Imperfect.

I've also heard good things about Drupal, but I know pretty much nothing about it. I think beetiger has worked with it recently, if you want to ask her about it.

[natbudin.livejournal.com]

As you pointed out, I've used Wordpress for stuff before, and I've been reasonably happy with it. It's good for the 80% case where you just need to put up a simple-ish site, and don't need it to do too much other than show some content you put there.

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.

[natbudin.livejournal.com]

(Sorry, Jekyll link is broken! I meant jekyllrb.com.)

[arachne8x.livejournal.com]

My photography site is word press.
My health blog is tumbler.

[real-green-tea.livejournal.com]

It isn't problematic to read unless it's written in comic sans.
Second shift site is functional and easy to navigate.

[mirrored-echo.livejournal.com]

WordPress tends to have way more features than you'll probably need, but is otherwise excellent. I do find it somewhat frustrating when someone asks me to set up a WordPress site for them and then uses something else to blog, though. It's not all that different from putting a website together from scratch if you design your theme from scratch; I usually start with a static html site to get the layout right, then convert it to a WP-friendly format.

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.