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Alex Jones

I lead teams at the intersection of strategy and design. Autodidact. Polymath. Barbecue acolyte. I start fires (the good kind).

CMS for Apocalyptic Dreaming

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I need to revamp the aging Apocalyptic Dreaming, as its current incarnation is three and a half years old. While there are some tempting whiz-bang features available in content management systems these days, all I really want is to:

  • make it easier for a user submission to be posted to the site – right now, the submissions are e-mailed to me, then I cut and paste them into MovableType
  • add threaded comments – the site has just under 1200 comments across about 400 entries
  • refresh the design – the current 800 x 600 constraints need to be eliminated and the table-less design was one of my first, so it isn’t anywhere near as efficient as I would like

In addition to these key changes, I also need:

  • The ability to port the existing MT entries into the new system
  • The ability to easily modify the layout via a template system – having to modify the systems core files to eliminate markup is a bad thingtm
  • The ability to set up multiple authors/moderators
  • The ability to categorize entries under multiple sections
  • Many more points that are inferred by their existence in systems like MT and WordPress

I’ve mentioned MT and WordPress throughout this post and I am familiar with both, but I don’t think either is quite right for Apocalyptic Dreaming. I would spend too much time tweaking and bending code to make it work the way I want, when I could utilize systems that are meant to serve communities like AD. I have given a cursory look at Mambo ( the forked version was renamed Joomla) and Drupal. Both appear promising, but I do not have any experience with either one. The fact that the Mambo team has just split worries me somewhat, as I want to choose a system and stick with it.

So, does anyone out there have any recommendations? It doesn’t have to be one of the packages mentioned above, but it does have to meet these technical requirements:

  • PHP 4.x
  • MySQL
  • Produces semantic (X)HTML – or allow me to easily modify the templates
  • Produces clean, search engine friendly URLs
  • Solid and devoted user/developer community

Some additional information and perspectives are available at Asterisk and BusinessLogs , which I have found to be useful in my own research.