Re: [Discuss] Small website, non-technical users: Joomla, Drupal, or WordPress?
I use Drupal. It is easy to start and there is a lot you can do. Thanks for reading this. I'm a member of the Big-8 Board, which decides what Usenet groups are created and deleted. We have both technical and non-technical members, and we've been using MediaWiki for the board's website (http://www.big-8.org/) until now, but we have to move the site to a new server which doesn't offer it. So, the question is What's the best compromise between ease-of-use, learning curve, and maintainability if we have to choose between Joomla, Drupal, or WordPress? The new site has 300 GB of disk and unlimited data transfers, but I don't have shell access, just an ftp upload account. I appreciate your help! Bill -- Bill Horne William Warren Consulting 339-364-8487 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Small website, non-technical users: Joomla, Drupal, or WordPress?
On January 6, 2014, Bill Horne wrote: ...we've been using MediaWiki for the board's website (http://www.big-8.org/) until now, but we have to move the site to a new server which doesn't offer it. So, the question is What's the best compromise between ease-of-use, learning curve, and maintainability if we have to choose between Joomla, Drupal, or WordPress? Have you considered not switching platforms? I would think the cost of moving all your mediawiki content to a new platform and retraining all your users would far exceed the price of a managed VPS on www.linode.com or www.hostdime.com, where you can install mediawiki yourself and keep doing what you're doing. You didn't say how many users you have, but I run mediawiki on a cheap shared VM at www.hostdime.com (about $5/month) just fine. -- Dan Barrett dbarr...@blazemonger.com ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Small website, non-technical users: Joomla, Drupal, or WordPress?
Daniel Barrett wrote: Have you considered not switching platforms? I would think the cost of moving all your mediawiki content to a new platform and retraining all your users would far exceed the price of a managed VPS on MediaWiki, and Wikis in general, have a spate of problems that make them not terribly useful for document management. I've gotten some experience with a few actual document management systems since the last time this came up. That's document management, not content management. The first is called DocDB. I wouldn't wish this on anyone. It's awful, but the scientific community loves it so that's what I'm running. I looked at a few others and my top choice is LetoDMS. It's easy to install (aptitude install letodms), simple to configure, is agnostic to file types, does versioning, doesn't use any unique or custom markup. -- Rich P. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Small website, non-technical users: Joomla, Drupal, or WordPress?
FYI, I did a google search for LetoDMS, and I found another one called SeedDMS that states SeedDMS is the continuation of LetoDMS because it has lost its main developer. On Jan 7, 2014, at 1:03 PM, Richard Pieri richard.pi...@gmail.com wrote: Daniel Barrett wrote: Have you considered not switching platforms? I would think the cost of moving all your mediawiki content to a new platform and retraining all your users would far exceed the price of a managed VPS on MediaWiki, and Wikis in general, have a spate of problems that make them not terribly useful for document management. I've gotten some experience with a few actual document management systems since the last time this came up. That's document management, not content management. The first is called DocDB. I wouldn't wish this on anyone. It's awful, but the scientific community loves it so that's what I'm running. I looked at a few others and my top choice is LetoDMS. It's easy to install (aptitude install letodms), simple to configure, is agnostic to file types, does versioning, doesn't use any unique or custom markup. -- Rich P. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Small website, non-technical users: Joomla, Drupal, or WordPress?
