[thelist] Press release - Database appropriate?

Burhan Khalid thelist at meidomus.com
Wed Feb 23 00:40:35 CST 2005


Pringle, Ron wrote:
> I manage my city's website and have to deal with manually recieving,
> formatting and posting a great deal of press releases from various
> departments.
> 
> I want all the press releases to follow a templated format and would prefer
> to allow the various departments to file their press releases electronically
> without my having to be involved.
> 
> Considering the amount of text in an average press release, would this be a
> proper and effective place to use a database to store them by means of form
> submission?
> 
> Or is there some other way I'm overlooking, that would take a form
> submission and output an HTML page?

In addition to the CMS recommendations, I can also recommend 
CivicSpace[1] (a CMS system based on Drupal[2]).  Its specifically 
designed for community-focused websites, and has specific modules (such 
as survey forms, volunteering, etc.) that you might find useful in the 
future.

Common advantages of CMS-like systems include templates for submissions, 
moderation of submissions, scheduled publishing (type it in now, have it 
go live on a later date) and archiving.  Any decent CMS product will 
have these, and many blogging scripts have similar functions.

I haven't had much experience with WordPress, but I can tell you that 
CivicSpace is not that difficult to setup, probably takes under 3 minutes.

[1] http://www.civicspacelabs.org/
[2] http://www.drupal.org/


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