How about a Wiki?

[Menard]

Well, it doesn't have to specifically be a wiki script, just something that can be used as one.

I have been looking around at some scripts and although I may have a potential wiki script, I am thinking that a lightweight blog script may fit my needs, or wants, better.

For the z54 site, I am considering a wiki for it. I want it to be lightweight as well; not just for server resources, but for access from any speed connection.

User friendliness is a key issue. The people who will mostly access this site will largely be involved in retail to some degree. Being that this will include people with varying degrees of internet literacy, I need to keep anything on the site as to the point and simple as possible (it's not designing for idiots, but designing for first time users).

Quite frankly a lot of scripts are designed with the idea that anybody who accesses it will already know how to use it; wiki scripts in particular assume user familiarity.

Some of these things I should be able to do with most scripts just by changing the names of a few things. Though I will inquire with others about this, perhaps 'menu' or 'contents' in place of index might be more friendly.

One script that is appealing to me more and more, for now, is CuteNews. Call it a CMS or news management system, it seems to be more user friendly out of the box. http://cutephp.com/

Another news management system that is lightweight is sNews. http://www.snewscms.com/

Minki is a very light wiki that looks as though I can change the link names to something more friendly. http://minki.theprawn.com/?page=sandbox

Though I considered Particle Wiki (their scripts are very easy to install) I would have to do quite a bit of updating to the page links and I'm not too fond of their word processor. http://wiki.particlesoft.net/index.php?page=Homepage&redirect=no

Okay, so I'm basically ambling aimlessly right now.

I was wondering if anyone has any other scripts they could recommend (blog, cms, wiki, etc.) that would be lightweight and user friendly?

[Andy]

What do you want to achieve? A blog is where you are the main content provider and visitors may comment on the posts. A wiki is a community edited/spammed site. A CMS is a general purpose script to build any kind of site.

Blogs are the easiest for people to contribute to I think since they don't have to register. They just need to fill in their name, email, comment and hit the submit button. But most people are afraid to post comments. You will need over 100 visitors per day to get any comments in my experience. For forums it seems to be worse, maybe you need 1000 visitors per day to get 1 new contributor to the site daily. Wikis may be worse still and a magnet for spammers.

So, if you are targeting people that are new to the internet then you have to make it incredibly easy for them to post and have no hurdles for them to jump over. You should just have a name field, comment form and a big submit button, then deal with the spam at your end. Also, have strong calls to action to encourage them to post such as free T-shirt to the next 100'th contributor. You will need a flood control to throttle the rate of spam submissions. Hmm, I think you need custom code.

[Menard]

What do you want to achieve? A blog is where you are the main content provider and visitors may comment on the posts. A wiki is a community edited/spammed site. A CMS is a general purpose script to build any kind of site.

Blogs are the easiest for people to contribute to I think since they don't have to register. They just need to fill in their name, email, comment and hit the submit button. But most people are afraid to post comments. You will need over 100 visitors per day to get any comments in my experience. For forums it seems to be worse, maybe you need 1000 visitors per day to get 1 new contributor to the site daily. Wikis may be worse still and a magnet for spammers.

So, if you are targeting people that are new to the internet then you have to make it incredibly easy for them to post and have no hurdles for them to jump over. You should just have a name field, comment form and a big submit button, then deal with the spam at your end. Also, have strong calls to action to encourage them to post such as free T-shirt to the next 100'th contributor. You will need a flood control to throttle the rate of spam submissions. Hmm, I think you need custom code.

Although the definition of scripts is general, some of them have different functionality even though they are classified as a certain type of script by the developer. The CuteNews script to which I referred allows posting news/articles by others. What I was wondering was if someone had a suggestion of a script that fit a simple format online content submitter that was relatively user friendly.

It is a private forum that is going to be on the site; the wiki would be private as well. This site is primarily for people in the retail industry within a geographic area; I am not looking to pull traffic to it from the internet in general. If someone comes along and knocks at the door to ask to join from coming across it on a search engine, I won't deny them, but I'm not looking for that with this site.

The wiki may be something that becomes a useful resource, or may be something in which nobody is interested. I refer to it as a wiki, as that is what seems to fit, but if calling it a contributed knowledge base for retail workers fits it better, then I'll call it that.

[Andy]

Maybe you can create a "group" such as with Yahoo or Google services? Then you don't have to care about hosting or software.

[Menard]

Maybe you can create a "group" such as with Yahoo or Google services? Then you don't have to care about hosting or software.

Well...that would kind of defeat the purpose of the simplicity.

The domain is simple, z54.org; not sitethis/slashthat/usernamehere.dotwhatever.

I've never used Google or Yahoo groups and I'm fairly certain that several of the people who may use this site/forum have not either. The more steps that I require for them to take to get there reduces the chance of them remembering or trying in the first place.

I'm just creating a simple site where people within a locale who either work with each other or in the same industry can get together; and specifically can find it easily.

[Draught]

Create a new group and achieve your targeted audience there.

[sonya1990]

We did open source the PDL book many years with the idea that people 
could improve it on CVS. One can go in there right now if one is a 
PDL admin on sourceforge and hack the latex.

A wiki might be a better approach though - neat idea.