On 1/7/2014 12:24 PM, Daniel Barrett wrote: On January 6, 2014, Bill Horne wrote: ...we've been using MediaWiki for the board's website (http://www.big-8.org/) until now, but we have to move the site to a new server which doesn't offer it. So, the question is What's the best compromise between ease-of-use, learning curve, and maintainability if we have to choose between Joomla, Drupal, or WordPress? Have you considered not switching platforms? I would think the cost of moving all your mediawiki content to a new platform and retraining all your users would far exceed the price of a managed VPS on www.linode.com or www.hostdime.com, where you can install mediawiki yourself and keep doing what you're doing. You didn't say how many users you have, but I run mediawiki on a cheap shared VM at www.hostdime.com (about $5/month) just fine. Thanks for the suggestion: it's always important to ask why change?, but that question was answered by my ISP's terms of service: the site has been stable for a while, but right now, it's sharing the 12GB of space on my virtual machine at prgmr.com, and I need to lighten up the disk load, so I'm jumping at the chance to find it a new home. The new site has 300 GB of space and unlimited bandwidth, so it's a keeper on that basis alone: it's already paid for, which is a big plus in a volunteer organization, and has professional support available should something happen which I or the other members can't fix. Alas, it offers the three options I mentioned, but /not/ Mediawiki. There are several utilities available to convert Mediawiki format to WordPress, so that's a possibility, or (although it would mean a lot of work) the board could set up a fixed HTML site and forego a CMS altogether. Bill -- Bill Horne William Warren Consulting 339-364-8487 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Small website, non-technical users: Joomla, Drupal, or WordPress?
Bill Horne wrote: ...we've been using MediaWiki for the board's website ...but we have to move the site to a new server which doesn't offer it. So, the question is What's the best compromise between ease-of-use, learning curve, and maintainability if we have to choose between Joomla, Drupal, or WordPress? I can't answer the latter question, as I have limited experience with maintainability for Joomla and WordPress. (Though I hear that although WordPress is less capable, the reason for its rise in popularity is the easier use and maintainability.) I will, however, in the tradition of answering the question you didn't ask, suggest the idea of using Wikispaces, as we do for BLU (and boston.pm.org). It's free or cheap, hosted, so no maintenance, still a wiki, so a model familiar to your users, and in my opinion has a better UI and markup language than Mediawiki. (Though in some ways is less powerful.) A CMS tends to be a better bet if your priority is site design (appearance), while a wiki is better if you are more concerned with doing collaborative document editing. It should be possible to write a markup converter to go from Mediawiki to Wikispaces. One may even already exist. As a plan B, you can highlight formatted text in your Mediawiki site and paste it into the Wikispaces' rich text editor, preserving the formating. (You'll still need to fix up the internal links.) -Tom -- Tom Metro The Perl Shop, Newton, MA, USA Predictable On-demand Perl Consulting. http://www.theperlshop.com/ ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Small website, non-technical users: Joomla, Drupal, or WordPress? (Solved)
On 1/6/2014 11:30 PM, Bill Horne wrote: Thanks for reading this. I'm a member of the Big-8 Board, which decides what Usenet groups are created and deleted. We have both technical and non-technical members, and we've been using MediaWiki for the board's website (http://www.big-8.org/) until now, but we have to move the site to a new server which doesn't offer it. Thanks to all for your help: I've just gotten off the phone, and the decision has been made to go in a different direction. We have a volunteer who wants to learn native HTML, and so we'll be setting up a static site without a CMS. I appreciate your time and advice. Bill -- Bill Horne William Warren Consulting http://www.william-warren.com/ 339-364-8487 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[Discuss] What's the best site-crawler utility?
I need to copy the contents of a wiki into static pages, so please recommend a good web-crawler that can download an existing site into static content pages. It needs to run on Debian 6.0. Bill -- Bill Horne 339-364-8487 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Small website, non-technical users: Joomla, Drupal, or WordPress? (Solved)
On 01/07/2014 06:46 PM, Bill Horne wrote: Thanks to all for your help: I've just gotten off the phone, and the decision has been made to go in a different direction. We have a volunteer who wants to learn native HTML, and so we'll be setting up a static site without a CMS. More secure than using fancier stuff. I know when I once learned a little about php I was shocked to learn that by just following ones nose tons of dangerous things could happen. I forget, but I think all variables default to being public to the internet unless the programmer remembers mark them otherwise. Or something scary like that. -kb ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] What's the best site-crawler utility?
