CMS or Blog?

[kgaines]

So, I've recently taken it upon myself to abandon my abuse of frontpage. A couple years ago I started messing around with open source CMS's like phpNuke, Xoops and a few others while I was trying to make a place for my everquest guild.

Now my needs are different. I have a family website that I used mainly for pictures, but also had a link to my blog (at myspace and xanga).

I would like to expand the use of my website to my whole family. I would still like a blog, but I also want a gallery and forums. The gallery part is what seems to be tricky. I've tried Coppermine and Gallery2, and they are "ok" but they are a bit clunky, and trying to bridge them with Joomla, for example, has proven to be difficult. I have 100's of photo's to upload, and it is important to me to be able to do it quickly, and not have to go through too much to get them.

Is there something out there I am missing? I want three things from my website:

1) Blog
2) Gallery
3) Forums

And I want my family and friends to only have to register once to access all three.

All the CMS's I've been trying seem to have a lot of module installing necessary. I would like this to be pretty simple.

Thanks for the help :)

~Kerith

[JPnyc]

While I suppose I could always be wrong, but I'm not aware of any implementation of what you're talking about that is simple. We do something similar to what you're talking about on http://thecreativeforum.com/forum/index.php and it is anything but simple.

[Jick]

You could use WordPress (http://www.wordpress.org/) for your Blog and from what I understand it can be made to integrate with bbPress (http://www.bbpress.org/) (simple forum software) fairly easily. As for the gallery, I believe there are several plugins floating around for WordPress that will do just that. I would suggest searching Google (http://www.google.com/) for said plugins. I would link you to one but I have not had any experience with any such plugins so I can't really say what would be best for you. Granted, this approach may not be the best if you're planning to have a very large site and/or need lots of features, but it should work just fine otherwise. I hope that helps. :)

EDIT: I forgot to mention that you may want to use WordPress MU (http://mu.wordpress.org/) if you want to have multiple Blogs. That is, IF you decide to use the setup I am talking about. ;)

[kgaines]

Since my post I think I might have lost my mind entirely. I do my hosting at Godaddy.

I switched from a Linux server to a Windows server. I downloaded the Visual Web Developer, and I'm trying to figure out asp.net.

I guess the problem is I feel like I've just been lucky thus far in my creation of websites. I don't know a lot about coding, I don't know CSS, I barely remember HTML. So I suppose I should really just bite the bullet and start to learn the bare bones of all these languages.

I guess I want something intuitive, easy and just happens to meet all my needs. It seems like everything out there now requires plugin's and know how of all these new languages (php and xml). It is all so overwhelming.

I will check in to your suggestions! Thank you for your time!