CMS's & Vanilla & Wikis & Etc...

hello

I should start off by saying I'm not a code guy. I have almost no database knowledge. I am, dare I say, a noob.

Now that we're all aware, is it possible to have a CMS (something pre-made like drupal) integrate with vanilla to utilize the user logins and things like that. What about other things? What I'm looking to do is create a blog with two news feeds, one limited to moderators, one open to any user with a login. I love vanilla (thank you mark) but i would hate for users to have to create 2 accounts to post news and participate in the forums. in the future i'd like to add a wiki to the mix, but again, don't want my users to have to signup yet again.

edit: closed a tag

Bergamot

This is really easy to do (depending on the complexity of your blog software it could be as little as a dozen lines), but you do need a certain amount of coding knowledge.

hello

alright then. onto m next question, which is.... how easy or hard would it be to expand on the individual user's page? i'm looking to (in the future) really beef up the individual user's pages by either creating one from scratch, adapting one from another blog, wiki, whatever, or by just taking vanilla's and beefing it up. and... is there a cms you might recomend. i'm looking at a bunch right now, but am curious as to whether or not you have any input off the top of your head based on my first post

Kosmo

Don't we have one of the Drupal devs here? Maybe he can help you with tasty treats. And to my knowledge Drupal has a wiki type widget, so if you are making a community portal, I don't know a better COMS (COmmunity Management System) than Drupal. Unless you are easily suckered to use some forum type thing to create your community like ADM has, that is pretty sweet.

jakob_r

The glorified profile page idea would interest me too. You can add some more fields with the predefined attributes add-on but that is realtively limited. Ideally I would like to allow certain roles - a sort of super-user - have an expanded profile with more own infos and with some attributes that only a moderator can set. Ideally some of these attributes should be searchable.

nathan

+1 for Drupal (from one drupal developer to a self confessed noob) For an all round CMS, I would suggest Drupal. There are others, but they are much more specialised in their function (Joomla/ Mambo is more a forum, TextPattern + Wordpress are the more common blog engines, etc.), but Drupal is quite universal in its application (out of the box). There is a Wiki module (in contrib.) and a blog module (that ships with the Drupal core). If you need any more help, drop me a line and I will see what I can do.

Kosmo

See? I told you so, tasty treats from the orange rabbity thing.

nathan

Tis a 'sodabunny' to be presise, and I have just realised that the bottom gets cut off in Safari. I'll reduce the size so it fits nicely. Or put a different one in there... like my ChiefCodeMonkey logo. Yes, I do contribute to Drupal (only a contributor now, as I am back to the classroom and have my own work to run). I mainly dealt with usability and the design (xhtml and css). The PHP and development side of things (while I see it all, and know what is going on, and, if needed, review/ patch the core code), was not my strong point, but I can help you there, especially with theming.

hello

wow. thanks for the response. i may be taking you up on a little help then. ps: i think the bottom may get cut off in camino as well

hello

out of curriosity, how does django or solucija compare as far as what i want to get out of it?

Kosmo

Well, Django is a prime solution, easy to work with and extremely speedy in results, tho, it requires some learning to do some more complex things like the wiki, but news/blogging and flatpages are done in few hours with it.