Simple hosted CMS like Site Crossing

On or about 3/1/05 8:17 AM, thus spake "Bryan Hooper" <bryanhoopermac.com>:

> Can anyone recommend a CMS for use with a Mac. I'm most interested in
> a hosted solution - I don't want to set up a server...but I do want
> some customization and branding features - I don't want a
> "cookie-cutter" site. The Site Crossing stuff looks good, but I'm
> having a hard time finding reliable, unbiased reviews of CMS on the web,
> especially from a Mac-user's perspective....

As a Frontier user from way back, I still think it's worth looking into
Manila hosting for this. Many schools and community organizations use Manila
hosting because it's so simple for members to contribute to the Web site.
Here are some hosts:

http://www.weblogger.com/

http://ideaforest.net/

m.


--
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pantes anthropoi tou eidenai oregontai phusei
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> Can anyone recommend a CMS for use with a Mac. I'm most interested in
> a hosted solution - I don't want to set up a server...but I do want
> some customization and branding features - I don't want a
> "cookie-cutter" site. The Site Crossing stuff looks good, but I'm
> having a hard time finding reliable, unbiased reviews of CMS on the web,
> especially from a Mac-user's perspective....
>
> <http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=08002>
>
> Can anyone share?

I think you'd first have to qualify what you mean by "CMS," because one
man's content management system can be another man's lightweight publishing
tool. It all depends on what you want to do.

That said, my hosting provider, DreamHost, has recently started offering
"one-touch" WordPress installations. I'm not a WordPress user, but it's
apparently very flexible beyond just creating weblogs. DreamHost also has
some great deals for hosting packages.

http://www.dreamhost.com/
http://wordpress.org/

Best,
Khoi
 

work: www.behaviordesign.com
play: www.subtraction.com

Plone is an excellent Content Management System. It's open-source and
available for Mac, Windows and the other unixes.

http://www.plone.org

There are lots of hosting options like zettai and nethosters who
aren't too expensive and even some (albeit limited) free hosters.
Check out objectis.org.

Have fun !

Christopher Appell
FreeRecruiting.com
European Market


On Tue, 1 Mar 2005 08:17:06 -0800, Bryan Hooper <bryanhoopermac.com> wrote:
> Can anyone recommend a CMS for use with a Mac. I'm most interested in
> a hosted solution - I don't want to set up a server...but I do want
> some customization and branding features - I don't want a
> "cookie-cutter" site. The Site Crossing stuff looks good, but I'm
> having a hard time finding reliable, unbiased reviews of CMS on the web,
> especially from a Mac-user's perspective....
>
> <http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=08002>
>
> Can anyone share?
>

I've had good results with Mambo <http://www.mamboserver.com> --
straightforward to install, loads of features, easy to customise, and
an active developer community for third-party plug-ins, templates etc.

Chris

Chris Reed, BBR Solutions Ltd * http://www.bbr-online.com

On Wed, Mar 2, 2005 at 1:43 pm -0800, Christophe Appell wrote:

>Plone is an excellent Content Management System. It's open-source and
>available for Mac, Windows and the other unixes.

A couple of drawbacks to Plone:

1) many hosting companies don't offer it (that's certainly true here in
the UK, at least), and may not allow you to set it up yourself.

2) As it's a fully-fledged web server, it's big, and resource-hungry,
compared to CMSs based on Apache/MySQL or the like.

I should say that it's said to be excellent software, and that my
comments are based on other people's experiences; I haven't used it
myself. I do get the impression that it's probably overkill for anything
less than medium-to-large sites, but very good indeed for those.

A more lightweight alternative that you may want to look at is Drupal:

<http://www.drupal.org>


[Just to be clear here, although many of the suggestions have been for good programs, I was not impressed with the ease-of-use or ease of installation on many of them. -Adam]


TimH

I also use DreamHost and I'm very happy with them. I signed up for
their $20/month "Code Monster" plan, for which they recently upgraded
their disk space & bandwidth. I now get 7680MB disk space & 192GB/month
bandwidth for that price. You can even create multiple shell/ftp logins
and host multiple domains on that plan.

