Maintaining my website

I used PHP-Nuke way back in 2001 or something and i liked it. Was really easy to learn and had lots of futures. I think they remade it though and i haven't tried it for a long time. But for sure worth to take a look at. I think its most for proffesional news sites though. You can even have your own forum with it.

The standard these days is to use WordPress, which you download and install to your server; it's described as a blogging platform, but in reality it's just a friendly content management/news system with a different name. It strives for simplicity and power, which is a far cry from the convoluted PHP-Nuke and those other 2000-era systems.

There're absolutely shitloads of free skins for it if you do a Google search, and the same goes for plug-ins; in addition, as it's pretty much the most popular system out there right now you'll find lots of community support on their forum.

If you feel a little brave you can even try making your own skin, where you have essentially limitless freedom. It's remarkably flexible, suited to both simple blogs like mine (http://%7boption%7d) and full blown news websites like http://www.relicnews.com/. You can Google for "Powered by WordPress" (with quotes) for many more examples.

You can also get a hosted version at http://www.wordpress.com/, with paid extras like custom domain and stuff. I prefer it on my own server though, especially as it only takes like five minutes to install as long as your host supports PHP and MySQL.

Is it free?

Did you even check the WordPress site?

btw, it's free

We use wordpress for Ham and Jam's site, its pretty simple to use and modify.

http://www.hamandjam.org

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I also vote yes for Wordpress, I had it on my site and it was very sexy. Though since I never updated more than once in 5 months I took it down and went back to my older design.

I also vote a thousand, million, trillon nays for PHP Nuke! Legendary Senator Venus lets out a pink aura! Especially for a personal site because you don't even fill up half it's sections and the moment you hit a PHP Nuke website, you know you're on one.

Quote from skdr

Did you even check the WordPress site?btw, it's free

If you meant me NO!

I use Wordpress, I know Mazy does too and I know its better than php nuke

Yeah wordpress is easy to use, but if you want to make a design of your own, you might need a fair amount of php and css skills.

theres thoooousands of wordpress designs out there, just find one thats similar to what you need, then alter

Wordpress...Ill look into that.

Beats using straight up html.

Mh, anyone thought about website baker?

Website baker is what i used last and it is pretty good with a decent plugin base and an easy to manage skin system

CMS (Content Management System) is what you need but my experience ends there.

question to Thrik (or anyone else using WP)

I've been thinking of a CMS for my worksite for a long time ( http://%7boption%7d ) but since i don't have any blog or much text on that site but more content like pictures I want to make sure the CMS i choose can handle it from the start.

Thrik mentioned that WP can be used as a CMS system rather then a blog, my question is how much can I do with it?

Since my page is quite heavy with javascript and I must be sure that it can handle it (maybe not be enable to create new

but to be enable to change the content in one (even hidden by onmouseover ones). Can i change basic HTML in it like background color, add remove images, add my own html code?. Are there any code i must know when "porting" my existing page to WP?I looked at the pages but couldent find an online demo or anything so if someone would help me with this questions I would greatly appreaciate it.

WordPress's theme system is completely flexible; for example, to show the post title you just use a small PHP line like <? wordpress_post_title ?>. Best thing to is download the blank theme that comes with no CSS and just easy-to-edit plain HTML; you can convert it into absolutely any design. Nothing will teach you like just downloading it and playing though.

As for HTML, each page or post (which sits within your template, eg: single.php is a news/blog post, page.php is a static page) can have HTML included in the post itself, although Javascript and stuff really needs to go in the template to avoid issues.

Rest assured, WordPress can handle pretty much any site you throw at it, and you can even set a post to use a certain template file (eg: h2o.php) which can of course contain any HTML you like without any dynamic stuff at all. You just need to learn how to implement it, and you can't do that without experience.

Bump. The long awaited version 2.1 of WordPress has been released, which supposedly makes it a lot faster due to long overdue optimisation, plus adds a whole stack of nice features. Probably not too exciting for those who don't use WordPress already, but a great upgrade for those who do.

http://wordpress.org/development/

Careful though, it's a whole new branch (will be 2.1.1, 2.1.2, etc, instead of 2.0.1, 2.0.2, etc) so while unlikely due to WordPress's superb backwards compatibility, some plug-ins and themes may not work. Best to do a duplicate test installation before upgrading.

I'm trying to install WP on my new site but I have no access to the servers mysql stuff and the host admin is on vacation... any workarounds I could try ?

I once had my site powered by Wordpress, but I have gone away from that now. My two major issues with it were:

A) The rich text editor was really immature. The formatting of the text often got more or less lost when I saved it and it converted it to html. So many things got screwed up, linespaces dissapeared, things got formatted as bold which were not supposed to be bold, etc. Looking into the html it generated it was clearly also a big mess and with wrong syntaxes.

B) I wanted to use Wordpress solely as a backend and then use my own existing designs as frontend. Wordpress however seemed to be built to work with only it's own themes and it was some work there to get it stripped down.

Both aren't really issues in my opinion. You can simply disable the rich text editor (which has now been reworked) and use a normal forum-like poster, or alternatively get a plugin like Textile that lets you use *this* to produce this and stuff like that.

As for the theming, I can't see how you couldn't put absolutely any design conceivable into WordPress. The only necessity is that you don't try and strip down the default theme, and instead download the blank one that comes with empty divs and a CSS sheet. I often strip it down even further and just put the PHP bits where I need them (eg: print post title, print comment, etc).

My workflow with producing a HTML/CSS site in WordPress really isn't much different to when I hand code any HTML page: I can do whatever I want with it.