Choosing a SEO friendly CMS for articles?

I currently run an interfaith site where a key part of the site is publishing texts from world religions:

http://www.comparative-religion.com

I'm looking to move the site to a new domain, and I'd like to run a CMS as I've been editing manually so far.

I've considered using Wordpress, but the concern I have is that I would like to preserve the basic category structure - ie,

comparative-religion.com/christianity/

and also have the articles published under each category, ie,

comparative-religion.com/christianity/apocrypha/

but I don't believe that Wordpress will allow this.

I've looked at other CMS solutions, such as Mambo and Drupal, but my impression is that they are overcomplicated for what I actually need.


Does anyone have any useful suggestions on how to approach a SEO-friendly CMS approach to publishing artcles with a proper cateogry heirachy?

 

I found there to be a bit of a learning curve with Mambo. However, once getting past that, I'm happy with my decision to build a Mambo based site. I've added Emir Sakic's SEF Advanced which does a great job re-writing my URL's to SEO friendly URL's. One problem I had with Mambo was it's global meta descriptions/keywords. It forces you to use a global meta description and keywords, then ADDS the page description/keywords. The result is an entirely too long description and keywords. Luckily, I just found a quick fix for this - I posted it elsewhere on DP. Feel free to PM me and I'll locate the code fix.

Here's a thread over at Mambo Forums that describes the structure - which might answer your question regarding site structure.

Hope this helps.

 

Cmsmadesimple is very good for static content and simple to use.

If you are willing to hack into the code I world say wordpress or textpattern.
The seem to be the easiest to use and modify.
If you site is only 2 levels deep textpattern will work out of the box.

 

I believe that WP actually does allow you to do this when posting the articles as pages rather than posts.

 

Indeed, but using Wordpress in this way feels too much like a fudge - ideally I'm looking for something that will allow me to set up the articles more dynamically. It would seem odd to use Wordpress simply for the pages function - but perhaps I'm being too narrow-minded??

 

My sites all use it... Never had any issues.

It does the job well IMO, and the wonderful thing with WP is that you can completly modify the CMS output, simply by editing the site templates.

It's a great way of getting WordPress to fit in well with existing site architectures.

 

I am looking for the same idea. I need a script that will allow me and other users I assign to write articles with thier own static pages. Also something that is simple to colaberate with my existing website look and feel. I was looking at Wordpress and textpattern for this. Which one is easier to do this out of the box? I know HTML put no PHP. I want to simply put my header and footer of my existing website on the article pages.

 

Hey Buddy, what did you end up using? I really like the way you have your website. Nice job

 

Check out sNews
New version is coming out on saterday. I think there is seo add-on

 

Wordpress 1.52 is not really seo friendly. You by default do not have keyword and desc metatags for each document. Also, this might not be important to you, but it does not make static pages.

Just install it in the root directory and it will. Just make a category called christianity, and then a sub category called apocrypha. See the permlink options in the admin section for some advanced option. The documentation for wordpress is not the best, so you might have to spend some time looking for what you want.

 

Setting up WP to be SEO-friendly isn't really a problem -

- my challenge is really that the way WP mod_rewrites means it's difficult have have a fairly normal directory heirarchy in the URLs - you need "category" as the first apparent directory in URLs for a single install -

ie, .com/category/christianity/ and .com/category/buddhism/ etc

plus individual entry URLs will not reference the category directory, which means there's loss of logical keyword associations in the URL.

I could simply use the pages feature, or else have multiple WP installs to try and preserve some kind of category structure - but it seems a very sloppy solution for what is in effect a very simple problem.

Also, I'd love to use the RSS and using pages would kill that?

Perhaps I'm using the wrong terminology - perhaps it's not a CMS I want at all, just a simple WYSIWYG file editor wth in-built RSS?

 

Instead of using wordpress, why not try a wiki?

 

Joomla has decent SEF (search engine friendly URL's). There are several free and commercial add ons for this.

 

where can we find these snipets ?

 

you can find them at http://extensions.joomla.org , just search for SEF extensions and it will fit to your joomla site nicely.

 

hihi...thanks btw..i'm just taking a hot challenge by some marketeer back in my place where they questions joomla SEO capability...

 

I recently dumped Joomla for the brand new Drupal 5.1

It really rocks

 

i think joomla is the best!it has more than 10 sef components!and alos you can hack the joomla templates for seo!

 

I use Subdreamer CMS which is great! =)

 

if you are looking for free solution, then probably go with joomla, otherwise here is a good article manager script