Considering an Unusual Setup for Blog...

[Brandon Luhring]

Hey guys, I'm hoping someone may know of a product that would be ideal for the situation I'm dealing with.

I know you'll be asking "why" but for brevity in this first question, I'll avoid the details of how we've ended up were we are at the moment.


I'm wondering if there is a simple and basic online product out there that can run the admin and management of blog posts -- and only that. The only non-admin access to the data being an API or RSS/ATOM/XML feed. So the management system is not going to have any display pages of its own. No special features needed...admin input of title, date, author, and content is all that is really needed.

With the situation I'm in, it would be great to send them to a 3rd party site to add/edit/delete blog posts, then on their (junky) website put in just a little server-side code to pull data from the 3rd party service and display within a page. Would just need to grab a feed of posts for paging the list, and then ability to grab a single post by ID number.

Anyone familiar with a service like this? I know it's a long shot.

Thanks,
Brandon

[ralph.m]

I'd say a lot of CMSes could probably do that. A simple option might be to use something like Perch. You load that software onto the server, and provide a simple admin page where they could enter data into predefined fields that could either feed straight onto a blog page or be sent to an RSS feed or similar to be pulled into the blog page. Or you could just install WordPress in a subdirectory of the site and use it as a simple blog page. That would be easy too.

[awasson]

Couldn't you also use something like Blogger or WordPress.com for authoring the posts and then grab the RSS feed with a snippet of PHP and format it for the page on the junky site? I don't know if blogger or WordPress.com provide full XML feeds of blog entries but it was the first thing that came to mind.

Failing that, as ralph_m suggested you could set up a simple blog in a subdirectory, style it to suit the junky site and add it to the navigation.

* I did something like the above idea a number of years ago and eventually just got rid of the static site and moved everything into the CMS.

[Brandon Luhring]

Thanks for the replies guys!

I wish it was as simple as installing Wordpress into a subdirectory. Unfortunately the server is a Windows server, and there's some pushback on installing PHP on the machine.

Using Blogger or WordPress.com could work if they have a full feed, but then it also gets published on that "site" as well, which ends up with redundant content out on the web, which I'd rather not have.

Was hoping someone knew of a service that lacked the "front end" and just took care of the data.

Thanks again!
Brandon