Webpage News Post software

[Alynn]

I've been thinking about adding a news post to the front end of my website, basically the first thing the user sees when navigating to my site. But at the same time I'd like it to be flexable enough that if I wanted I could link to it from other areas of the site to different types of new posts.

For instance, The front page would display general news anouncements. On another part of the site, they can click a link to see all the progress news posts about various game/software updates that I'm doing. And in another part of the site they can view all my ranting and raving about various random topics. Lastly I would like the formatting to be easily ediable with CSS, and by easy I mean I'd like to be documented enough so that I know exactly what I'm changing so I don't have to change something and reload a million times to get it to look correct.

I know some of you use these things, so I was wondering what do you use and why, and would it work for what I am wanting? I already created the mySQL database on my site so I just need to install the news software and go from there.

These are the easiest for me to install (since my host actually does the installation for me, I just tell it where to go and what database to use)
WordPress
b2evolution
Nucleus
Serendipity
PixelPost

PixelPost is more for photoblogs so it probably won't do what I want... WordPress, with it's cataglory feature may help me seperate post types for different parts of the site, but I don't know about it's ease of editing...

So anyway of those, which do you use, and will it work for what I want?

[Toefur]

WordPress seems to be the most popular these days. I use it myself and it -is- ultra-customisable, but it's a bitch to do much customisation with unless you're a mega CSS pro.

[Evil]

Yeah, but word press has thousands of templates. If you find the one right for your page, changing hex colors and stuff is pretty basic.

[Alynn]

The main thing I'm looking for would be something like....

Main news page (front page)

General annoucements so on so forth...

Xenoflan game page - progress reports, on just that game...

I'd like to use the same software in one database for both.... with one access point that I can just go in Make a news post, cataglorize it, and it will show up on the correct page...

What I'm probably looking for is a cataglory filter, one that I will remove from the newspost pages itself so that depending on where they come from, it will apply the appropriate filter showing them only the info I want from them...

I'll have to research some more, so if anyone else has had personal experience with this sort of thing please post.

[Vince Twelve]

I use WordPress on my games wepgage.  I love it.

I can customize it however I like, and the categories are easy to manage.  You can keep some news posts in the "general" section and then have some in more specific game related categories which you can link to from wherever.

For example, here is a link to all the posts about Erin's Spooks:

http://xiigames.com/category/spooks/

The look is easy to customize.  I started with a base template (that looked nothing like mine, but had the basic elements that I wanted) and then worked it out to what you see there which I'm quite happy with.

Let me know if you have any other questions I might be able to answer.