Should I use Web designer or Wordpress for my site?

[slast]

Hi, some advice needed please!

I’ve used Xara products for decades (starting with Wordwise!) and built a small business site about 20 years ago with a Xara website building product. However it became apparent after a couple of years that for various reasons the business actually needed a CMS site and it was changed by the IT people we brought in to run on Drupal 7 as it needed multiple levels of client access to different restricted confidential content. I became reasonably competent with Drupal at that time and subsequently set up a personal site about 10 years ago for a totally different subject at www.picma.info .

I no longer have much involvement with the company which now uses Wordpress anyway. I no longer want to use Drupal for my picma.info site as its upgrades (D7-8-9-10) have made it too heavyweight for my needs. I'm someone who just needs a working site and is not a programmer or designer, and I have been recommended to switch to WordPress, although that seems set up to make it easy initially for bloggers. However as I am familiar with the XARA interface etc I would like some advice as to whether in fact Web Designer will actually do what I want without such a big learning curve .

My site is mostly text pages with images, and that’s obviously not an issue, but I do need the ability to create pages with forms that I can fill in which can then be searched, and have a forum facility. I’ve just downloaded the trial but most of the more sophisticated facilities seem to need me to buy the whole package before I can try them. Also I don’t want to spend a lot of time learning yet another package if I subsequently find it doesn’t do what I could more easily achieve if I just dived into learning WordPress. If anyone has any advice and can look at my picma.info site which has the functions I want to reproduce, I’d be extremely grateful!
Steve

[RKissane]

Xara does not have the ability to do a forum and neither would Wordpress. You would have to have a forum software package for that, that you would then link to from your site.

As far as what you currently have on your site, this could be easily done in Xara. If you plan on adding a lot more content to your site, then in the long run Wordpress may be a better option.

As far as forms, I am not following how you want to use them. You can adapt several form widgets for use with Xara but depending on how you are trying to use them they may not work. I think of a form as the ability for an user to enter information into it and then this information is sent to you. It almost sounds like you want a database that can be searched and looked at. If this is the case then someone else would have to respond on the best way to accomplish this.

Ray

[slast]

Thanks Ray, that's very helpful. Since you've obviously looked at the site, what I would be adding is not significantly more text pages, but I would need to add more to the list of event reports (accident summaries). When I create these in Drupal, each is a content type item (form) with about 25 fields on it, with two of them being substantial text fields, and with links in them to other files which would be on the site as separate .PDF files. Some of these PDFs are very big (200 or more pages) as they are final accident reports from various countries. Others are also vrey big as they are research documents. So yes that bit is a database I guess. The forum aspect is less important to be honest, not many people are that interested in the subject!

[Acorn]

@slast, Steve, it is great to be able to view a serious website.
It is Drupal 7 generated but a lot could be ported into a Xara design.

The issues that I have noted:

• Xara has no word search mechanism - clearly this is an important aspect for PicMA to be of use (?q=search/..)
• PiCMA also uses query expressions in the URL string - ?q=content/..
• Your current Forum link fails - Xara has no Forum capability.
• Xara has no User Management for usernames & passwords.
• PicMA is using an Adaptive presentation - Xara is Responsive.
• It is unclear what you need in the way of "forms" - I have taken this to be the structured data at the bottom of several articles.

The main lack of PicMA seems to be one of Citation. I personally would expect to see the source material lodged in some global aviation repository that was publicly accessible.

I tried a web search for 'site:http://www.picma.info/ attitude' and got all of one Hit.
Your current Drupal search returns 16 Hits.
The lack of Hits in the first is down to your site being a CMS and the pages are not directly available.
In Xara, I would use an HTML table approach with Datatables.js with columns for your structured data and other columns for Title, Keywords, Citation, Full Description.
This would be best as a standalone page, still part of your site for advanced, detailed searches.
Plainer on-page searches could be met by Keyword & Title wildcard selection of a drop-down form.

I assume the Forum access requires login credentials as it is not anonymous.
I would aim for a standalone Forum for this and not add it to the Xara site directly.

You have around 150 articles.
I would publish these as separate sub-sites. They don't have to be Xara ones as they are very basic. a simple HTML template would afford a continuing Adaptive approach.
I might consider them as a MarkDown design instead. Cleaner for searches as well.

You will have as many challenges with WordPress but it comes with User Management and Searches and your articles fit into Posts very well.
Less overhead but more prone to hackers.

