Please Help Me Find a New Platform

I want to migrate my management30.com website to another platform. Ning has disappointed me by being a pain in the usability backside, and by announcing “exciting new changes” in the form of a 500% increase of their monthly price.

Can you help me find a new platform?

Here are the must-have requirements. I won’t consider a platform if it doesn’t have all of these features…

  1. A blog posts feature, allowing me to post articles to the website.
  2. A content pages feature, allowing me to create separate pages.
  3. A comments feature for both blog posts and pages.
  4. A free HTML text feature, that allows me to create page parts with HTML.
  5. A great HTML editor that doesn’t feel like it was built during that last ice age (like the one on Ning).
  6. Custom CSS so that I can design the site in the style I want.
  7. Modern look-and-feel of the platform. I don’t want clunky GUI controls that give me flashbacks to the 90’s.
  8. Good spam control!!
  9. Hosted in the cloud. I don’t want local a installation.
  10. Support for a custom domain, in this case management30.com.

The next list contains the should-haves. If one or two features are lacking, that’s OK. But if too many are lacking, then don’t bother suggesting it to me.

  1. A moderation feature, which enables other people to submit articles (under their name!) and allows me to accept or reject (or edit!) them.
  2. A discussion/forum feature, allowing people to discuss various topics.
  3. A news feed feature, allowing me to publish one or more RSS feeds.
  4. An image upload feature in the HTML editor.
  5. A document upload/attachment feature, so that the site can host PDF’s and other documents.
  6. Good image positioning features, allowing me to place images to the left or right of a blog post/text. (Ning does this badly.)
  7. Integration with Google Analytics.
  8. Social network integration of the comments system with Twitter, Facebook, and others. (Not supported on Ning.)
  9. A membership feature, so that I know which people are interested in/contributors to the website.
  10. Login with Twitter and Facebook, so that people don’t have to register on my site.

And the last ones are the nice-to-haves. I know most system don’t have these. But hey, you can't stop me dreaming…

  1. A groups feature that allows me to create separate groups/pages for reviewers, etc.
  2. Built-in Facebook fanpage integration.
  3. Built-in LinkedIn group integration.
  4. Support for migration of content from Ning.
  5. Preferably, it shouldn’t cost me an arm and a leg.

Thanks for helping me choose!

p.s. I have a very interesting Amazon gift certificate available for you, if you have a really, really good suggestion for me!


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