[DupySite] Content Management Experiments

Over the past few days, I've been working on a new website for my KylanAndKristen.com domain. Since the wedding is finished, a redesign is due. The wedding website will be preserved under www.dupyshon.com/wedding, so you can still visit and sign the digital guestbook, if you like.

Anyway, I wanted to try something new with this site. In the past, I've coded up all of the HTML and CSS on my own. It's been a fun learning experience, but it also takes a lot of work. Additionally, since I'm not a graphic design guru, the sites end up looking less polished than I would like. This time around I decided to try my hand at implementing a content management system that can handle all of the backend details. I tried out three different options:

TextPattern

At first I was sure that TextPattern would be the right tool for me. My friend Mike Sun runs a photoblog called Sojourning Days using this software, and it looks really classy. TextPattern is extremely simple, almost to the extent of being bare-bones, but that let me feel like I had a lot of control. There were some issues regarding navigation between pages and auto-generated content, though, so I decided to move on.

Joomla

Joomla had the advantage of working right out of the box. However, it seems like this product is meant for a much larger-scale implementation. The support for many users, polls, and other features were just overkill for what I wanted. Plus, most of the extensions and themes are non-free, making customization much more difficult than I would have liked.

Wordpress

I've been wanting to try Wordpress for quite a while. I really like the way users can create blog posts as well as web pages. There is quite a large community supporting this product, which means that there are plenty of free extensions, widgets, and themes. Out of these three, Wordpress is easily the best choice for KylanAndKristen.com.

KylanAndKristen.com is now up and running, with pictures from our wedding to be posted later this week. Stay tuned, because the site should grow pretty quickly over the next couple of months.