I use WordPress (which I installed myself and recently upgraded to 1.5)
for my weblog, and I also have 3 Drupal-based sites hosted there. If
you need something more than a weblog, I highly recommend Drupal. It's
very customizable and supports forums and slashdot-style news pages as
well as weblogs. There's even an e-commerce module. There's also an
optional shared registration feature which lets anyone who's registered
on a participating Drupal site use the same login on all other
participating Drupal sites. Drupal is also very secure, unlike a lot of
other web portal systems.

http://www.drupal.com/

http://bryght.com/ does Drupal hosting.

My two public Drupal sites:

http://www.macmegasite.com/
http://www.worldbeatplanet.com/

See http://drupal.org/drupal-sites for other sites which use Drupal.

 From the other side of the fence so to speak...

We would *love* to offer a blogging/CMS package as part of every
hosting account we sell, but there always seems to be some licensing,
resource, or price hitch that prevents it from happening. We have
looked at offering many different packages over the past two years,
and from the hosting company's end of the deal the search is equally
frustrating.

There are some nice OSS blogging apps out there, but licensing
restrictions prevent us from bundling them with an offering. We can
help clients install/run them, but we can't charge somebody to use
them.

We use MoveableType for our own blog <http://support.forest.net> and
approached the authors very early on to offer it as a hosted service.
Unfortunately they signed an exclusive deal with another hosting
outfit almost as soon as it was released. Oh well. They also seem to
have shot themselves in the proverbial foot WRT their users and
licensing policies of late. That said: We have assisted many of our
own clients in installing/running MT on our servers.

Ditto for Geeklog... but it seems to be *exceptionally* resource
hungry. A couple of our clients use it, and their sites perform like
Winnebegos on servers that should have them running like Ferraris.

A colocation client of ours, Inknoise, makes a very nice package.
<http://www.inknoise.com>. I think our negotiations with them to
offer their product as a hosted app will be like Zterm's beta
release.... never-ending. Sigh.

If anyone out there has a package that works and wants to make a
deal, you know where to find us.

--
Chuck Goolsbee V.P. Technical Operations
_________________________________________________________________
digital.forest Phone: +1-877-720-0483, x2001
where Internet solutions grow Int'l: +1-206-838-1630
**** celebrating ten years of service 7/12/1994 - 7/12/2004 ****
12101 Tukwila International Blvd Fax: +1-206-838-3749
Suite 410 http://www.forest.net
Seattle, WA 98168 email: cgforest.net

Xerox sells a product called Docushare that excels in cross-platform CMS.
It's a scalable server-based solution that runs on Windows or Linux/UNIX,
but end-users interact with the system via a standard modern web browser
and/or via WebDAV. Entry-level solutions are very cost-competitive (for a
commercial product). It ships with its own integrated database, but of
course can be made to work with SQL and Oracle-style databases if needed.

The latest iteration is version 4.x, which offers threaded discussions,
collection subscriptions, etc.; more information, including free trial
download, is available here:

http://docushare.xerox.com

James Atkinson
(full disclosure: affiliated with Xerox, albeit at an extremely low point on
the totem pole)

Check out opensourceCMS.com and cmswatch.com for reviews, discussions and demos. Some webhosts are using cPanel+fantastico successfully, which includes a plethora of blog and CMS products easily installed, de-installed, and upgraded. Mambo, for the more traditional looking business oriented sites is very easy to manage. CMS is a very general and overused term; it's like saying you need a vehicle and wonder what we'd recommend. Bike? Truck? SUV? It depends on what you really need.

I currently use Mambo 4.5.x and Big Medium (commercial but affordable) on Mac OS X boxes. Mambo has won some recent awards. It's not fully W3C compliant, yet, and won't be until probably 5.0 in a year or so, but it has been easy to keep updated, is historically fairly secure, and has a large support network with both commercial and opensource participation which is somewhat unusual.

