I’m looking for blog software with the following features:
[ul]
[li]Can register hundreds of authors.[/li][li]Has allow comments / prohibit comments switch for each article.[/li][li]Administrators and self same author can delete and edit authors stuff, not other authors.[/li][li]Admin moderates registration of authors. (We’re gonna charge 'em)[/li][li]Admin moderates and edits all submitted content.[/li][li]Multiple categories (for each article)[/li][li]Navigation by author name[/li][li]Easy to manage. Wannabe geeks (not real ones) have to install and manage the site.[/li][/ul]
I dunno if it will do everything you want, but here’s a blog post I read recently about Blogging software. Looking at the URL, you’ll see that it’s hosted at Blog Harbor. Their info about the software is here.
I’m pretty sure Wordpress offers most of the functionality you ask for (the one I’m not sure of is the “navigate by author”), but I wouldn’t be surprised if charging people to join your Wordpress community would be in some way a violation of the ToS.
Assuming you can do what you want, I think what you need is your own site, and contract for the software. Getting web space isn’t hard, nor is it that expensive. That way you can use it as you like, so long as the software does what you want. ISTM that’s the only way you’ll be able to have the degree of control you want.
Last year I looked and looked at software and sites. IIRC, nobody else but Blogware (what Blog Harbor uses) offers a large number of categories. Things may have changed in the meantime, but there’s not that much incentive for developers to offer tons of categories, as the vast majority of blogs are limited in subject matter (or just have it all together, like a journal) - that’s why I gave you the link to one that has a bunch of topics - and categorizes them. By my count, that blogger has 13 categories, some of which are nested, something else that most of the software packages don’t seem to offer. I dunno about any other software, but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen Blog Harbor users with posts in multiple categories.
Maybe what you need to do is google for blogging software, and then look at everybody’s FAQs. Just to get you started, here’s the FAQ for Blogware. That’s what I’d do, and then I’d contact the software owners/developers with that bullet list.
Of course, there are packages like Greymatter that are open source, and you can modify to your heart’s content to add this or that feature. However, you said that you’re “wannabe geeks (not real ones)” which makes that a problem.
here’s the FAQ for