Web question and network question

My apologies for two completely unrelated questions:

First: I'm a huge Wordpress fan, and I prefer it as a blogging platform to all the others I've come across. But I was wondering if anyone knew of equally good software for non-blogs. The fact is, if I try to shoehorn Wordpress into a site with nothing but static pages, it becomes fairly apparent that it wasn't designed with that in mind, so I start forcing the software to do something for which it wasn't intended. I've tried Drupal and a couple other CMS systems in the past, and they've always seemed like a little too much for what I need. I'd love something with the ease of use of Wordpress. Any ideas?

Second: Here's the situation: my church has a horribly make-shift network, so the only option at the moment is to do wireless. Right now they have an Airport Extreme doing the routing and wireless, but the signal doesn't go very far. What I'd like to do is to place WRT54GL APs around to the furthest wired spots. My question is, is it possible to make them all the same SSID and password, and fool computers into thinking it's all the same network? Sorry, I'm not really well-read on this part of wireless networking. If anyone has a good online resource for information on this topic, I'd really appreciate that too.

Thanks!

Second:
Yeah, it's called "roaming" and it's more-or-less seamless. Well, okay, it has a small seam, but you don't really need to do much.

Your access points should have the same authentication configured and should be on separate channels. (As a reminder, you should really only use channels 1, 6, and 11.) All modern (and perhaps all always) cards and drivers will handle moving from one AP to the other.

If you're running DHCP, you should probably have it run on a system separate from the APs, or, if that's not possible, run it on only one of the APs and make sure that it responds to both the wired and wireless segments.

You can use WDS to bridge multiple APs together without having to run a physical cable between them. It will totally kill the throughput however since WiFi is half duplex. Each hop you add will halve the available capacity. Thats after the reductions caused by distance as well.

Range extenders are basically very small APs doing WDS back to the main AP.

Mambo? Just don't use PHPNuke.

Thanks Bitt, that's exactly what I was hoping. So if these access points will be in a relatively straight line, I could just go from channel 1 to 6 to 11 and then start over again if I needed a fourth one?

Trevor: yeah, I quickly ruled out WDS for that reason. Tethering the APs won't be too much of a problem. And those range extenders are pure evil. I've tried installing them for a few people, and fortunately I've finally found the exact settings they want in order to work, but I still abhor them.

I'll take another look at Mambo. I tried Joomla once and it was simply too much. Far more powerful than necessary, and the menu system was labyrinthine. I'll take another peek at Mambo, though.

Does anyone know of a CMS that doesn't worry about community? I don't need user accounts or comments or anything like that. Mainly, my issue is that I don't have enough time to devote to coding my site from scratch, and I don't have a need to build a community for this site. I just need to be able to easily add/edit content.

Thats assuming that nobody nearby has any WiFi at all. If you're going to have that many APs in a small area then you're going to have interference.


Use a regular blog/CMS but just disable comments + logging in and edit the template so you don't even see those options?

Shouldn't be too much of a problem. The closest houses are about 200 feet away, and the current wireless can't reach half that distance (and I can't detect any signals nearby either).


I'd have to investigate how well that works for the other CMS options, but that's one of the ways I was talking about shoehorning Wordpress into a static environment. For example: you can disable comments, but you're left with a fairly large "comments are disable for this page" message. It's also possible to make the first page you come to one of the static pages instead of the blog, but it feels more like a kluge than a feature.

Yup. I've done it before, and other than the fact that the APs I happened to be using were awful (they would just drop connections for no reason -- which they still did when I only had a single one running), it worked just fine.