> [Just to be clear here, although many of the suggestions have been for good
> programs, I was not impressed with the ease-of-use or ease of installation on
> many of them. -Adam]

I would agree with that. For myself, I have a Movable Type-based weblog
<http://www.subtraction.com/> that I've heavily customized, and yet I still
don't know how to install Movable Type myself, and thus consider it not
"easy to install" and therefore did not suggest it.

As I mentioned, WordPress, which I've never used, can be installed in a snap
with DreamHost, so it's supported by the host provider -- which, for me,
would be a key factor in the selection of a "simple hosted CMS."

I would also add that, even if one were to find host support for one of
these more complicated packages, I think it's important to consider the user
community too -- how many other non-technical people are using it. The more
of that type of user there are, the more easily you'll find answers to your
questions without having to dig through obscure technical documentation or
through consulting much experts.

In that regard, if you can find a host who offers Movable Type (I don't know
any), it offers the most robust resources for beginning/intermediate users,
by far. The product's forums are *excellent* in terms of getting answers
from other users in plain English. Highly recommended.

Khoi


work: www.behaviordesign.com
play: www.subtraction.com

Bryan Hooper 2005-03-01 08.17 -0800 wrote:

>I'm most interested in
>a hosted solution - I don't want to set up a server...but I do want
>some customization and branding features - I don't want a
>"cookie-cutter" site.

After using/testing a number of different open source CMS I settled
on Drupal about 1,5 years ago <http://drupal.com/>. I use it for my
personal site, our company site and for a number of customers. Some
are blogs, some corporate sites, one small webb-shop etc. Drupal is
very flexibel.

Some things I like with Drupal
* Clean, fast and secure code
* Generates valid XHTML 1.0
* Clean URLs like /node/123 or /about instead of cryptic things like
"/frame.do?tabId=3&channelId=-76837
* Use Unicode so you can write in English, Japanese, Hindi etc. on
the same page.
* High quality on many of the contributed modules.
* Very nice RSS support
* Not a resource hog (built in cache system e.g.)
* GPL license

Maybe not the easiest to set up and configure, you need to read the
documentation. For the user of the site it's very easy to add and
change content etc. My customers can usually not spell to "XHTML" or
"Unicode" but they seem to really like there Drupal powered sites.

Fredrik

--
Web site: <http://xdeb.org/wiki/Fredrik>

Khoi Vinh <publicsubtraction.com> said:
>In that regard, if you can find a host who offers Movable Type (I don't know
>any), it offers the most robust resources for beginning/intermediate users,
>by far. The product's forums are *excellent* in terms of getting answers
>from other users in plain English. Highly recommended.

I noted in an earlier post that apparently there is only one hosting
company that "officially" offers MT. The authors of MT signed an
exclusive deal with that hosting company (I have no idea who they are
actually, sorry) that excludes anyone other company from offering
MoveableType hosting.

That may have changed, as the deal may have expired, I don't know.

'The Rest of Us' can only offer assistance with
installation/configuration of the software onto a generic UNIX
hosting account... which we have done many times (including for a few
folks on this list)... We just can't charge the user any extra for
that service.


--

Chuck Goolsbee V.P. Technical Operations
_________________________________________________________________
digital.forest Phone: +1-877-720-0483, x2001
where Internet solutions grow Int'l: +1-206-838-1630
**** celebrating ten years of service 7/12/1994 - 7/12/2004 ****
12101 Tukwila International Blvd Fax: +1-206-838-3749
Suite 410 http://www.forest.net
Seattle, WA 98168 email: cgforest.net

On 3 Mar 2005, at 19:00, Khoi Vinh wrote:

> > [Just to be clear here, although many of the suggestions have been
> for good
> > programs, I was not impressed with the ease-of-use or ease of
> installation on
> > many of them. -Adam]
>
> I would agree with that. For myself, I have a Movable Type-based
> weblog
> <http://www.subtraction.com/> that I've heavily customized, and yet I
> still
> don't know how to install Movable Type myself, and thus consider it
> not
> "easy to install" and therefore did not suggest it.

I've installed MT twice, and was really surprised by how
straightforward it was. If you're happy writing HTML in a text editor,
the minimal configuration you'll have to do is a doddle.

