Technical platform for Web site?

Hello,

My website is currently .html and .css based only. It gives me full control of everything, but it is cumbersome to maintain, especially when I want to add a new structural element.

So, I spent some time investigating and experimenting with WordPress (WP), Drupal, and other Content Management Systems (CMS), designed to make life easier in developing and maintaining a web site.

I was able to produce a menu driven prototypal web site using Drupal, but not using WordPress. With the WordPress platorm I can't seem to be able to go beyond the blog look and feel.

I also tried a few other CMS but they did not seem to support multilanguage as Drupal and WP seem to be able to do, although with some degree of risk, as I understand.

One very important point that makes me hesitate before moving platform is that I understand what is going on with my site as it is now, but with any of these CMS platforms, I am not exacly sure I will be able to know what is going on if a technical problem comes up.

So for now I am sticking to my .css and .html based web site, but would like to move to an easier to maintain platform.

Anyone interested in providing insight?

HammerStone,

Thank you,

your advice encouraged me to reopen this study left behind about three months ago. I had been focusing on Drupal for the most part of three weeks or so, but then realized it would probably be a lot of work to set up and maintain the site. When I came to WordPress I had run out of free time. This time around, I will try to understand the outworkings of WordPress. Themematic provides a tutorial that I began to work through, while WordPress is installed in a private development section of my web site.

Thank you!

HammerStone,

using the Thematic Theme Framework, I was finally able to figure out how to create a menu driven interface for my web site. You can look at the result at www.savoiretcroire.ca/en/. No images yet, just the raw structure, and my most important contents.

Now I was thinking of loading a new instance of WordPress into an /../es/ section of my site, and then a /../fr/ section to make the site trilingual. Reason I am thinking in that direction is that it seems that you have to load an awful lot of plug ins if you want to make a single instance of WordPress truly multilingual, and I don't know which are reliable and which are not.

So I figure if I just have three independent sites, I reduce the technical risks of loosing everything because I am not savy enough with CMS in general and with WordPress in particular.

One case in point. I created this site using a ../dev/preprod/wp/ section. Moving my site was very simple, applying the instructions I found in a WordPress codex that answered my question exactly. The codex said moving a multi site was more complex. So I am shying away from anything that is not easy enough to understand now...

So do you think I am making a mistake by trying to maintain three instances of WordPress, or should I adopt a plug in and make my site truly multlingual? and if so, which direction should I look into for plugins that won't break my site down the road.

Here I am talking from experience, because while prototyping Drupal, I used all of the multilingual functionalities and plug ins, but there were so many of them that eventually I ran into conflicts I did not have a clue as to how to fix, and I lost my site completely without having the know how to recuperate it.

Thank you for offering to answer my questions. I hope it might also be of some use to some of www.christianityboard.com members.

I like to think of the following verse when I work at my Web Site, whether creating contents for it or setting it up with technical tools such as filezilla, html, css, wordpress, which I had to learn using one by one through the months :
"LORD [...] all that we have accomplished you have done for us" (Isaiah 26:12, NIV 2011).

Daniel

HammerStone,

Thank you for your encouragement about creativity, and for your advice about WordPress plug-ins.

Daniel

Hello HammerStone,

JUST FOR THE RECORDS...

Just for the records, I did follow your previous advice. It led me to install the Polylang multilanguage WordPress plugin. With it I need only one site domain for all my languages, which is easier as you had said.

The Thematic framework helped me understand how WordPress operated with pages vs menus. Now I switched to the TwentyTen WordPress theme, because it provides some "out of the box" features that are useful to me, and because, TwnentyTen and Thematics were the only frameworks or themes that did not break under my older Internet Explorer 9. All the others looked great with Mozilla Firefox, but they broke down with Explorer.

QUESTION...

Before I posted my previous questions to you, I had moved my site from "www.example.preprod.ca" to "www.example.ca/en/". My purpose was to make sure I could move the site without breaking it. At that time I was working with the idea of managing my translations as three separates sites /en/ and /sp/ and /fr/.

The Softaculus WordPress installer provided by my host (register4less) indicates the location of that WordPress installation where it was before I moved it. So I am wondering if that will not cause some problems when WordPress goes through its automatic updating through the months and years.

Apart from that, my moving the site, using WordPress codex instructions, worked just fine. So I would intend to move my site again. But this time, from where it is now (maindomain/en/) to the maindomain itself. The concern I have here is about the coabitation of my old css and html based site with this new php site. I'm not sure how I should go about not loosing my visitor base to the current index.html and all its sub pages, while at the same time moving my entire WordPress setup with its index.php file and all to my maindomain.ca directory.

Any comments on what direction I should look into?

One step at the time,

Thanks,

Daniel

Hello Madad,

yes, it's behind me now... and I enjoy the pictures you are expressing yourself with, even if I initially took your laughing donkey for a laughing cow...

Hello Randor,

I did note your encouragement for me to get back to the main business life is all about. And now it seems I'll be able to do other things than trying to figure out how the technicalities of modifying the platform from which a web site is running. It was quite daunting, as I was afraid my site would go down and not be available for people who were visiting it up to then. But I did it and my new site interface lives.

Hello HammerStone,

Thank you for your advice. It has been quite difficult for me to understand everything I needed to know before moving my site from its css and html base to the WordPress CMS platform, while knowing I would not loose previous work and while preserving the obsolete links so they could be rerouted to my new site interface.

Come on, Arnie Manitoba,

Be patient with this site if you encounter any difficulties with it. May I suggest you open up a posting where you explain in a descriptive manner what the problem is so that other people who have found solutions to it can help us all making christianityboard.com a great experience relationally and technically. For my part, the use I'm doing of the forum's functionalities is working pretty good generally. And when facing glitches, there is Raised Renard who used to call herself Laid Renard who makes me laugh about the whole issue, and HammerStone to nail it down.

May God bless all of us happy christianityboard.com members.

Daniel Garneau

Hello Arnie,

Thank you for describing the problem to me. I do not have extended experience with forums, Christians or otherwise, but I did in a French language forum respond to someone who had misunderstood my post as if I had been offending him wilfully. Then when I explained what I meant, the person who had felt criticized removed his postings, which makes my answer seem a little strange dangling there without any context.

I still think it might be a good idea to open a thread which would deal with whatever specific technical issues we all need to be concerned about. One other English language forum I was involved in for a little while seemed to have very few participants, so I thought, hey, OK, I'll come back in a few months to see if anything has moved. At that time I was met with a new platform and the requirement to register anew. And all of my previous postings on that forum were no longer available. So that problem I did experience.

Personally I kind of like the way this forum works, and when I want to talk to someone individually I use the mail functionality. But you know, I have my own web site, and technically there are things that require so much time and know-how, I tend to be patient... But losing postings would be awful... I hope HammerStone has a sturdy backup and restore procedure to fall back on so that if ever worst come to worst only 24 hours of postings and other data would be lost.

God bless you !