I am currently building a family website. Here are some requirements:

1. services will be based on existing free software (I don’t have time to develop a complete solution)
2. first service provided: a news service (I don’t know if it will be a forum or a shared blog)
3. second service provided: a photo gallery
4. all this should be on a shared host server (so it should work with PHP safe mode enabled ; I don’t have time to maintain a dedicated server)
5. all this will allow everyone in the family to add elements, it will need very little maintenance and it should also be fast
6. an e-mail address will be provided to everyone (all serious providers give e-mail addresses)

Although I am running WordPress for this blog, although a friend of mine is running DotClear, I am tempted to try b2evolution (blog), TextPattern (blog and more) or even Vanilla (forum) for the first service (blog). What is interesting is that these tools are localized in French, they allow multiple author to write and, finally, they have an anti-spam service “out-of-the-box”.

For the second service (photo gallery), I am tempted to use either LinPHA, PhpWebGallery or singapore.

I’ll dig a little bit more for more information … I’ll try to finish all this before Monday.

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