The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 3 (of 5)

JOS similar site

I want to make a similar JOS site, with blog, articles, categorized links to other sites (my bookmarks/favorites online), and support for inline images on articles. Discussion input for each article would be a plus.

My website supports ASP, PHP, Perl and mySQL. Any suggestions of an easy to administrate package. I'm thinking of an easy blog/personal site package, not some sort of "portal solution"

Mauricio Macedo
Friday, October 10, 2003

but first make sure:
do I have something valuable to say?

name not available
Friday, October 10, 2003

I've installed PostNuke, which seems to have everything I need (besides lots and lots of things that I don't need for now).

When I was refering to inline images, was for my articles (automatic upload and insertion), not forum posts.

And I do have things to say. If there are people wanting to hear it is another story ;)

Thanks all, I think I will give PostNuke a go.

Mauricio Macedo
Friday, October 10, 2003

I recently set up a web site using Postnuke. It's surprisingly easy to get going.

Its main advantage is that it allows collaborative publishing - you can allow remote users to submit articles and it has a decent security & permissions system to support delegated authority to edit and publish content. For a self published weblog that will never be changed by others, or to set up a discussion forum, it's probably gross overkill.

Its disadvantage comes from the fact that it's big and complicated. It takes awhile to prune the features that you won't be using. Also, there are some features that one would consider "reasonable" that Postnuke omits - such as a way to have content that is not part of chronologically arranged stories. And the 'style' system ("skins" for the site) is difficult to grasp and quite complicated. Heck, the whole thing is complicated... And, there are a variety of third party add on modules for Postnuke; but surprise, surprise, they have their own bugs and introduce their own notion of formatting styles.

Postnuke is worthwhile if you need its many features.

Bored Bystander
Friday, October 10, 2003

Does postnuke also have that problem where Google won't index it? I tried some other nuke and Google wouldn't index it because of the session ID in the URL.

Mark T A W .com
Friday, October 10, 2003

I was wondering the same thing. My hope is that every link in the site gets crawled.

When I try it not logged in as a user, I click on a story URL like:

http://www.blabla.org/newsite/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=8&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

(sid is apparently the story ID, not a session)

Mozilla says that the meta keywords are the same as those I set for the overall site (so Postnuke regenerates them into each displayed page.) The tag ROBOTS is set to INDEX,FOLLOW for the story.

I selected Postnuke for my organization's web site after doing a Google search for Postnuke <type-of-org> and getting a bazillion hits of nice looking sites. In that instance Google indexed them. So, in a sense, if Google could not index these sites, I would not have found any examples and would not have chosen it...

Bored Bystander
Friday, October 10, 2003

Google stops the index when it hits a ?

A ? indicates generated content that's not "real" so Google can't index it. I'm sure you can modify PostNuke to get around that by changing the way it creates or titles pages.

Alternatively you can put mod_rewrite rules into effect to change the path dynamically.

Or you could go with a blogging solution and a separte forum solution. I'm a fan of MovableType.

Lou
Friday, October 10, 2003

I'd avoid nuke stuff unless you never want to change them. I've worked on Nuke sites and what a pain in the **s they were. But then it is just not easy to do this stuff and I've not seen an easier solution. I'd suggest getting code that at least mimics OO and doesn't use globals and that uses a template system like Smarty or Template::Toolkit or something, good signs, although not always, when apps use those

Me
Friday, October 10, 2003

Where was Joel's weblog before it was kept in CityDesk on JoelOnSoftware.com ? Remember, the old URL's were like: www.site.com/story$45357

You can find sometimes an old link still in an old article. Certainly you can make a JoS style site there.

Mark T A W .com
Friday, October 10, 2003

www.sswltd.com

*.*
Saturday, October 11, 2003

There's also a JoS clone on JohnsAdventures.com.

It seems that the previous incarnation of JoS was in Frontier/Manilla/Radio - can someone confirm or deny this? Remember when the URL was joelonsoftware.something.com ?

Mark T A W .com
Saturday, October 11, 2003

> There's also a JoS *forum* clone on JohnsAdventures.com

Mark T A W .com
Saturday, October 11, 2003

Hosted by yourself:
Moveable Type?
Textism?
Bloxsom?
Nucleus?

Hosted elsewhere:
Typepad?
Blogspot?

Hybrid:
Blogger?
Radio?

Tom (a programmer)
Saturday, October 11, 2003

>Hosted by yourself:
>Moveable Type?
>Textism?
>Bloxsom?
>Nucleus?

How about Fog Creek's CityDesk? Might be a little overkill for a blog, but it's far more flexible. You can manage your whole site's content, not just the blog.

..
Saturday, October 11, 2003

Shhh... CityDesk would the the obvious option because that's what JoS is maintained in. Though at $300 per license, I don't think, as a blogging tool, it compares to the free options.

My girlfriend is looking for a blogging tool, she likes xanga. I think moveable type is pretty good, but haven't played with it much. I like blogger, but really wish posts were listed in some other-than-chronological way.

www.MarkTAW.com
Sunday, October 12, 2003

After playing for a few hours with PostNuke, it seems to be overkill. I use blogs, but most solutions do not cover all that I want to post online. I don't know, I'm thinking about starting small with dreamweaver.. :-(

Mauricio Macedo
Monday, October 13, 2003