Customizing Movable Type on the other hand to get the output you want
is another story...
Dave
PS: subtraction.com is absolutely *gorgeous*
--
Applied Randomness
<http://www.dere-street.com>

At 4:33 AM -0800 2005/03/03, chuck goolsbee wrote:
>There are some nice OSS blogging apps out there, but licensing
>restrictions prevent us from bundling them with an offering. We can
>help clients install/run them, but we can't charge somebody to use
>them.

        Why not? Surely BSD licenses let you do whatever you want with the
software, and GPL licenses only restriction is that you need to provide
source code to your anyone you provide binaries to (providing web services
is generally seen as not invoking even that requirement).

        Bundling OSS with non-OSS might be an issue in some obscure manner
(Apple seems to do it quite well with all the OSS stuff they bundle with
Mac OS X, so it isn't impossible), but surely charging for use of OSS is
not a problem for the vast majority of OSS software.



--
* Johann Beda - contact link: <http://public.xdi.org/=j-beda> *
* Johann's MostlyMac Computer Consulting - <http://mmcc.beda.ca/> *

I'm another Drupal fan. Drupal is one of the few open source projects
I've come across that has active interest and feedback about usability.
I don't suppose I have to sell the importance of that to Tidbits
readers.

Although installation is somewhat complex, it's a one time affair. And
you can have someone else (your web host) do it for you. Like mentioned
before: opensourcecms.com is a great way to try out these before you go
through the trouble of installing/configuring. The company behind the
site also is a webhost -- and they do free installs of any of those
systems. I used them briefly and was impressed by the email support.

Jonathan Ploudre

In reading these responses I wondered if anyone had a suggestion for
me. We are looking for a place to have our website with ease of
maintenance and able to be modified by pc or mac. It is for a
community youth group. We don't want to spend a lot of time or money
doing it. Right now I am looking a .mac but it is soooo limited. But
it is so easy to use. Anyone have a suggestion (forget anything with
html required knowledge)

Thanks,
Sherry

[Lest I be pointing out the painfully obvious, anyone who's asking questions in this thread should just try Site Crossing! :-) It is pretty cool and there's a free 30-day trial, so it's easy to give it a try and see if it meets your needs. -Adam]


On Tuesday, March 8, 2005, at 02:08 PM, Sherry Wren wrote:
> In reading these responses I wondered if anyone had a suggestion for
> me. We are looking for a place to have our website with ease of
> maintenance and able to be modified by pc or mac. It is for a
> community youth group. We don't want to spend a lot of time or money
> doing it. Right now I am looking a .mac but it is soooo limited. But
> it is so easy to use. Anyone have a suggestion (forget anything with
> html required knowledge)

I helped my nephew set up a free Yahoo/Geocities site - it's easy to
use for kids, they've got lots of template options, and the price is
right. There will be ads served on the site, though, if you choose the
free hosting option - the $11.95 per month gives you more storage
space, phone support, etc.

http://geocities.yahoo.com/home/

But you shouldn't be afraid of HTML. Even I had no problem picking it
up back in the days before WISYWIG editors were a gleam the eyes of
developers - and you'd be hard pressed to find anyone less code and
programming oriented than me.

The free Mozilla/Netscape browsers have a wonderful free set of tools
built in to them - Composer, that are very intuitive and easy to learn
- even for kids. And it's a good skill for those kids that are
interested to learn. There are a ton of free learning resources on the
web for kids and adults.

http://www.mozilla.org/products/mozilla1.x/

There's an extension of designer/developer tools, including a great set
of Cascading Style Sheet tools, that can be downloaded for Firefox and
Mozilla:

http://mac.softpedia.com/get/HTML-Tools/Firefox-Web-Developer-
Extension.shtml

I've recommended Pair hosting to a number of clients - they've got a
number of basic low budget packages, starting at $5.95 per month. :

http://www.pair.com/

At the $5.95 and $9.95 price points, which don't include phone support,
the e-mail help is prompt and very good.

HTH,

Marilyn