Web Authoring Tool Advice

In terms of open source, easy to use/learn:

http://www.mamp.info/en/mamp.html

The abbreviation MAMP stands for: Macintosh, Apache, Mysql and PHP. With just a few mouse-clicks, you can install Apache, PHP and MySQL for Mac OS X! MAMP installs a local server environment in a matter of seconds on your Mac OS X computer, be it PowerBook or iMac. Like similar packages from the Windows- and Linux-world, MAMP comes free of charge.

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You could use your Mac as the local development platform. Completely open source solution using a powerful yet easy to manage MySQL database and of course PHP which is well documented and plenty of help available online and freeware code/classes for RSS, blogging and so forth.

For publishing to the world, purchase web hosting from any company that supports PHP and MySQL, which is nearly all of them - from the low end godaddy.com to the high end Liquid Web VPS's (between $15.00/$60.00 month). I suggest this because it's managed by someone else, does not use your bandwidth, easy web based management these days, and you simply FTP or use the publishing feature of your development software to move the files over. These days even E-Mail and DNS is easily managed online. This is my value conscious answer.

From a perspective of software, I recommend Dreamweaver MX for PHP/MySQL development, but as anyone here will tell ya - a simple text editor or other third party freeware solutions are all over the internet. To get you started on that: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/os-php-ide/index.html

Be sure to visit http://www.php.net and http://phpclasses.org for shareware/freeware open source classes so you don't reinvent the wheel each time you code.

Plenty of graphics software out there for image editing, visit apple.com/downloads for Mac stuff, or if you're into professional image editing get Adobe Photoshop. To get you started on that (beyond iPhoto) visit http://aroundcny.com/technofile/texts/tec082502.html

Get the idea?

I'm being general in my advice, remember there are a million ways to do things, everyone has their own favorite way, and everyone is right! Spend the time to research, I suggest open source because it's easy to learn, less money spent, and plenty of easy to find online resources. By no means is this the "best", the "most powerful", "the most scalable". But it is reliable.

Might want to check out Wordpress which handles blogging across many platforms, and plenty of plugins to extend its basic functionality. People these days also download Drupal (an open source content management system) to setup an entire site, including plugins for Wordpress and RSS and so on.

A great page for test driving CMS's in the open source community: http://www.opensourcecms.com

-jim

tommoran said:

3. Do I need a Macintosh specific server to run this web site?

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Nope, any server will do, though many would advise Unix for security sake. I believe most are Unix anyways, though a Mac server would be very fine as well.

As suggested, a CMS is the easiest way to go, otherwise you'll be paying big money to have someone build you something. I also hope you realize how big of a project you're taking on. It's not just technology, but legal issues can arise as well. Just continue to research and thread cautiously.