Bill Horne wrote: I need to copy the contents of a wiki into static pages, so please recommend a good web-crawler that can download an existing site into static content pages. It needs to run on Debian 6.0. Remember that I wrote how wikis have a spate of problems? This is the biggest one. There's no way to dump a MediaWiki in a humanly-readable form. There just isn't. The best option usually is to use the dumpBackup.php script to dump the database as XML and then parse that somehow. This requires shell access on the server. This will get everything including markup; there's no way to exclude it. Method number two is to use the Special:Export page, if it hasn't been disabled, to export each page in the wiki. It can do multiple pages at once but each page must be specified in the export. This is essentially the same as dumpBackup.php except that it's page by page instead of the whole database. -- Rich P. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] What's the best site-crawler utility?
On 1/7/2014 6:49 PM, Bill Horne wrote: I need to copy the contents of a wiki into static pages, so please recommend a good web-crawler that can download an existing site into static content pages. It needs to run on Debian 6.0. wget -k -m -np http://mysite is what I used to use. -k converts links to point to the local copy of the page, -m turns on options for recursive mirroring, and -np enforces that only urls below the initial one will be downloaded. (the recursive option by itself is pretty dangerous, since most sites have a banner or something that points to a top level page, which then pulls in the whole rest of the site). HTH, Matt ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] What's the best site-crawler utility?
On 1/7/2014 7:28 PM, Matthew Gillen wrote: On 1/7/2014 6:49 PM, Bill Horne wrote: I need to copy the contents of a wiki into static pages, so please recommend a good web-crawler that can download an existing site into static content pages. It needs to run on Debian 6.0. wget -k -m -np http://mysite is what I used to use. -k converts links to point to the local copy of the page, -m turns on options for recursive mirroring, and -np enforces that only urls below the initial one will be downloaded. (the recursive option by itself is pretty dangerous, since most sites have a banner or something that points to a top level page, which then pulls in the whole rest of the site). Now that I read more of the other thread you posted before asking this question, depending on your intentions you might actually want to skip '-k'. I used -k because I was taking a wiki offline and didn't want to figure out how to get twiki set up in two years when I needed to look up something in the old wiki. So I wanted a raw html version for archival purposes that was suitable for browsing using just a local filesystem with a browser. '-k' is awesome for that. However, it may or may not produce what you want if you want to actually replace the old site, with the intention of accessing it through a web server. Matt ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] What's the best site-crawler utility?
Matthew Gillen wrote: wget -k -m -np http://mysite I've tried this. It's messy at best. Wiki pages aren't static HTML. They're dynamically generated and they come with all sorts of style sheets and embedded scripts. Yes, you can get the text but it'll be text as rendered by a wiki. It takes a lot of work to turn it into something usable. -- Rich P. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] What's the best site-crawler utility?
Daniel Barrett wrote: For instance, you can write a simple script to hit Special:AllPages (which links to every article on the wiki), and dump each page to HTML with curl or wget. (Special:AllPages displays only N links at a time, Yes, but that's not humanly-readable. It's a dynamically generated jambalaya of HTML, JavaScript, PHP, CSS, and Ghu only knows what else. Converting to PDF is even less useful. -- Rich P. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] What's the best site-crawler utility?
Matthew Gillen wrote: wget -k -m -np http://mysite I create an emergency backup static version of dynamic sites using: wget -q -N -r -l inf -p -k --adjust-extension http://mysite The option -m is equivalent to -r -N -l inf --no-remove-listing, but I didn't want --no-remove-listing (I don't recall why), so I specified the individual options, and added: -p --page-requisites This option causes Wget to download all the files that are necessary to properly display a given HTML page. This includes such things as inlined images, sounds, and referenced stylesheets. --adjust-extension If a file of type application/xhtml+xml or text/html is downloaded and the URL does not end with the regexp \.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]?, this option will cause the suffix .html to be appended to the local filename. This is useful, for instance, when you're mirroring a remote site that uses .asp pages, but you want the mirrored pages to be viewable on your stock Apache server. Another good use for this is when you're downloading CGI-generated materials. A URL like http://site.com/article.cgi?25 will be saved as article.cgi?25.html. '-k' ... may or may not produce what you want if you want to actually replace the old site, with the intention of accessing it through a web server. Works for me. I've republished sites captured with the above through a server and found them usable. But generally speaking, not all dynamic sites can successfully be crawled without customizing the crawler. And as Rich points out, if your objective is not just to end up with what appears to be a mirrored site, but actual clean HTML suitable for hand-editing, then you've still got lots of work ahead of you. -Tom -- Tom Metro The Perl Shop, Newton, MA, USA Predictable On-demand Perl Consulting. http://www.theperlshop.com/ ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] What's the best site-crawler utility?