Acorn

[slast]

H Acorn, thanks for the reply it's good to have expertise like yours so quickly available!
Taking your issues list:
[*]Xara has no word search mechanism - clearly this is an important aspect for PicMA to be of use (?q=search/..)
Yes word search is very important so that's a major point.

[*]Your current Forum link fails - Xara has no Forum capability.
Lack of a forum is not crtical as I said to Ray above, but would be nice to have.

[*]Xara has no User Management for usernames & passwords.
User management - again and referring to your point about anonymity: I deliberately would not allow anonymous users, my FAQ item about it says "Anonymous forums (such as PPRuNe) provide wide access and often excellent discussion, but are also open to abuse, mischief-making and time-wasters.
The intention of the PicMA site is to promote serious discussion only. All users need to be assured that everyone has some qualification to particpate in discussions." This subject has had exactly that problem on PPrune ("Professional Pilots Rumour Network") which is probably the largest pilot discussion forum. There's been deliberate misinfomation posted and I want any discussion to be honest which requires identification.

[*]PicMA is using an Adaptive presentation - Xara is Responsive.
OK, I will look into that - just had to look up what the difference is!

[*]It is unclear what you need in the way of "forms" - I have taken
this to be the structured data at the bottom of several articles.
Yes, see above reply to Ray

The main lack of PicMA seems to be one of Citation. I personally would expect to see the source material lodged in some global aviation repository that was publicly accessible.
You are quite right: unfortunately, PiCMA.info is my attempt to create the global repository for much of this stuff, as there isn't one anywhere else! Skybrary doesn't have much of it as far as I am aware.
As far as the background documents are concerned one objective in setting the site up was that I realised I had a huge amount of paper documentation from the 60s on, from working on this stuff. Some of it was used then for pilot training. But as those of us who were involved retired and commercial pressure has meant that much training is now very curtailed, most pilots are simply unaware of a lot of background. There is a real danger that the knowledge was simply going to become lost. So I have spent a lot of time either scanning my own paper copies or researching and trying to find digital archive versions and bringing them to one accessible place!
For the accident reports, I try to only include events where I can access an official report, and make a copy available (may be copyright issues here but I'll take the risk).

I tried a web search for 'site:http://www.picma.info/ attitude' and got all of one Hit.
Your current Drupal search returns 16 Hits.
The lack of Hits in the first is down to your site being a CMS and the pages are not directly available.
In Xara, I would use an HTML table approach with Datatables.js with columns for your structured data and other columns for Title, Keywords, Citation, Full Description.
This would be best as a standalone page, still part of your site for advanced, detailed searches.
Plainer on-page searches could be met by Keyword & Title wildcard selection of a drop-down form.

OK, thank you - may have to come back to you regarding that !!

You have around 150 articles. I would publish these as separate sub-sites. They don't have to be Xara ones as they are very basic. a simple HTML template would afford a continuing Adaptive approach.
I might consider them as a MarkDown design instead. Cleaner for searches as well. Sorry, don't understand "markdown design" ??

You will have as many challenges with WordPress but it comes with User Management and Searches and your articles fit into Posts very well.
Less overhead but more prone to hackers.

Acorn[/QUOTE]
Thank you!
Steve

[Acorn]

MarkDown

Acorn

[lex]

Hello,

As a good Wordpress alternative with an easier admin side, I would suggest Dotclear (https://dotclear.org/). It has a capable forum-building plugin Agora (https://plugins.dotaddict.org/dc2/details/agora). As Dotclear is originally a French invention, some French may be required for setting up advanced options.

[Acorn]

Hello
As a good Wordpress alternative with an easier admin side, I would suggest Dotclear (https://dotclear.org/). It has a capable forum-building plugin Agora (https://plugins.dotaddict.org/dc2/details/agora). As Dotclear is originally a French invention, some French may be required for setting up advanced options.

lex, thank you for the Link. From the documentation, i cannot see what Search operates on. Is it whole word, tag or other?

@steve, if I were going for a CMS route, I would look at Datenstrom Yellow - https://datenstrom.se/yellow/ - and, yes, it uses MarkDown: https://datenstrom.se/yellow/.
You would have Adaptive, Wiki and Blog. The one thing I have not tried much is its User Management.
It comes with a host of PHP utilities so you can tailor easily.

Acorn

[behzad]

Wordpress has millions of support/plugins and resources. Xara has zilch. Xara is good for simple non database websites.

[DanFelix]

"Xara has no word search mechanism - clearly this is an important aspect for PicMA to be of use (?q=search/..)"

Isn't search a browser feature? Is this a search of a page or the entire site? Just want to be clear I understand. Thanks.