can anyone recommend a cms?

[Masetek]

I spend waaaay to much time designing and coding my sites, and not enough time writing content. So for my next site I wanna use a cms/template setup and just make minor additions to it. It's going to be an article site that publishers and myself can add articles to. I need to approve all articles. I need a page where the publisher can submit his article. And of course the usual category management etc etc that you normally get.

I've been hunting around and there's a few that look ok, can anyone recommend one?

:cool:

[John]

Mambo and Drupal will both do what you need. I've used them a little bit but nothing on a large scale, theres another, smaller, cms that I really like called etomite (http://www.etomite.org/), I find it has most of the features the more popular cms's do but it is a lot smaller.

[deronsizemore]

I have not played around with these two enough to know if they will do what you need to do, but check out CMS Made Simple. www.cmsmadesimple.org, and Plume at http://pxsystem.sourceforge.net

I have played around with the CMS Made simple more then the Plume one and it is very straight forward and simple. It stumped me installing it at first cause I had never chmoded anything before and didn't know how, and a few other little things but the forum support for it is great...I asked a couple questions and it seemed within an hour or so I had my answer.

[Emancipator]

dpm you could write a cms for it in an hour. Use PHP, I use a cms i wrote for www.avixion.ca that is that very principal. Step to is to add a wikipedia style edit function (with approval ) using xml http.

If you cant code in php and dont mind spending a bit of money you can very likely get something custom made for cheap.

[John]

I forgot to mention, check out http://www.opensourcecms.com/ it lists quite a few open source cms's and lets you try them for yourself on their servers.

[Masetek]

dpm you could write a cms for it in an hour. Use PHP, I use a cms i wrote for www.avixion.ca that is that very principal. Step to is to add a wikipedia style edit function (with approval ) using xml http.

If you cant code in php and dont mind spending a bit of money you can very likely get something custom made for cheap.

Yeah I was planning on writing it myself but wanted to see if there's a pre built cms that could do it. I rekcon I am just going to go ahead and do it myself.

I was impressed by the cms's I checked out though - especially Mambo. I'll definately be using that for a bigger site I have planned.

[deronsizemore]

Wish I knew how to write my own! One day maybe.

[paul]

In some ways knowing you can figure out how to do more technical things yourself is a curse. It distracts you from the big picture of building a site that is good enough to generate an income. The world is full of people who can write wonderful code and/or create beautiful designs. There seems to be a real shortage of people who really understand the web publishing business model and can effectively implement it. I mean, just look at the few who post here compared to the thousands who post on the technical forums. But I suspect the web based income of those who do post here is higher. :)

[ozgression]

In some ways knowing you can figure out how to do more technical things yourself is a curse. It distracts you from the big picture of building a site that is good enough to generate an income. The world is full of people who can write wonderful code and/or create beautiful designs. There seems to be a real shortage of people who really understand the web publishing business model and can effectively implement it. I mean, just look at the few who post here compared to the thousands who post on the technical forums. But I suspect the web based income of those who do post here is higher. :)

Exactly. Outsource coding and design as much as possible. I always wonder why people spend so much time on these areas.

[Masetek]

Yeah I know what you mean. But for me at the moment it's all a question of $$. I'm not making enough to outsource something I can do myself. In the future I'd like to pretty much outsource everything and stick to managing my sites, but that's the future. For now, it's back to writing the cms :)

[Masetek]

Wish I knew how to write my own! One day maybe.

It's not hard really. Once you know php you will see how easy it is (to create a very simple cms anyway). I found learning photoshop harder than php :)

[deronsizemore]

It's not hard really. Once you know php you will see how easy it is (to create a very simple cms anyway). I found learning photoshop harder than php :)

Wow. Well my brain must be design oriented then. I learned Photoshop and Illustrator to where I was pretty good with it in about two weeks. I've sat down twice with my PHP/MySQL sitepoint book and tried to get a start on it and it never went anywhere...well I did get MySQL and Apache installed on my system, but that's it. :rolleyes:

[Masetek]

If you're just starting with php/mysql just worry about the programming not installing. If you're going to run your own webserver, then yeah worry about it, but otherwise put it on the back burner and concentrate on writing scripts.

