CMS for tutorials website?

Can anybody recommend a CMS for a tutorial website? I won't be using half the features as I need just a simple website. But the website may turn a huge one so it will be better to use a CMS right from the start.

Anything to just manage articles? I have these options in my cpanel:

Drupal
Geeklog
Joomla
Mambo Open Source
PHP-Nuke
phpWCMS
phpWebSite
Post-Nuke
Siteframe
TYPO3
Xoops

 

Do you intend the tutorials to have videos/audio or are they purely text/image. How long are they and what form do they take.

In general I think you would be happy with Joomla.

J

 

plain text/image tutorials. Can I choose to shut off most features from joomla?

 

Would you pay for a cms specificly made to run a tutorial web site? If so, how much for non exclusive copy?

 

Joomla lets you turn the modules on and off, or more to the point remove them from the template (which is the same thing really) just through configurations.

I know what you mean, i typically turn off at least half the module with Joomla.

I wouldn't recommend getting something built. Go have a look at opensourcecms.com, you can play with most content management systems, joomla is in the list.

http://www.opensourcecms.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=2097&Itemid=159

J

 

Not really. This is not my main business you know. I belong to the 'Home & Lifestyle' field and doing this just because ... because I am a webmaster after all.

Will do that. Thanks for the link.

 

You can look at the CMS I developed for article management.
http://www.articletrader.com/articlems/ (be sure to check out the demo)

Easy to modify, and free.
Check out http://www.articleconnection.com/ to see an example of the script in action, to get an idea of flexible it can be.

 

Hey, this is looking nice. I am checking out the demo. Thanks!

 

Thanks for link but it is not what I need. I won't be needing and user-login features at all. But that is a nice piece of CMS and I will keep that in mind when I need something of that sort.

 

Hello DotCom,

I am the owner of tutorialhome.com

I recently decided to start selling the script as Turnkey, and everything that is included in each license can be viewed via thegrandtutorial.com

If you are interested in the script, please feel free to contact me.

Kind Regards,

Craig.

 

I always recommend Drupal, as it can easily handle what you're looking for. Right out of the box, it's feature laden but comes with only the core modules for extras. For a simple tutorials site, the page creation system is exactly what you'll need. It's capable of handling of course your varying level user accounts, online content creation/editing/moderation/comments, and more. I've done some work with the votingapi module, and it's very simple if you think you'd like voting to be enabled on the tutorials. (I'd be happy to help with it!) Installing modules is as simple as dropping the folder into your modules directory and clicking a box in the admin settings. Creating a simple block to search, browse, or list most popular tutorials or tutorials by category would be a snap. If you're interested in knowing more, I'd be happy to point you in the right direction and offer what help I can.

 

For some reason, I cannot open tutorialhome as well as grandtutorial.

rszrama, I will go ahead and install drupal and try to play around with it. And thanks for your offer. I will definitely holler if I need help. From what I have heard, Drupal is SE friendly as well, isn't it? Because that is most important.

 

If this thread is any indication, I'd say it's SE friendly.

http://drupal.org/node/20033

With mod rewrite on, in admin->settings, the general settings form, you can enable clean URLs to remove the queried type links (/?q=node/1 becomes /node/1). Also, in an ice machine sizing module I wrote, I used custom menu callbacks like so:

$items[] = array('path' => 'ice-machine-sizing-guide.html',
                         'title' => t('Ice Machine Sizing Guide'),
                         'callback' => 'sizeguide_app',
                         'access' => user_access('access content'),
                         'type' => MENU_CALLBACK);

Code (markup):

And Google/MSN both love to crawl these pages and follow those links. Ice Machine Guide ranks very well on both, and the sizing guide is always up there with the links to these callbacks. We're certainly happy with it, and have seen sales generated from these links.

(Fairly out-of-the-box site, but it works for page rank/linking: http://www.icemachineguide.com. I really just wrote the sizing guide module here, the block on the top left - don't blame me for the ugliness. )


(Sorry about the links... they aren't available to me yet. )

 

Wow! Drupal is complicated! I am completely lost there - and this is after installing so many forums and php scripts previously! Even the front page does not show up...lol. Well, I haven't given up yet. Still trying.

 

hehe Well, let me know what I can do to help. I actually haven't run into problems w/ installation in the past, but I'm using the latest WAMP server (w/ PHP 5) and the latest Drupal version 4.7.0 RC 2.

You have to drop the Drupal folder into your htdocs/www directory, create the database, and edit the file in /sites/default called settings.php. This file is what stores your database/site address information. It's plenty commented and easy to understand. Once those three things are done, you should be able to browse to the site address you set up in there and create an account. Account 1 is created as the admin account, and you can set your password when you create (unlike subsequent registrations). You may receive errors like me if you don't have an SMTP connection for PHP's mail() function which Drupal uses to send passwords to new users. But for testing purposes, you can always just login as admin and browse to administer->users on the menu and change the password manually.

So.. maybe you've already done all this and are still receiving errors? Let me know!

 

I installed it from my cpanel and that was the only easy thing about it. The script got installed in just one click. Customizing is where all the trouble started. I made some categories and then added some content pages. But the content does not get categorized at all! Also, there is no information on how I can display the categories on the navigation bar. And I want to shut off the user-login system completely because I just need it to manage my articles. But when I shut off the user-login form from the navigation, I am unable to login myself..lol.

 

Ok, let's see what I can do...

I'm assuming by categories you mean you've created some taxonomy vocabularies and added terms to them? An example vocab/term structure might be a vocabulary of the name "Shirts" with terms of names "Polo", "T-Shirt", and "Long-sleeved Shirt." If you enable this vocabulary to be applied to pages/stories, when you create a new page or story or edit an existing one, there should be a drop down Categories form. Select from there which one you want this to be. Then, when you're viewing that node later there should be a small link of the term name you've applied to it. Note that you're applying a term name from a vocab set, not a vocabulary name. If you click the "T-Shirt" link by the node's submitted by/dateline, it will list all the nodes classified as T-Shirt.

If you look at the URL for that list, you should now be able to create your menu item in the navigation menu. So, go to administer->menus, click on add item below the Navigation sub-heading, and fill in the info. Your path box should contain something like this: "taxonomy/term/1" Click the menu link, and voila! You should now be seeing all nodes categorized with taxonomy term 1 (in my test case, "Limburger" of the "Cheese" vocabulary set ).

About your login issue, you can turn it off from the menu but still browse to it directly with the following URL: <your site>/?q=user/login

Hope this helps!

I think I'd like to do a screen captured, step by step tutorial on the taxonomy stuff, as it really is just awkward wording so most people don't get it easily (myself included!)..

 

recently I find a script specially developed for tutorial engine.

please PM me, i can give it to you. I guess its a free script.