For one of my clients I’ve been looking for a very simple CMS(Content Management System). It would be nice for him to be able to create new pages for the site without having to ask me to do so.
I’m not thinking of anything heavyweight. Something with a “Create new page” link, allowing you to open up a form and just type away. It would work a lot like Dreamweaver’s templates (i.e. you fill in the boxes). Textile support and WYSIWYG would be present.
There would need to be a way to upload/resize images and insert them. And a decent menu builder - pages can be hidden from the menu, split into separate menus etc.
Knowing the number of CMS’s out there something must do this already. However the majority try to mould you into do working their way, being contstrained by the tool - which shouldn’t be! I played with XOOPS and Mambo, and neither felt it could be bent easily to my will.
In a way it’s a bit of a Wiki idea, being free to create new pages. Weblogs seem just as bad as the average CMS, as they mould you into entries which unless assigned to a special category will appear in the navigation and front page by default. But perhaps they could be adapted to do what I require? I’ve seen it done with MovableType, but no examples with Wordpress, pLog, Nucleus or similar.
Or am I after a breed of tool that no one else is bothered with?
5 comments ↓
“Whisper”:http://whisper.cx/ doesn’t do everything you list, but I still think it’s worth mentioning.
Hi Peter, have you decided on anything? If you do wind up finding something that meets your needs please let me know about it. I’d be interested for myself.
Hi Keith,
I haven’t yet. It looks like I’ll be writing my own image gallery at this rate, so I can then plug it into any simple CMS (I need it to work with MediaWiki, but that’s another story…).
A couple are looking promising, maybe with only a small modification:
# “pLog”:http://www.plogworld.org - I will certainly try this, as it looks promising (not only for a simple CMS, but also to replace MT on this site)
# “Nucleus”:http://nucleuscms.org/ - interesting, but probably not as promising
# “EasyCMS”:http://www.onlinetools.org/easycms2/ - I played with this over 2 years ago and found it to be good, but basic.
# Whisper’s interesting, but I need image support.
As none seem to fit my needs exactly I’ve temporarily lost interest (as I do) and have been playing with another project for the past 2 days (more of that later).
I think a tool like the above would make a good Open Source project. I can’t be the only person that has the need to build simple sites to be maintained by a secretary, or who wants a flexible CMS.
In a way the solution would be a more sophisticated version (probably web-based) of Fogcreek’s “CityDesk”:http://www.fogcreek.com/citydesk/ or Macromedia’s Contribute - they both model how to create new pages etc. With the news posting capabilites of a weblog as well
Are you up for working on this project? I definitely am, although I’d love to modify an existing application to prevent reinventing the wheel (even though our wheel will be a different shape)
Could the features you want be added to Whisper as plugins? It seems to be the closest to what you need that we know about.
Am I up for working on something? I’d consider looking at Whisper to see how easy it would be to add certain things. A project like this seems like it’d be a fun thing to take on in general though. I even have some ideas for how it could work. However, I’d be foolish to try to commit to anything new right now.
hey –
sort of in the same quandary. I don’t like anything I’ve looked at. Plone’s getting a lot of hype but it’s a resource hog, requires its own app server (Zope) and while there is a lot of documenation on it, most of it is oriented toward particular bits and pieces rather than a unified whole. There are books about it which may remedy this. I’ve only read Andy McKay’s and it blows. Clearly a rush job written by someone too deep in both Zope and Plone to empathize with those who aren’t. It’s all over the place and nowhere. I don’t bash Open Source developers generally, but when they start charging for REALLY shitty books the gloves come off.
My problem with all the cms’s I’ve looked at is there is way too much formatting embedded in the app either by way of actual document structures or by way of the language used to describe various objects. And they all have there own templating language which seems unnecessary. Wrapping html-like tags around your logic does not code/content separation make. Plone gets props, however, for putting the logic in actual html tags themselves so that you can look at a template and see what it’s going to look like as a page.
Usability guy Andy Veen of Adaptive Path has written interestingly on the topic of cms and believes that for many if not most sites a db and a good set of templates and some forms for getting content into the db is all the cms you need. I’m starting to agree.
For simple sites, roll your own.
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