Just write scripts and run them on your server.

Yeah, Im much more mathematically orientated, that's why PS was harder I reckon. But I have put way more time into learning to program though.

:cool:

[paul]

It's EXTREMELY hard to appreciate your own intellectual gifts! For some the programming seems easy and obvious. So they make comments about how easy it is to do something. Many/most don't yet understand that a task which seems trivial to them may actually be very difficult for someone else who is equally intelligent but whose mind works differently. I have watched a graphically gifted person tweak the colors on a web page and I can't explain what she did, but her stuff ALWAYS looks better than mine.

[r2d2]

I think the tough thing with PS is, its not always obvious how you can best do things. You might know what you want to do, but now be able to find it in the help because you dont know where to start. Sometimes you might even be doing something 'the long way' because you didnt even realise there was a short way.

I was working with a guy who uses PS fulltime, and he was just awesomely efficient with it - so quick. I picked up a few tips, and am better myself now.

Personally, I program all day, so coding is more natural.

[deronsizemore]

If you're just starting with php/mysql just worry about the programming not installing. If you're going to run your own webserver, then yeah worry about it, but otherwise put it on the back burner and concentrate on writing scripts.

Just write scripts and run them on your server.

Yeah, Im much more mathematically orientated, that's why PS was harder I reckon. But I have put way more time into learning to program though.

:cool:


Thanks for the advice. Yeah I just installed everything cause the Sitepoint book told me too so that I could test my scripts on my own machine and not have to upload it to my web server.

I don't know. Maybe one of these days I'll get motivated and learn it...or I'll just get someone else to do it for a fee and just concentrate on designing.

[John]

It saves me an incredible amount of time testing scripts locally.

[Masetek]

With PS I think you have to have some design talent to create really good designs. Sure, I can make a web page layout that looks professional, but if you told me to create a design for a radio station that had to have a funky rocknroll look I'd be srewed. I was aways good at maths at school, and pretty bad at design :)

[deronsizemore]

Well I definitely wish I were better with programming. There is a much higher demand for programmers/developers here in Lexington, KY then there is for Designers.

[freekrai]

Same with here in the okanagan (the valley when I live), nearly 100 web design firms and all of them outsource their PHP work.

Most of it to me and one of my partners these days.

[Masetek]

Programmers are not in demand here unfortunatey.

Businesses want people who can design and program :)

[subodh]

Try phpfusion small easy to use. lot of community support.
U can also view various CMS at :
http://opensourcecms.com/

[deronsizemore]

I'm finding textpattern gets easier everyday. It has a pretty big learning curve I will say though, for me anyway. Some might think its very easy, but I was completely lost to begin with.

[Emancipator]

i do layout and graphics as well as programming but doing both to a very high level of quality is no easy task. My forte is code, not design. :P If you want a CMS for a blog try nucleus.

[James]

http://rodin.lot23.com/

I've enjoyed working with modifying Rodin (minus figuring out mod_rewrite, which I did over and over again and the time I redid it and it actually worked looked like all the other times >_<) to create a CMS for my cheats website. I don't know PHP or MySQL so it's a good learning experience.

As for design, I've always had designing then making XHTML and CSS sites as my forte (though I'm slower at it than our friggen Mozart of making things really good really fast, Emancipator ;)), because I don't know much coding. Minute amount of Java, and I can name a few PHP functions, like str_replace. I guess there's not much more to PHP than functions, etc. (all the basics of coding) and it's somewhat cross-language, but putting it together to create a CMS is not what I consider a small task for someone not following a tutorial or anything.

[Mike Hunt]

Ruby on Rails. Or maybe Drupal.