Managing Content

If we make content easy for people to create, they will create more of it. If it's a hassle to create content, they'll create less of it. Case in point: my own website. It's all html and when I write a new article, there's about 6 different places I have to hand-edit something. It's really amazingly poor.

This blog is pretty easy to post to, so I do that more, but now my site is in a fairly ridiculous state. I have forums that require one login, a blog that requires a different login, and articles that are managed in a different system (and that don't have rss). I figured it was time to do something about all that.

Unfortuantely, researching and installing various CMS's (content management systems) is all I've been doing for weeks now, so I've no time to actually write any content! The state of the CMS offerings out there right now is pretty bad, too. If you just want a forum, vBulletin is the best (that part's easy!). If you just want a blog, then Blogger is decent and Wordpress is good. But what if you want articles separate from blogs, articles with a summary and cover image that don't appear in the articles themselves, one page that lists all article summaries by date, another that lists all recent blog posts, a front page that lists som articles and some blogs (each displayed differently), and other stuff like that? It's quite a task to get a sidebar that automatically lists every single article by category, like I have on my current site.

So what's out there to do all this stuff? Drupal has a lot of features, but is hopelessly difficult to wrestle and no designed for non-technical people. Mambo...well I think the main developers left to create Joomla, so if you wanted Mambo, you might as well use the newer Joomla. I'm wary of both of them for some reason, even though I've hardly tried them. Subdreamer seems lacking. vbadvnced isn't up to the task. The integration between vbulletin and drupal found in "vb drupal" comes at too high of a price (a totally non-standard and unsupported version of drupal). ArticleLive has promise, but seems too hard to customize. EvoArticles has promise, but doesn't even have a working demo on its site. Wordpress is great for what it does, and pretty terrible for doing anything other than a straight blog (forget doing real articles on it).

I could really go on and on and on here, because I've certainly looked into a lot over the last few weeks. Ultimately, it's looking like drupal is what I'll go with, as soon as version 4.7 is out of beta. Drupals motto should be "Nothing is easy. A few things that should be easy are nearly impossible. Most things are hard, but at least most things are possible."

That motto beats the motto I'd give many competitors such as Wordpress and ArticleLive "Some stuff is incredibly easy and great. Everything else is hard enough that you basically can't do it unless you get into php programming."

This is boring stuff that makes for a boring post. I hope I can get past all this and go back to actually writing decent stuff someday.

--Sirlin