If you have multiples sites and can answer “yes” to more than one select the answer that applies to the majority of your sites. Your preference so to speak.
Out of 15 votes so far 72% of you say you have a blog. Are you running a “stock” blog or do you have a “tool” to incorporate “stacks” into you blog?
I’m not really sure what your question is regarding “stock” vs. “tool”. At any rate I use Armadillo and love it.
I am also using Armadillo for my blog.
By “tool” I mean anything that adds functionality/options etc to the stock blog page. I love Stacks so much I’m giving up my blog and going with all stacks pages.
Well Armadillo adds a whole bunch of value to any stacks page: be it blog pages or solo content areas.
Understood. But my focus here really is non-CMS. I’ve always assumed that most people run Stacks pages to get 800+ add ons benefit. You can’t really do much with a standard blog unless you “stackify” it somehow. I’m not surprised that almost 50% of RapidWeavers say they have all Stacks websites. Right now I’m running a “pseudo-blog” - It looks somewhat like my old blog… but it’s hand made with Stacks to look like my old Blog. I’m working on changing to a new responsive them and at that point I’m leaving the blog “look” - but conversion isn’t easy when you have almost 700 pages to convert to stacks pages.
I use blog pages with the rw blog plugin.
As i changed to foundation some time ago and so only may use stack pages, i integrate them with pluskit and the ©import function.
A cms based blog is not necessary for me, so Amardillo or TotalCMS make no sense for me at all.
I would be interested in a stack to integrate a blog like tumblr or something similar, if features like tags, categories or “click here to read more” would be implemented.
Stock blog with PlusKit and Houdini to flesh out the sidebar and footer
… okay, but it would have been useful if you stated that up front (that you focus was non-CMS). It certainly wasn’t clear based on how you phrased your questions originally.
That aside, why are you looking for a non-CMS solution? Or, put differently, what’s your end game? If it’s to create an efficient, seamless blog area then there’s no reason to exclude any potential solution (CMS or not). If you simply have a lot of time and you want to play around with ideas then that’s another thing all together.
BTW converting 700 blog posts to RW pages is likely not only going to be a long process, but also a nightmare. (Could be wrong, but I would never encourage someone to go down that path.) There are all sorts of things that blog-products do that aren’t easily/automatically done by creating single stacks pages. In the end I use Armadillo not because it’s a CMS solution, but because it’s the most flexible and efficient way for me to create the kind of blog experience I want to have. And it takes advantage of much of the flexibility of Stacks. It’s not the only solution, but you definitely don’t want to be creating a 700-page inteconnected blog area (categories, tags, search, comments and much more) without a great helper product.
Hi Mathew…
Everyone is welcome to talk CMS if you want… I’m sorry I was not clear. I am not looking for a CMS solution. Sorry about the poor wording. I am an inquisitive type guy and I just thought it would be interesting to get a very rough picture of blog users and stacks users since they kind of go in different directions.
Your statement about a blog is a good one: There are all sorts of things that blog-products do that aren't easily/automatically done by creating single stacks pages. That’s true… but I don’t want a blog… I want stacks pages… I’ve worked this blog for three years now and I’ll miss nothing about it when my blog is gone. This isn’t a blogging site. It is a site full or 1700 reports. Each one is it’s own entity. The person who ran the site before me setup the blog when he should have setup individual pages. We don’t even run the categories or dates archives… they are turned off. The articles are listed alphabetically on an index page made with sitemap plus.
Again, no end end game… just asking others some general questions to better understand the community…
Thanks
Greg: Aha, that makes things MUCH clearer! Thanks for the explanation. You’ve got a big job ahead of you but it can be done slowly step by step. Stacks is beautfiul. Depending on the content of each topic you’ll be able to supplement/amplify in all sorts of interesting ways.
I guess one of the bigger challenges is how to make explicit to users where/what the various topics are. Because of that I can understand how the person before you took a blogging approach. But I also understand it may not be the best solution for you all.
How are you planning on having people find the various topics/reports? That may be an interesting challenge and may require the usage of some inventive stacks!
Ha… I didn’t explain well again! I already have a number of stacks pages, that’s why I want to go all Stacks. Of a 1700 page site 700 are blog pages, a couple hundred Stacks, and plenty of plain ol’ Styled Text pages. Anything new I add is Stacks. As time allows I convert existing “other” pages into stacks pages.
On top of that I’m converting this old site to nice responsive theme. So I’m plenty busy on this antique of a site!
As far as finding things… I have worked very hard at incorporating Zoom Search into the site and weighting everything to return valid search results. I now have our Search working very nicely. So once people find us (mainly through google) our own search tool almost always get them the material they are looking for. The material we have isn’t easily classified so grouping it and classifying it into “groups” is rather difficult. (Except for the obvious like “Store>Books>eBooks”, etc.)
Thanks Mathew!
Got it. Sounds like Zoom search is a wonderful product.
I run a website with the standard blog function of rapidweaver and use a lot op stacks. I consider to switch to Joe Workman’s new blog stack, because I miss SEO tools in the blog pages of rapidweaver.