Looking for news publishing system/CMS

Bearthunder · 06-26-2009, 01:55 AM

I've been searching for a good (free or dirt cheap) news handling system/CMS to integrate into my existing website, preferably as a SSI, for quite some time now.

What I want is something that looks and feels like an online newspaper. With articles, categories and images. I've been looking at Wordpress the last couple of days, but not sure how and if it can be integrated with SSI.

So, if anyone has any good suggestions I'd be very happy to hear your thoughts and ideas.

The site is hosted on a Windows system with all the bells and whistles at LFC Hosting.

kieransimkin · 06-26-2009, 05:46 AM

Wordpress is a good option although your site will end up looking more like a blog than a 'news site'. If you want to create something that looks like a news site you'll probably want a proper content system like Joomla or Drupal. These can be a lot more work to set up than a blog, but you'll get a lot more flexibility and stand a better chance at achieving the look of a newspaper.

As for integrating with SSI - I would've thought you could integrate any PHP script with SSI, but I'm not sure why you would want to. It's normally just a case of applying your site template to the system and then linking to it.

Costin Trifan · 06-26-2009, 06:19 AM

anything free or dirt cheap it's not going to help you or your website in a long ride; if you can spare $200 you can take a look at vivvo cms.

kieransimkin · 06-26-2009, 06:21 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Costin Trifan

anything free or dirt cheap it's not going to help you or your website in a long ride; if you can spare $200 you can take a look at vivvo cms.

I wouldn't agree with that - there's plenty of great opensource content systems available! The advantage of opensource is also that you can modify the code yourself (or pay someone else to modify it), so this gives you more flexibility than a proprietary system would normally provide.

Costin Trifan · 06-26-2009, 06:33 AM

Quote:

The advantage of opensource is also that you can modify the code yourself (or pay someone else to modify it), so this gives you more flexibility than a proprietary system would normally provide.

oh, yeah, you're right on this one and I couldn't agree with you more! but I wasn't meaning this when I said what I said. Suppose you have no knowledge or skills whatsoever then what can a free (maybe not even supported anymore) cms can do for your website?

It will work ok until you get(if you get) a high traffic of visitors. Then you'd like to customize it and that will be, sometimes, pretty hard...

kieransimkin · 06-26-2009, 08:22 AM

It's certainly true that spending a bit of cash will get you a better product - at the end of the day you get what you pay for.

Bearthunder · 06-26-2009, 08:42 AM

Thanks for the answers.

There are a lot of very good news publishing systems out there, some of which have more or less exactly what I need. The problem is as always money, my site is a mere hobby, and already a money pit (not the least due to me not keeping it updated

).

The site runs mostly on ASP, and the news section is just one of many sections, but it is the first thing you'll see when you enter. To prevent having to change layout and styles too much I was hoping to find something that I could integrate without loosing the option to run the SSI file which contains my header that has logo and site menu, and maybe also have it in a frame with some sideframes with other content. There's too much that needs to be changed, fixed and updated already to have a news section which forces me to change the whole site too much.

This is the news section as it looks today. And as you see, it's not really very good, nor updated in ages. Wife, two kids and a house takes quite a bit of time to keep up with.

Come fall I might be able to cough up a few bucks to invest in something proper, but I still don't know what to get when that time may come.

kieransimkin · 06-30-2009, 10:05 AM

I think for a site like yours Wordpress would do fine - I think you're probably also worrying a little bit more than you have to about how to integrate the system with your site design - just make a template for Wordpress, you can probably use PHP includes to achieve something similar to SSI.

webopius · 07-04-2009, 01:54 AM

For a Windows based system, I would recommend looking at Xigla News Manager for the .NET platform. Not free but a good system that you can customize if required:

http://www.xigla.com/absolutenmnet/index.htm