A little help ... please!

[VanillaOrchids]

I have been looking everywhere for information on how to have people post comments for each news announcement that I may put up on my site. For example, you can see what I mean by visiting MuggleNet (http://www.mugglenet.com/) . I have seen a place that offered this service from their servers but they are currently not offering it anymore and I don't feel like waiting for them to offer it again.

Can anyone help me? I know some are done through PHP but I don't know much about PHP so I would need a lot of explaining before I could get it through my thick head. :D

Pam

[SmackDaddy]

I use the php news script from http://fusionphp.net .... it's in action here:

http://www.osso.org/news.php -- people can then post comments on the news that is posted......

[g808]

you probably want a CMS (content management system). a resource was posted by thinkaholic in this thread (http://forums.insiderhosting.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=808)

http://www.websoup.org/resources/links.php?cat=11

here are some commenting systems:
http://www.websoup.org/resources/links.php?cat=12

[VanillaOrchids]

Thank you SmackDaddy and g808, I will check out all the links!!

[Ravedesigns]

The free version of pMachine would let you create a blog that you could post news to and users could comment on. Take a look at http://www.pmachine.com

All the best,

Steve

[g808]

That CMS list in the link of my previous message is long. Here are some commonly used CMS and ones that I like:

- Movable Type (very popular with a lot of support, but con is that it creates a static page for every entry; must rebuild)

- B2 (installer is in CPanel, PHP/MySQL based)

- pMachine (PHP/MySQL based)

- TextPattern (http://www.textpattern.com; still in beta; PHP/MySQL-based)

[VanillaOrchids]

Thank you all for the links and recommendations. I checked out the links and followed more links and even installed the blog that is in the control panel (which I didn't even know was there) but haven't found something that I think will work yet. Mainly because I have 4 seperate sections to my site and plan to add a fifth very soon and so basically it appears as if I would need 5 seperate blogs in order to post news in the appropriate section(s).

But I will keep looking through the links til I figure out a way of doing it or I'll give up on the idea. It's not a big deal, I suppose. I just really liked the idea.

Well, thanks again to all who helped.

[VanillaOrchids]

I continued to look through the links and I found one that I can use. It's remotely hosted and doesn't require you to be using a blog, which is actually good (even though after looking through the blog links I did like them). So, THANK YOU to everyone who helped.

[g808]

out of curiosity...which did you settle one?

[VanillaOrchids]

I chose http://www.enetation.co.uk/
For some reason though, today it's not working right for me. I haven't uploaded it yet but just the tests I do from the copy on my hard drive, it doesn't want to load the comment box.

Just when I think I've found something perfect, something always goes wrong. :(

[VanillaOrchids]

Seems as though the reason the comment box wouldn't load properly was because of one of the templates I chose to use. I changed the template and it works just fine now.
Must have been a problem in the template code.

[VanillaOrchids]

Well, after doing a test post using enetation I found I didn't like it because it doesn't appear as if it adds your comments. It does though, you just don't realize it. Well, until you close the comment window and open it again. And I figured that if people were to try to leave comments they may think that it didn't work and continue to hit the submit button ... filling the comment area up with the same comment over and over again. So, I switched to BackBlog instead. Allows me to do the same thing as enetation only when you hit submit, your comment loads right before your eyes ... so you know it works. :D

Anyway, the trick now is getting people to use it. LOL

THANKS AGAIN for all the help!