Andrew (Television Executive)
One thing I'm really struggling with right now is the way Blogs ate other kinds of websites.
I want a Website for this community media directory, not a blog.
And, especially now, not wordpress.
So what's the best CMS for building a website that exists as a series of entries structured around something other than the time that they were written?
Chuck the Lab Technician
@ajroach42 You're getting into the free-form data CMS, something like drupal really excels at subjects like this since you can free-form define your archetypes.
I've also had good success building with hugo, defining an archetype, and then just a fist-full of yaml.
ymmv
alcinnz
@ajroach42 Personally I use Jekyll, though mostly just raw HTML/CSS!
And yes, I shun organizing my personal site as a blog...
Marco Andrei K. 🧉
@ajroach42 Dear Andrew, WP is flexible in the way you don’t need to use normal “posts”, instead you can use “pages” or even “custom posts”, a post type you can specify what you need. For example, you could create a “audios” post type or “videos”, so you can define metadata for them and group or list them automatically. If you need some help, please let me know!
Marco Andrei K. 🧉
@ajroach42 Good luck! And my best regards from Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul!
Andrew (Television Executive)
@marcoandrei I was a wordpress dev for a decade. 🥰
I appreciate the offer, but I've got it under control.
Kevin Wilson (he/him/they)
@ajroach42 I so deeply appreciated your thread on independent media curation/solidarity that I wanted to share something back. And since I've gone through dozens of CMS' over the past few years while trying to figure out what works best for online comics, I have a few weird curveballs I can share in case wikis don't work well for you (and it seems like they might!)
Since you're asking about how people move around the website, I'll focus on 3 info system type CMS':
First is Bookstack (https://www.bookstackapp.com/), which is a documentation CMS that is centered around categorizing things into a hierarchy type format (demo example: https://demo.bookstackapp.com/books/marketing-depertment/page/outbound-marketing-options). This might help people who use it feel like browsing through stacks of books and digging up something interesting.
Next is Typemill (https://typemill.net/), which is a CMS that lets users generate PDFs and ePubs directly. This could let people walk away with something to hold onto and feel like they're reading one single book. Otherwise it's more like a normal blog out of the box.
Third is more of an overall design approach that might be what you're looking for, which is often called "digital gardening" - where the explicit goal is for things to be as organic and non-linear as possible. I learned about it from Maggie Appleton, who has a huge list of resources about it (https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners). This list includes guides for software from Tiddlywiki to Obsidian to Jekyll. This might help you achieve more of what you want with software you already like.
I hope any of this helps!
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