Ask HN: News Site Application | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: News Site Application

1 pointf4stjack6 comments

Hello there, A group of my friends want to create a news site and asked me for help. I've looked up for some web apps in google but none of them seems to fit the bill. Do HN users know a web app which provide newssite features out of the box?

Thanks

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What specific news site features are you looking for? Additionally, what toolset skills does the startup team possess?

I have used Liferay in the past and can see how it can be used to create a news site. However it needs Java skills. I am pretty sure products such as Joomla etc. can be used too (though I have not used any of them).

From what I have gathered they want a news slider with images, a place to list articles written by authors, picture gallery and rss feed parsing for automatically getting images and news items from various sources. As for the startup team skills they are not a startup and do not have technical expertise for building a site - I am helping them and because I am working in an IT department I don't have the time to build a site (I mean not in the timescale they would accept).

As for your recommendations I have checked wordpress, joomla and drupal and from what I have seen I felt like they need an immense amount of setup time to create a workable news site. There are themes which tout they provide this kind of functionality but I can't say "shucks, guys I don't know whether this will work but you have to pay this amount of dollars for an experiment".

Thanks for your comment by the way.

You are right in that it requires familiarity with the underlying toolset to create the site and involves some amount of effort.

Check out the wordpress templates.

http://wp.smashingmagazine.com/2012/05/23/best-wordpress-the...

Good luck.

I think newscloud is a good place to start. http://communitystarter.org/

Thank you checking it.

edit: I have checked it and it seems that they do not give prices in their site, nor a demo version to check whether my team can use it.

Thanks anyway.

Have you seen refinerycms? http://refinerycms.com/

From what I gather in your other comments this team wants to post their own news stories, refinery has engines built specifically for this. If you know just a little rails you can set them up nicely and fast with refinery.

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