help me out - blog stuff....

It's been a while now that I decided to change my site.... never had the time though and I suppose I'll find even less time in the near future...

so I was thinking of making do with a blog thinghy. I don't know a lot about those and I know some of you here have blogs and know your way around them. I am not looking for a free app. I have some money spared and I'd be willing to pay for membership or license or whatever a blog requires. I do have hosting, php databases if its required (I suppose it is).

I don't know if a blog is what I need - maybe you guys can tell me if it's not what I should be looking into.

What I need to put inside:

Basically it's going to be a portfolio site/blog(?)

- a lot of pics. There will be at least 3 "big" galleries - each with its own subsections (like one gallery will be "Illustration" and will have "realistic," "general art," "icons" ....etc as subsections)
- a weekly (or more often) news thinghy
- contact form thinghy
- presentation thinghy

...it will get pretty graphics heavy - I intend to display photos too...

so now you tell me - could I do this with a blog? Is it worth it? Is it easy enough to set up and manage and not very time consuming? Which one would be best for me?

Or should Ijust forget the blog thing and use my money on a coder guy instead?

A blog system can definitely take care of that setup for you. There are a lot of options out there, the most popular being Movable Type and Wordpress most likely. www.movabletype.org www.wordpress.org

Movable Type has by far the most active community, which also means it has the most support, the most plugins, and the most tips/tutorials. There is a free version, which is probably all you would need.

There is no built-in photo gallery in either one, though it's very easy to set one up in either system. MT supports uploading and resizing images from the admin panel, so it's a good choice.

My personal favorite is ExpressionEngine (www.pmachine.com). It's $150 for non-profit, but worth every penny. It's 10 times more powerful than MT and Wordpress, and can handle just about anything you want to do with it. The best part about it is that you can create your own entry fields. Like MT is limited to Title, Body, Excerpt, extended entry, and keywords. But with ExpressionEngine you can have anything you want. You could have a thing for the large image, the thumbnail image, the caption, the date, anything you want. It also supports sub-categories, which MT doesn't without a plugin. If you have the cash it's by far the best system in my opinion.

hey thanks deker

Those look good - all of them but complicated also. 150$ for ExpressionEnging is a little steep. I have about 100$ saved up for a gift ...for myself it's going to be my birthday real soon. I guess I could conjure up another 50 if it's really really good. The thing is...I know absolutely no php - none whatsoever. Whenever I need it - I pay for the coding Will I have to do that too? Is is something I could just install and tweak myself? Without having to read mountains of documentation?

I actually like the Movable Type better than Pmachine (going by their site strictly - not by the product).

also - if you happen to know - if I offer my services as a designer on my blog - will it be considered proffit or non proffit?

ExpressionEngine is definitely worth the money, but it may be overkill for what you're doing. I run my blog on MT, and it works great. The only bad thing about MT is that you have to rebuild your pages. Everything is dynamic and stored in a database, but it builds out static HTML pages, to reduce server load.

Neither system requires any PHP or PERL knowledge, though you do have to learn their templating systems, which are easy.

If you only have $100 to spend, I'd go with MT. There are enough free plugins and tutorials on how to setup photo blogs and stuff that it will suit your needs, and you won't have to spend any cash.

Another option is TypePad, which is a hosted service by the MT people. It has built-in photo galleries and stuff already. The only problem is you have to pay a monthly fee for it and you're limited to their hosting plans.

So yeah, MT is probably your best option.

yeah - I was allready kinda half decided for that you tipped the scale. I'll go with movabletype. Thanks a lot for the advice. If you know a good gallery plugin for MT - let me know Even if it's commercial. the personal edition is only 70$ or so - so I'll have some extra cash to spend hihi.

thanks again.

Here's one... I haven't used it personally but it looks like it will do it for you.

http://brandon.fuller.name/archives/hacks/mtphotogallery/

Other essential plugins:

MT Blacklist - To deal with spam on your blog. Which you will get if you have comments open.

MT Textile - Easy way to markup links and lists and things like that. Like a short-hand for HTML.

Smarty Pants - It automatically puts in correct curly quotes, proper elipses, etc.

I have to reinstall MT on my site. Everything was going fine, it looked great, and then afew days ago it all went berserk. I didn't change a thing, but all of a sudden style sheets don't load, where my posts used to be there is now blank space, etc.

Nos.

yay - thanks.

I looked into all of those and I want them

Can I bother you for some more details? Is there a way to make links to entries permanent? Or once the "date" goes by it goes straight into the archive?

Say for instance I want the "gallery" link to always point at the same entry.

The way I'd do your photogallery is to actually setup a separate blog... It would have its own templates and everything. Then you'd just link to the beginning of that blog from your index page.

But the way the archives work is like this...

Your index page will display x number of the past entries, starting with the newest, or x number of days entries. You can set it up however you want. If you click on the "permanent" link for that entry, you'll be taken to that entries individual archive page where only that entry is displayed. You can also have archives by day, month, year, and category.

thanks bunches