Blogging Platforms (New Question)

T4CT

I was going to write up a big explanation for this but I decided brief is probably better.

We're looking for to change the platform we use for our site (Wordpress) and hoping to move to something that's going to have a little more in the way of customizability on the back-end. I began my search for alternative platforms today and came out with Joomla which seems alright, but I'm wondering what other alternatives you guys might know about.

Things I need it to do:

- RSS feed/"blog" styling is crucial for the operation of the podcast
- A publishing backend that's fairly easy to use so that the contributors aside from myself don't have to have a shitload of technical know-how just to get their content posted
- We host on Dreamhost so I need to be able to install it via FTP.

and I'm not Drupal's biggest fan but if you think you can sell me on it you can try.

I'm fully aware that their might not be any great options for what we're looking for but if anyone has any direction they can point me in that'd be greatly appreciated.

Dehumanized

could look into orchard CMS, not sure if it'd fit all your needs though. designed for customization

wmelon

If you don't like drupal, You probably won't like joomla.

What kind of customizability are you looking for on the back end?

VThornheart

At a recent GiveCamp I tried to customize Orchard CMS to do some things that the nonprofit wanted... they essentially wanted to turn it into a social networking app, where users could create content (groups, profiles, events, etc) and share it with people.

I had a heck of a time with Orchard CMS, admittedly. I found that there were two models you could use for customization, and neither of them were well documented (what documentation I could find was out of date and inconsistent):

* Create new content types. This would allow you to create content, but only through the Admin interface (which they didn't want to expose to the users, understandably).

* Essentially create your own custom MVC Controllers and pages, that did whatever the heck you wanted. In theory, this sounds good: but in practice, I could never find correct documentation on the APIs to actually wire into everything you'd need to work properly with Orchard: information like using Orchard's security model to check for permissions to perform actions, or how I would go about associating content they created with this "free-for-all" addon model to the actual users that created it in a way that Orchard would be aware of the content that was created and its ownership.

If documentation has improved since then and is up to date with the most current version of Orchard, you may be able to go with either of these depending on your needs. Just wanted to forewarn you on the Orchard path though, it certainly wasn't obvious how to do more than trivial tasks with either of the options above.

Alternatively, you could check out WordPress. Their plugin model is even more wild west than Orchard, which causes the underlying structure to be a bit of a mess... but it's much more well documented and has an obvious API for the various ways in which one would like to leverage the existing concepts such as Users, Posts, etc...

I hear that under the surface for developers, Drupal is a bit more organized than WordPress... but I have to admit that the confusion I felt as an end user steered me away from trying to dig into it more deeply, so I can understand where you're coming from on that front.

Anyways, hopefully this helps.

MrDelish

out of curiosity, what does WordPress not do that you're looking for? The bulleted points are all things WP can do

T4CT

I have a hell of a time getting Wordpress to play nice with drastic layouts and changes; in general it seems like creating themes ends up being more convoluted than I'd like, right now it functions though.

I'm currently playing around on one of our test servers with concrete5 but I'm unsure of whether or not I like it yet.

Back-end wise I'm looking for something that the other hosts can use basically as a blog publishing tool for when they write things, but I'm also looking for easy integration into other people making accounts on the site and managing those accounts. The easier the GUI is to use, the better, since it means I have to explain less if/when we change platforms. A good amount of plug-in support would be nice since we have audio/video content to embed and I'm actually having some major issues getting an audio player to function properly in Wordpress.

My issue with wordpress is really that it just seems harder than it should be for me to code a theme to work properly in it. It's entirely possible I'm just silly, but it doesn't click for me.

wmelon

well orchardCMS won't work for the OP since it's a .net CMS and he's using dreamhost as a host.

I've not messed with concrete5 much yet, but I can tell you which of the one click installs you probably don't want to use.

ModX is pretty much junk. The admin is a monstrosity and the documentation was even worse.
Contao has a complicated back end as well. Didn't spend much time on it.
The back end is why I dislike Joomla as well.

and this is coming from a person who actively chooses to use drupal on occasion.

MrDelish

Concrete5 will not do what you want; it's just a PHP-based WYSIWYG editor. If WordPress doesn't work your best shared-hosting-compatible bet is Joomla or Drupal.

Honestly, though, the backend for WordPress is the easiest of your options, here.

JacksWastedLife

You might want to try Drupal Gardens. All the Drupal, none of the backend, especially in regards to theming. It's got a in browser theme editor that requires no coding what so ever, unless you want some really fancy CSS.

About the only thing you've mentioned it doesn't do flawlessly is audio embeds. It's got built in support for managing video embeds but not audio yet. Let's just say I know a guy, and seamless audio handling is going to be added in the very near future.

But honestly, it's Drupal 7 on a managed service that you can use for free. That's pretty much all you need to know.

Seeks

You might give Pivot a look. I used to use it, and I do recall it being a little easier to customize themes than WordPress is. That being said, it isn't as polished as WordPress. It's not really any more difficult to use, though. It was even a bit quicker to load content than WordPress (why WP slows shit down is beyond me, but to be honest, I just don't care enough to go back).

Granted, I'm sure there's a reason I stopped using it. I just can't remember what it is.