So, I disappeared for most of a year with the arrival of my son. And after I got a whole host of movie reviews up on the old site, DRUPAL started giving me glitches. It never looked quite right, so I opted to just ditch worrying about it.
But in the last few weeks, I’ve thought long and hard about what I really want the site to do and how I want to approach it, and finally came to some basic realizations.
- My hoster is fine if I don’t muck around with databases.
- If I avoid heavy databases like MYSQL or MSSQL, that takes a whole whack of content management systems out of the equation. Including MediaWiki which I actually managed to get working closer to what I wanted, even though it was using a database. But in the end, it was still too complicated for what I wanted to do, and not worth the overhead.
- If I look at “light” CMS packages, there are only a couple that really stand out as worth testing. So I did test them, and right now I really like GPEASY. Admittedly, the documentation is not huge, but my needs are simple. And the guy who created the package and who runs the website forums is REALLY helpful with answering questions.
I managed to start with a FaceBook-like theme, and tweak it almost beyond recognition in colours, etc., and still have 98% of the original code untouched. And best of all, it has a really good online editor that allows me to paste text from a simple editor or just type from scratch, along with lots of little formatting options. Still glitching with the 1.5 line spacing after each paragraph, but I’ll work on that over time.
I also need to ditch a second logo that is showing up, add in separate colours for the background of top and bottom, edit the sidebar, rename the blog, and edit the footer. Then on to Movie Reviews!
