I first purchased Website Publisher around 2005 when it was still called Article Live. I bought this script when I was still very blind to open source software. I thought the best scripts were commercial ones. I found out later on that the cost of a script has very little to do with how good it is or how well it has been developed. Website Publisher turns out to be one of the commercial scripts that has been consistently developed and offers excellent support.
The script has a robust back end with the ability to create multiple groups while assigning a number of different permission levels. You can create blogs, news stories, or articles. I like the flexibility of the articles because you can post full stories or excerpts with linked titles to the full story. Attachments can be added (if permissible) to articles and you can also link together multiple pages to create a larger series of articles.
Adsense integration is a snap with a place to input your publisher ID. If you decided to share revenue with other authors, there’s an option to let writers place their publisher ID too. There’s also a dozen or so graphical images of where to place your Adsense ads. If you’ve read some of my other posts, you’ll know that being able to easily monetize my websites ranks high on my list, and Website Publisher makes it beyond simple.
Creating categories and sub-categories is a snap, and creating static website pages is easier than posting an article. On my Website Publisher site, I chose to create a nice nested FAQ with illustrated help pages that came out great. Users can leave comments on articles and there’s a built in contact form as well. There’s a simple logo upload page, statistics, logs, a number of standard themes, the ability to email users, database backup tools, and a lot more.
This is an extremely simple yet powerful piece of software to run your news related content site. If you want to cut the learning curve in half from some of the other content management systems out there, this is your script. I still think open source is great, but if you’re going to buy a script, this one is worth every penny.
One more thing worth noting is that after my initial support ran out, I purchased another license for a different site and both of my website licenses were upgraded to the latest edition. I thought this was great because there were a lot more features in the newer version. Currently my sites are now a revision behind again because it looks like there’s even more great features stuffed into this script. If you can’t find what you’re looking for in the open source field, be sure to check out this script.