CMS Advice

[Webbie]

Needs some opinions please on an easy CMS to maintain for a family site. I have done a site in E107 which was not bad, and currently have a WordPress site. I am also working on a Joomla site, but I just don't seem to be catching on to Joomla. COuld be I am not giving it a chance...

Looking to build to family website where members can upload pic's and chit chat on forum. Want it semi safe so I don't pick up a bunch of spammy crap - but most of my family isn't all that bright (including me as I am asking for an easy to build CMS :rolleyes: ).

Was thinking maybe WordPress and use Fantistico for bulletin board and gallery?

[redsox9]

I don't have much experience with any CMS software but Fantastico has several options available. You might go and check out the demo sites for each to see which looks the most practical for your needs. You can also install and uninstall each program at your leisure and play around with the features; I would put each one you try in its own unique subfolder, i.e., public_html/joomla; when you make your final selection, simply uninstall each program (including the one you choose) and then reinstall that in your base directory.

You can do a search on this site to see what recommendations other users have but nothing beats beta-testing the software on your terms.

[Webbie]

Redsox, your website is awesome! Did you use a CMS for that, or is that "freehand"? How many hits do you get a day? Way more detail than what I need for a family website, but I do eventually have bigger dreams :)

[redsox9]

Thanks for the compliments on the site!

I use Wordpress for my News and Content section but everything else is my own code. I like to have control over the "nuts and bolts" that runs the majority of the site and the remaining content is easy to manipulate with my own programming abilities. That's my choice, however; you can probably nearly duplicate the look and function of my site with CMS software.

I'm not going to post my numbers here but I can boast that my numbers have continued to climb almost exponentially since its inception in 2004. FYI, hits isn't an accurate reflection of web traffic - that merely tells you how often files from your site are requested from the server, including HTML pages, images, scripts, etc.

Thanks again and good luck with your family site!

[Lydia123]

FYI, hits isn't an accurate reflection of web traffic - that merely tells you how often files from your site are requested from the server, including HTML pages, images, scripts, etc.

Could you elaborate on this? Are you saying that traffic could be more (or less?) than what the hitmeter shows? How can that be? Wouldn't a file from the site be requested each time someone lands on it?

BTW, yes, your site is great!

[Lydia123]

<< You can do a search on this site to see what recommendations other users have but nothing beats beta-testing the software on your terms. >>

Can this testing be done "live" online? On my old host I used Front Page and I was able to edit my site live, which was very helpful. Now I can use Front Page on my desktop and upload it. It is a lot harder this way, esp. since I can't get the shared borders to work.

Would using a CMS installed via Fantastico enable me to work live, online?

[felgall]

Could you elaborate on this? Are you saying that traffic could be more (or less?) than what the hitmeter shows?

If you have a web page that consists of

1 HTML file
1 stylesheet file
2 JavaScript files
6 images

then when one person views that page that is 10 hits on your site - one for each of the 10 files. If you have five pages like that and a visitor visits all 5 then that is 50 hits, 5 Page Views and 1 visitor.

Page Views will always be a lot less than hits and visitors will always be less than page views (onless all your visitors only visit one page).

[redsox9]

Would using a CMS installed via Fantastico enable me to work live, online?

Absolutely - once you have installed a CMS, you can interface directly with the software online. It's a matter of adding your content - the CMS stores that content in a database and then calls it through requests made the software code.

[Lydia123]

Absolutely - once you have installed a CMS, you can interface directly with the software online. It's a matter of adding your content - the CMS stores that content in a database and then calls it through requests made the software code.

Great! I assume that I could NOT do that if I used Dreamweaver, though? Would it be like Front Page, where I have to design on the desktop and upload?

[Lydia123]

<< then when one person views that page that is 10 hits on your site - one for each of the 10 files. If you have five pages like that and a visitor visits all 5 then that is 50 hits, 5 Page Views and 1 visitor.

Page Views will always be a lot less than hits and visitors will always be less than page views (onless all your visitors only visit one page). >>

I understand that, but it sounded like RedSox was saying that the hit meter count isn't an accurate indication of how many visitors a site receives. I'm defining "traffic" simply as how many visitors stop by, not how many pages the visitors look at. Does the hit meter accurately describe how many visitors stop by?

[felgall]

There is no really accurate way of identifying unique visitors. You can have two visitors using the same IP address misidentified as one visitor. Also the same visitor may return a few minutes later using a different IP address or a different browser and be misidentified as two visitors. You may also have several thousand visitors from an ISP who caches popular web pages where none of those visitors actually download any files from your site because they get all of them from the cache at their ISP.

[Early Out]

Also the same visitor may return a few minutes later using a different IP address or a different browser and be misidentified as two visitors.
Even worse case: AOL users come in through some sort of proxies, and a single person browsing your site for 10 minutes can show up in the logs with 20 different IP addresses. They're all in the same range, so you can see what's happening, but any "visitor counter" is going to be led astray by it!