Need your help/opinions

^whitey^

Hey Guys,

I created the following website a few years back www.csnmc.com. Basically its for an old school club that i'm still involved with.

I used to have the time & interest to maintain the website/message board & photogallery but that is no longer the case.

I found the message board was getting hacked all the time because I was too lazy to keep patching the PhpBB software on the server.

The gallery software also needs to updated every so often but it seems less prone to attack.

The home page and the "logs" page should be updated every two months or so using dreamweaver or whatever but I never get around to it.

Currently i'm paying around 120 a year for domain and hosting (i'm sure I can get cheaper). What would suit me great would be if I could log onto to the website directly from anywhere and update it directly without having to worry about the back-end stuff.

Likewise if I could get a hosted gallery and message board all in the same package that I would not have to constantly patch and keep the backend up to date to avoid getting hacked/spammed e.t.c

Now i've used things like proboards.com in the past but i'd like something that isnt covered with adverts and i'm willing to pay every year for such a service.

Am I making sense here? Does such a thing exist.


Cheers,
Eoin.

I doubt you'll get everything you want as integrated hosted services from one provider. Googling hosted forums returns stuff like http://www.activeboard.com/
For the gallery you could look at a flickr based solution maybe?
The rest of the site could be done from a wordpress blog on wordpress.com.

The problem is - that is 3 different services on 3 different domains, and matching the look and feel of the three components will be hard to do.

If you were willing to use a CMS like Joomla, Drupal or CMS made simple, you'll be able to add gallery and forum modules. Everything will be on the same domain and be skinned with the same template. The problem with that approach is there will be a good bit of setup involved, and you'll still need to manage the updates yourself. Most of the big CMS systems and the relevant modules are fairly easy to update, so it is nothing like the headaches you would have with phpBB when you'd update the core and then have to apply all your mods by editing files.

Hope that helps.

^whitey^

Cheers SBS that does help. I'll take a look at some CMS software. With CMS software is it possible to add/edit content from anywhere without having to edit html and ftp new pages/content ??

Any of the CMSs I mentioned (and many more I didn't) will let you do that. You log into the secure admin area and you can add/edit/delete pages using a WYSIWYG editor such as TinyMCE or FCKeditor (one or both of these is often supplied with the core CMS package).

HandWS LTD

^whitey^ wrote:

Hey Guys,

I created the following website a few years back www.csnmc.com. Basically its for an old school club that i'm still involved with.

I used to have the time & interest to maintain the website/message board & photogallery but that is no longer the case.

I found the message board was getting hacked all the time because I was too lazy to keep patching the PhpBB software on the server.

The gallery software also needs to updated every so often but it seems less prone to attack.

The home page and the "logs" page should be updated every two months or so using dreamweaver or whatever but I never get around to it.

Currently i'm paying around 120 a year for domain and hosting (i'm sure I can get cheaper). What would suit me great would be if I could log onto to the website directly from anywhere and update it directly without having to worry about the back-end stuff.

Likewise if I could get a hosted gallery and message board all in the same package that I would not have to constantly patch and keep the backend up to date to avoid getting hacked/spammed e.t.c

Now i've used things like proboards.com in the past but i'd like something that isnt covered with adverts and i'm willing to pay every year for such a service.

Am I making sense here? Does such a thing exist.


Cheers,
Eoin.

As SBS mentioned a CMS is probably best for you unless you are willing to get the whole thing redesigned for a large fee. CMS is a quick solution. Did you say 120 quick :eek:??

Beside a CMS. Anyone with a hosting control panel can login and update your website from there as the have an online editor available as well similar to dreamweaver but different.