Buying a custom CMS, what to ask for?

[jbiggs77]

As some of you may recall, a few months ago I was on here asking about building my own PHP based CMS. Shortly after that post, I was offered and accepted a full-time IT position and didn't really have the time to follow through with my plans.

Now that I am in the swing of things with the new job, I am ready to start rolling out some sites. I also now have some capital to work with and am planning on hiring someone (perhaps from here or sitepoint, if anyone is interested) to create a basic CMS for me.

What features/functionality should I specify I want. I want to be able to use this basic CMS for all my sites, adding extra modules where necessary. Also, what do you think a fair price would be for what I am asking for? Any other advice, things to look for?

[Chris]

Search engine friendliness is key.

My requirements when building the CMS for this site were:

Search engine friendliness
the ability to hide articles
the ability to have different article types
article pagination
the ability to include descriptive text on category pages
simple text navigation

[jbiggs77]

Search engine friendly URL's are definitely on my list. What do you mean by the ability to have different types of articles? How long would it have taken you to create such a CMS if you would have started from stratch? I assume you modifed the code from your other sites to create this one.

[chromate]

Depends what you mean by CMS. Do you want to be able to produce content *in* the CMS? Or just structure the site using the CMS?

If you want to be able to create content in the CMS then it's tricky, as you need a way of easily manipulating text styles, creating tables etc. Sitepoint's Editize does this. There's also HTMLEditBox which is MUCH cheaper, but it used to be that you had to be using IE to take advantage of the active-x controls. Editize is platform platform independent. So if you're going to offer this feature, try and make it as platform independent as possible. A lot of hard work though.

[jbiggs77]

Just structure the site. I don't need anything fancy.

[Snowballer]

How about the ability to skin the layout of the site easily withought having to dig into the PHP code etc? Templating mechanism is what is called hehe.

[Todd W]

To build a CMS to be able to use for "all" your sites will be somewhat difficult and a long task. Since each site will most likely be a littler different than the previous one the needs will be as well. I use a "group" of CMS functions I made in php for my sites but each site I re-arrange differently, and add/subtract features.

I like:
-Unlimited Categories (Sub-categories too)
-Category/Sub-Cat descriptions
-Cat/Sub-Cat Optionals
--Pictures
--Ads [this way you can offer/post ads specific to a certain topic]
--Sorting Option
-Date Posted under Article (optional)
-Able to re-arrange/move categories easily
-Multi-User Levels (allow users access to add articles in only 1 category or as many as you choose)
-Search Engine Friendly of course

I like "Most Recent..." and "Top Viewed..." on the homepage.

As far as layout goes it changes site to site. I like to put in php includes where I think ads may work or maybe site-wide announchements. (Header, Mid, Right, Left, Bottom, Footer)

When adding articles I use a checkbox with a default of "Viewable" so if I uncheck it the article is no longer shown on the site but is still stored in the database, and can be edited in the future to be made viewable again.

I track article pageviews to not only show top articles but to keep track of pages that perform in terms of advertising.

Basically each time I need a new CMS I need a new feature in the CMs for the site so that gets added.

Also, depending on your site a "credit" field/option may be a nice thing to add.

At the end of the articles maybe randomly list ~3 other articles in that category.

Sorry the ideas are not organized better but I just wrote them out as they came to me. :)

[Chris]

Search engine friendly URL's are definitely on my list. What do you mean by the ability to have different types of articles? How long would it have taken you to create such a CMS if you would have started from stratch? I assume you modifed the code from your other sites to create this one.
Different types of articles.... reviews/tutorials/tips all arranged differently.

I think this site took me about a month, but most of it was new code.

[Snowballer]

The top viewed is a good idea, but I find that it only works well when a site is already established, otherwise you won't really get meaningfull results.

[Todd W]

The top viewed is a good idea, but I find that it only works well when a site is already established, otherwise you won't really get meaningfull results.

Make it so that it only shows that section when the views are over 100 for a page? Then if there are none the section wont exist.. This could be another option in your custom CMS :)

[Snowballer]

ToddW,

yeah your right, if you think about it long enough there are ways to make it meaningfull even for small content sites.

the issue is this, say you start of with 1-5 pieces of content. Its going to be pretty worthless having that data on the main page since you have very few content pieces...that is basically what I was getting at.

[Todd W]

ToddW,

yeah your right, if you think about it long enough there are ways to make it meaningfull even for small content sites.

the issue is this, say you start of with 1-5 pieces of content. Its going to be pretty worthless having that data on the main page since you have very few content pieces...that is basically what I was getting at.

Maybe, Maybe not... For a site starting out an article on the homepage may mean the difference from that article's page/url making it into SERPs and not.

Search engines don't always crawl in a couple pages on their first visits so if you link to something from your homepage it may get listed where as something from the homepage to the category page then a link to the article may not.

-Todd

[bassplaya]

- generation of static content for minimizing server load,
- proper linkbuilding
and the thing missed in most apps -- proper handling of HTTP headers (Modified / Expires etc)

and stats/tracking works better being implemented inside site engine

[wrigh_g]

what about Mambo (http://www.mamboserver.com) its free, its great and highly customisable. It also has a large community which are always developing modules for it?

[Emancipator]

one feature im building into my cms system which is a MUST in my opinion is spellcheck... god my spelling is horrible :) Its easy to do and is a MUST!

[bassplaya]

Emancipator, if u're Firefox user, u can easily install spellcheck extension (check FF extensions site)

[Emancipator]

yeah that unfortunately doesnt help the writers for my site :) Sides I want my CMs system to have all the greatest whistles.. lol.. and i hate how firefox runs like ****e on my laptop.

[deronsizemore]

I guess I'm wrong in what I understood a CMS to be. I thought it was just something you set up with a site to allow easier updating. You specify sections and what not and you can just go in and update text, pictures, links, etc, without messing with large amounts of code? In a post earlier one member said he needed his CMS to do this: Unlimited Categories, Category/Sub-Cat descriptions, Cat/Sub-Cat Optionals, Sorting Option. Is this just an advanced CMS or is my perception of a CMS off?

[chromate]

No, your understanding is correct. That's just a more advanced CMS system that would deal with, not only the content, but also how the content is organised (categories / sub-categories etc).