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Ask HN: What's the best cms for a grandma?

4 points by isaiahg ↗ HN
So I promised I'd make a website for my mother. I did that and created a very basic wordpress site for her to blog on and talk about her interests. The problem is she doesn't like wordpress and really it's way more advanced than she needs and I think that's where the problem lies. It doesn't help that I'm not super versed in PHP.

Now if I were to make a website for myself I'd probably use a static website generator or django. But I can't possibly expect that she'd be able to use these without my constant help. While she's reasonably tech savy for her age, she's still in her 60's. And I can't set her up with something like squarspace since she can just barely afford a shared server on her retirement income.

So now I'm looking for something that I can set her up with that can meet some basic requirements. Let me install it quickly and get a theme going in twig or some other theming language and provide a basic portal for her to log in and make blog posts/add pages and nothing else. I've been searching but I'm having trouble finding something that simple with documentation to back it up. So I thought I'd ask here.

What CMS would you recommend to a grandma?

6 comments

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napolux
Why not WordPress? If you choose WP.org you can also limit her role as a writer so she won't mess up with configuration.

Otherwise go for WP.com which has the new interface (even simpler IMHO) and it's free if she don't want to pay for the domain (2.33€/2.86$/month right now).

UX is so simple she won't have any problem IMHO.

wheresvic1
There's blogger that is absolutely free.

You can also try ghost - if you're willing to self-host it, it will cost you $5/mo. for the cheapest cloud VM @ digitalocean or whatever)

There's also medium but I actually find their interface difficult to read in, heh.

cimmanom
There are a handful of desktop CMSes (at least for Mac) that will generate static sites or even publish to a remote Wordpress site. Maybe one of those will be more user friendly for her.