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GEEK WARNING!
Okay, here's where I've gotten so far with content management systems, for those who care. We have a site at work which I'm primarily responsible for. (Well, that and a bunch of internal ones.) It needs to follow the USF web identity standards, so the basic layout and all the design elements are more or less set in stone. However, content keeps getting out of date, and after seven years the directories on the server are chock full of orphaned files and obsolete pages. Also, the news section never gets properly updated.
The problems I'm trying to solve are:
Other features that would be nifty are the ability to require that some pages are accessible only via SSL, and authentication features that can tie into radius or something else. We have custom code for all that as is, though, so that's not a biggie.
The CMSs I've looked at so far, and my gripes for each are:
Generally, almost everything out there seems to be for people who want a blog or a slashdot-type site, and little is for more corporate type sites which consist of standalone static pages rather than constant news articles that get cycled through.
Contenido and Typo3 are really the only ones that allowed for pages to be assigned to different categories that show up differently without too much hassle. Say, the difference in appearance between a second tier page that contains just a menu of links to third tier articles (and hence has space for an image, and needs a cleaner, more sparse layout of larger font) and the appearance of the third tier article itself. I can code this by hand via CSS or HTML, but it just means I have to do by hand what the CMS was supposed to be doing for me.
Next I need to figure out what to do with my gallery site--no commercial web galleries I've seen are even remotely as useful to me as the homebrew php system I'm using right now. Perhaps I should try to find the time to improve on it, and offer it to the public. I'm also wondering about the security of the various CMS systems.
And now, off to Steve's game, which actually apparently is starting again. Angst (and Jasmine Thai delivery, courtesy of Dave), here I come!
Okay, here's where I've gotten so far with content management systems, for those who care. We have a site at work which I'm primarily responsible for. (Well, that and a bunch of internal ones.) It needs to follow the USF web identity standards, so the basic layout and all the design elements are more or less set in stone. However, content keeps getting out of date, and after seven years the directories on the server are chock full of orphaned files and obsolete pages. Also, the news section never gets properly updated.
The problems I'm trying to solve are:
- Keep links and menus current and pointing at places that exist
- Have a proper breadcrumbs/pathways/pagetrail and other navigation features
- Prevent orphaned files
- Have the news section update automatically
- Make it easy to update the design when the university's web committee decides to change the colors / fonts / whatever again to increase the marketing potential and brand recognition of the USF product
- Management of media content, most notably video clips--maintaining links is the main problem here
- It would be nice if less web-oriented people could easily add articles too
Other features that would be nifty are the ability to require that some pages are accessible only via SSL, and authentication features that can tie into radius or something else. We have custom code for all that as is, though, so that's not a biggie.
The CMSs I've looked at so far, and my gripes for each are:
- Typo3
- Lots of features, but the interface is a jumble and it feels horribly bloated. The documentation is somewhat decent, but writing templates and modules is a total pain in the butt. You end up loading endless extensions to the system as well.
- Contenido
- Simpler and much cleaner than Typo3, and what documentation there is is more polished. Templating seems very nice. I just couldn't get it to work reliably and do what I wanted it to do. Internet support is also lacking, as it's a free product from a commercial company.
- XOOPS
- This is what the USF Aikido Club uses. It seems good for making a community forum type site, but doesn't impress with its ability to do basic content management
- Mambo
- I liked this most of the "big" ones I tried. Alas, there isn't a convenient way to change it's news-siteish/bloggish nature. The support forums actually seem very useful on this one. Alas, the main documentation sucks. Also, the menus were much too manual-work intensive.
- Etomite
- This is what I'm currently going with. It's simple, and fits the idea of categories with one page static articles better than the rest. Templating is less clean, and documentation is pretty decent. The menu generation works automatically better than in any of the others, at least for my uses. The ordering of items in the menu is a bit manual, but the rest works wonderfully; ditto for the breadcrumbs.
Generally, almost everything out there seems to be for people who want a blog or a slashdot-type site, and little is for more corporate type sites which consist of standalone static pages rather than constant news articles that get cycled through.
Contenido and Typo3 are really the only ones that allowed for pages to be assigned to different categories that show up differently without too much hassle. Say, the difference in appearance between a second tier page that contains just a menu of links to third tier articles (and hence has space for an image, and needs a cleaner, more sparse layout of larger font) and the appearance of the third tier article itself. I can code this by hand via CSS or HTML, but it just means I have to do by hand what the CMS was supposed to be doing for me.
Next I need to figure out what to do with my gallery site--no commercial web galleries I've seen are even remotely as useful to me as the homebrew php system I'm using right now. Perhaps I should try to find the time to improve on it, and offer it to the public. I'm also wondering about the security of the various CMS systems.
And now, off to Steve's game, which actually apparently is starting again. Angst (and Jasmine Thai delivery, courtesy of Dave), here I come!