Hi Bill, GPL - licensed HTTrack Website Copier works well (http://www.httrack.com/). I have not tried it on a MediaWiki site, but it's pretty adept at copying websites including dynamically generated websites. They say: It allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original site's relative link-structure. Simply open a page of the mirrored website in your browser, and you can browse the site from link to link, as if you were viewing it online. HTTrack can also update an existing mirrored site, and resume interrupted downloads. HTTrack is fully configurable, and has an integrated help system. WinHTTrack is the Windows 2000/XP/Vista/Seven release of HTTrack, and WebHTTrack the Linux/Unix/BSD release which works in your browser. There is also a command-line version 'httrack'. HTTrack is actually similar in it's result to the wget -k -m -np http://mysite that Matt mentions, but may be easier in general to use and offers a GUI to drive the options that you want. Using the MediaWiki API to export pages is another option if you have specific needs that can not be addressed by a mirror operation (e.g. your wiki has namespaced contents that you want to treat differently.) If you end up exporting via Special:Export or the API, then you will be faced with the option to convert your XML to HTML. I have some notes about wiki format conversions at https://freephile.org/wiki/index.php/Format_conversion There's pandoc. If you need to convert files from one markup format into another, pandoc is your swiss-army knife. http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/ ~ Greg Greg Rundlett On Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 6:49 PM, Bill Horne b...@horne.net wrote: I need to copy the contents of a wiki into static pages, so please recommend a good web-crawler that can download an existing site into static content pages. It needs to run on Debian 6.0. Bill -- Bill Horne 339-364-8487 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Small website, non-technical users: Joomla, Drupal, or WordPress? (Solved)
Bill Horne wrote: | On 1/6/2014 11:30 PM, Bill Horne wrote: | Thanks for reading this. | | I'm a member of the Big-8 Board, which decides what Usenet groups are | created and deleted. We have both technical and non-technical | members, and we've been using MediaWiki for the board's website | (http://www.big-8.org/) until now, but we have to move the site to a | new server which doesn't offer it. | | Thanks to all for your help: I've just gotten off the phone, and the | decision has been made to go in a different direction. We have a | volunteer who wants to learn native HTML, and so we'll be setting up a | static site without a CMS. | | I appreciate your time and advice. | Bill Heh. For some reason, I'm reminded of that classic cartoon showing all the ways that various experts designed and built their interpretation of what the customer wanted, which was a tire hanging on a rope from a tree branch. I had a similar case recently. I've helped a few nonprofits build web sites, and several have started off looking into Drupal, Joomla, etc. After a month or so of this, with nothing working, I've combined a few scripts that I've collected or written anew with a few of their designs for the pages they want, and in a week or two they were happey with the results. But the fun part is after that, when we were discussing what they really need, and why my stuff was still too complex. Finally, I've persuaded a few of the orgs' members to try my idea that they learn a bit of HTML. Of course, they've looked at HTML manuals, and run terrified from the incomprehensible technical gobbledy-gook that they saw. HTML is this horrible stuff that mere mortals don't stand a chance of understanding, right? But I persuaded them to try a few experiments. I start them with a few plain-text docs that look like the pages they want, and show them that these work when put on the web, but cause problems on various screens. Smart phones are nice for this demo. Then I show them the effect of wrapping them in a simple htmlbody ... /body/html wrapper, and adding p tags between paragraphs. Hey, that's really simple; why didn't anyone tell us that? Then I show them a few more tags, b, i, and then the all-important a href=... tags. And they're off and running, building some of the pages they want. I keep emphasizing that they should just learn it one tag at a time. The result has been that the orgs' web sites are now run by a few of their members that have learned just enough HTML to do the job. I have to teach them a bit about debugging a page, of course. And some of them have even started to learn basic CSS. Their sites are often rather impressive to interested visitors. I attribute this to the fact that they're mainly concerned with getting their information online, and view HTML as a tool to make it readable on visitors' screens, whatever size they might be. This won't work for every org, of course. Some of them actually need wordpress or drupal or whatever. But a fundamental problem is that people often don't know what they need, and are prone to being taken in by people who want to sell them the ultimate solution to all the world's Web problems. So maybe what we need is a reliable way to determine when static pages with simple markup are sufficient, and when we need a high-powered Solution to complex marketing problems. But I don't know how to translate people's amorphous desires into requirement specs. I suspect nobody does. -- -- _' O :#/ John Chambers + j...@trillian.mit.edu /#\ jc1...@gmail.com | | ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] What's the best site-crawler utility?
