I’m not a major CMS expert, but I’d say that unless you’re looking to have a major role for community authoring, Drupal or its main multi-user competitors would be overkill. For those environments, it’s great. Obviously, 43f runs it, as does DIY Planner and KnoxViews (two other places in my regular reading).

But for a relatively small number of authors, and limited need for comments, i.e., if you want to just publish, I don’t know how much easier you can get than WordPress. Your blog postings are obviously its core competency, but you can set up separate categorized pages for your “writing samples”. You can get some really clean minimalist themes for it that may fit the bill for a site where you want people to focus on your writing rather than the sidebars. If you’re a CSS weenie, you can get a good starter template from the plaintxt.org folks that you can customize to your heart’s content.

Examples:

• WordPress features
• Example WordPress page that’s not a blog entry, at my work site
• My personal site, entirely run by Wordpress, where the front page isn’t a blog index, and where there’s a faked “blog” subfolder with all the blog entries.
• plaintxt.org, where I got the Barthelme theme for my work site, and the Sandbox theme I customized for my personal site.

Hi mwr,

That’s awesome. Thank you for your help!

I guess one more question: Is A2 a good Web hosting site? Of course, 43folders.com uses it, and I like fantastico. Just was wondering your thoughts on that as well.

Robyn

A2 works fine for me:

• Same overall cost ($8/month after a 20% off coupon) as my previous host

• Many more useful features — I get secure shell, IMAP SSL, and SMTP+TLS; I can put my own subversion repository up in my home directory; and they already had LaTeX installed on the web server

• Much better performance — never had to submit a ticket for “everything that uses SQL is ridiculously slow, and everyone who goes to my site is complaining”

• Much better tech support — what little dealings I’ve had with them has been perfect, and I don’t think they’d say “your site isn’t slow here, have all of you tried clearing your browser cache?”

No idea about Fantastico, since I tend to just install whatever I need from scratch.