[portland] CMS Recommendations

[Rich Shepard]

On Wed, 1 Sep 2010, jonathan karon wrote:

> If you're just looking to publish a small web site and make it easily
> maintainable, stacks like Django and Plone are vast overkill and come with
> a great deal of setup and learning you shouldn't have to deal with. 
> Django is a web app framework and Plone is as much an App Server as a CMS.

Jonathan,

   I've been writing my web site in html/xhtml and css for more than a dozen
years. I've changed the site a half-dozen times and do all my editing in
emacs. There are 18 .shtml pages, a slew of publications, some images, and a
couple of .css files. The most frequent page to change is (currently)
"What's New" when I post a new newsletter, white paper, or article.

   Perhaps there are features in Django that will attract more potential
clients, but I've no idea what such attractions might be.

> Setting up and running a MySQL instance and WordPress will actually be
> less work than getting a usable web site up and running on Plone or
> Django-CMS (especially if your server has prebuilt MySQL, PHP, and Apache
> packages).

   I am resistant to installing and learning MySQL because I've used postgres
and sqlite for years and don't want to learn and maintain a third dbms. I
don't make money by writing Web sites, and so far it's not directly
generated any business for us. I'll be changing the focus and content, but I
like the looks of the current site.

> It's not Python, but you might have a look at Drupal as it does have
> good Postgres support.

   My preference for Python is that I've written our approximate reasoning
models in Python and don't want to learn PHP, Java, or Ruby just for the Web
site. Again, it's not my business so I want to modify the site then ignore
it as I've done in the past.

   I'll take a look at Drypal, too.

Thanks,

Rich