r/Glasgow Tools

Hi mate. Thanks for offering to help me get set up.

I'm tech savvy and able to muddle my way about with some html, CSS and even a little bit of PHP. Understand how backends work to a degree...things like SQL databases, etc. I've set up websites for a couple of things in the past... a company site for an old employer, an SMF forum for a hobby group,

I am an amateur though and my abilities in everything above is limited to editing and hacking ready made systems.

I've chucked WordPress onto the new site, but I'd rather use something else. Wordpress is fine in a pinch, but I always seem to smack hard against a limitation somewhere along the way when using it. It's also nearly always painfully obvious when using Wordpress as all the themes and templates all seem to have the same looks and feels.

What out-of-the-box solutions would you recommend for a CMS these days? I won't need it to do anything majorly fancy. The biggest demand I have is that I want it to look nice and not be a total pain in the arse to modify. It'll be for article writing. Not quite a blog, but blog-like.

The things I like about Wordpress is the ability to categorise and tag the articles.

As as example I have written a draft article on "Cleddans", which is an area on the edge of Glasgow. The article has a section on the Cleddans burn, detailing its route. Then there's a section on Cleddans farm, which is the site of an ancient Roman Fortlet where they found some stone tablets. Then a section on the now demolished Lillyburn high flats, which were sometimes called the Cleddans Flats and where the most notorius, crime riddled part of Drumchapel in the 80s and 90s. So, the article obviously covers several distinct topics, but all relate to the overall title: "The area of Cleddans".

The thing I like about Wordpress is that I can tag/categorise that article under "Burns and Streams", "Drumchapel", "Forgotten Place Names", "Areas of Glasgow", "Historical sites" ... that kind of thing. So that when somebody searches for Drumchapel that article ends up in the results as well as any other article with the Drumchapel tag.

So, with all that in mind, what CMS system do you think would suit best? Something that looks good design-wise, and has the sort of article/blog sorting and searching as described above?

If you want to take a peek at the early stages of the site just now, which has a loooong way to go... www.mungosfire.com (the "brand" will be Saint Mungo's Fire, inspired from the legend of Saint Mungo magically starting a fire from frozen branches). The draft article on Cleddans is there.

On that... I suck at artwork. Do you know anybody that might be able to help out with the likes of site logo/header banner/things like that?

Thanks in advance mate.