CMS for my personal web

Question

I’m planning to make a new webpage; It’s a thing I’ve been thinking about some years ago, but I’ve never started. But it’s now or never.

I want to make a platform to discuss themes of my interest, about morality, society, religion, technology, human behavior, physics, gaming, software developing, and a lot of things to come.

I want it to be like this:

• A forum to discuss and share ideas, to communicate with other people without having the constraints of my immediate environment.

• A personal mark of who I am, what I want, my visión of the world, the existence, people, and our role in existence; I plan to let some people in my daily life to know about my web to be able to establish more profound links between people.

Here is a basic mockup; The features I want for my web are:

It has to have the Structure shown in the picture above: A hierarchical tree for categories (tags - the posts will have multiple tags) and themes, search capabilities, multimedia content and so on; Here are the detailed specifications:

• Only one web site: I once had a website that had a main webpage and a forum-like webpage. This has to be all in the same CMS.

• Open-source, well known software: Like wordpress.org or Joomla with the needed plugins, with a huge community behind. I want to learn and I cannot waste my time with “marginal” alternative software.

• Responsive: From phones, tablets, computers…

• Multi language support: For the web itself (menus, interface) and also for the content, with semi-automatic and manual translation services; I’ll write in English, Catalan, Spanish and French.

• Search by title, category, rating, number of answers, and others

• Users will be able to see content without login, but not able to like/dislike, create or modify comments.

• Moderate comments: logged-in users will see their new / edited posts after publishing them, but the other users and not logged-in users will not be able to see them until I, as the admin, approve them.

• Antispam semi-automatic systems

• Content control for multimedia sizes, slang language and some other features.

• Notify settings to users and administrator

• I want to manage the entire web, having a local copy of it, easy and rich backup and restore features and so on. I don’t want a site like wordpress.COM (fully hosted), I want to get my hands dirty and have a full control over my web site.

• Easy WYSIWYG editor: insert multimedia content like videos, music, links, pictures have to be ridiculously easy to do.

• Configurable and programmable: I want to be able to change things at will in the future. I’m a software developer and I know that someday I will need to implement some programming.

• Google friendly: I want it to be compatible with Google Analytics and selective page indexing: I don’t want google to index pages that are not approved or drafts.

• Manage users: ban/approve users…

Answer 1

Go with Wordpress and host it on your own site (not at wordPress.com). Your provider should tell you how to create a MySQL database for it.

The most 'difficult' part may be finding a responsive^* theme that you like. You may have to experiment with several. If you find a good one that is not free, just pay for it. That's much less hassle than insisting on a free one that you like only 90%.

Use the BBPress plugin (not the BBPress standalone software) for your forum (I'm not current on its moderation features, you'll have to check that out).

WP has user management, the Akismet antispam filter, comment approval, categories, automatic updates, languages, etc. Most of what you want can be handled, search through the plugin library if you need more.

A lot of WP stuff can be updated 'on site' but you can still FTP everything in and out. Apart from that, use the BackupWordpress plugin for your backups.

I suggest you start small, i.e. do not implement the forum part until you are familiar with WP and have decided on your theme. And don't forget to read up on WP security before you do anything.

^{* Nowadays that term is used for mobile-friendly, i.e. responding to the different form factors of devices. It used to mean: responding fast. I hate this confusion, why don't 'they' use a better term?}