Also, I just discovered a MediaWiki extension written by Tim Starling that may suit your needs. As the name implies, its for dumping to HTML. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:DumpHTML As for processing the XML produced by export or MediaWiki dump tools, here is info on that XML schema http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Export#Export_format And, some of the tools you can use to process MediaWiki XML http://wikipapers.referata.com/wiki/List_of_data_processing_tools Greg Rundlett ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] Small website, non-technical users: Joomla, Drupal, or WordPress? (Solved)
Hi Kent, What do you mean by variables being public to the internet? Nobody can directly access them from what I understand. Sanitize in and out you should be fine no? Thanks. On Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 6:55 PM, Kent Borg kentb...@borg.org wrote: On 01/07/2014 06:46 PM, Bill Horne wrote: Thanks to all for your help: I've just gotten off the phone, and the decision has been made to go in a different direction. We have a volunteer who wants to learn native HTML, and so we'll be setting up a static site without a CMS. More secure than using fancier stuff. I know when I once learned a little about php I was shocked to learn that by just following ones nose tons of dangerous things could happen. I forget, but I think all variables default to being public to the internet unless the programmer remembers mark them otherwise. Or something scary like that. -kb ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- Eric Chadbourne 617.249.3377 http://theMnemeProject.org/ http://WebnerSolutions.com/ ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [Discuss] What's the best site-crawler utility?
Plus one for HTTrack. I used it a couple of months ago to convert a terrible Joomla hacked site to HTML. It was a pain to use at first, like having to use Firefox, but it worked as advertised. Hope that helps. On Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 10:34 PM, Greg Rundlett (freephile) g...@freephile.com wrote: Hi Bill, GPL - licensed HTTrack Website Copier works well (http://www.httrack.com/). I have not tried it on a MediaWiki site, but it's pretty adept at copying websites including dynamically generated websites. They say: It allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original site's relative link-structure. Simply open a page of the mirrored website in your browser, and you can browse the site from link to link, as if you were viewing it online. HTTrack can also update an existing mirrored site, and resume interrupted downloads. HTTrack is fully configurable, and has an integrated help system. WinHTTrack is the Windows 2000/XP/Vista/Seven release of HTTrack, and WebHTTrack the Linux/Unix/BSD release which works in your browser. There is also a command-line version 'httrack'. HTTrack is actually similar in it's result to the wget -k -m -np http://mysite that Matt mentions, but may be easier in general to use and offers a GUI to drive the options that you want. Using the MediaWiki API to export pages is another option if you have specific needs that can not be addressed by a mirror operation (e.g. your wiki has namespaced contents that you want to treat differently.) If you end up exporting via Special:Export or the API, then you will be faced with the option to convert your XML to HTML. I have some notes about wiki format conversions at https://freephile.org/wiki/index.php/Format_conversion There's pandoc. If you need to convert files from one markup format into another, pandoc is your swiss-army knife. http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/ ~ Greg Greg Rundlett On Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 6:49 PM, Bill Horne b...@horne.net wrote: I need to copy the contents of a wiki into static pages, so please recommend a good web-crawler that can download an existing site into static content pages. It needs to run on Debian 6.0. Bill -- Bill Horne 339-364-8487 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- Eric Chadbourne 617.249.3377 http://theMnemeProject.org/ http://WebnerSolutions.com/ ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
