Selecting right CMS - All-in-one vs lite/simple ?!? Hi. I'm rather new in Content Management System(CMS). I have difficulty in picking a CMS. Generally there're 2 types of Content Management System(CMS): - all-in-one CMS (many features, whether built-in or add-on, eg WebGUI, Typo3, PostNuke) - lite/simple CMS (fewer features, eg CMS.Link, CMS Made Simple, Artiloo) I just wonder what's the "real" point of choosing lite/simple CMS. We should be prudent in choosing a CMS for your website since it may be with you forever. Eg: if one decides to choose on a particular CMS, and you find it is not its cup of tea after some time (eg 1 year). It may be a headache to transfer your contents from 1 CMS to another. As you know they are limited in features and ability. So what they really give is only simplicity: easy to install, very smooth learning curve etc. For a lite/simple CMs which have (very) few features, will it be risky to use them? For example, when I find out I need some features which my CMS doesn't offer (nor do its plug-ins or add-ons or its similar). How can I do at that time? I'm not a programmer or CMS developer. Trouble! So the best bet seems to fall on all-in-one CMS which they have many features (whether core or as modules/addons) and many people who support this CMS. In this regard, I don't need to worry about the lack of features in my chosen CMS. In conclusion all-in-one seems to be always the first choice, while lite/simple CMS is the second choice. That's what I think. Am I right? What do you think? Do you think all-in-one CMS is always the safest or best bet? Is there really any point of choosing lite/simple CMS? Thanks a lot.
How about hosting limitations? I recently spent some time learning ezPublish, which is almost as "all-in-one" as Plone. If you actually want to use it, though, you pretty much must have root access to the host. And the learning curve's pretty nasty, too. Personally, I think they blew it because they wrote it in PHP. It's all a crap-shoot. That time I spent learning ezPublish? I was trying to land a contract with a guy who's trying to upgrade his site from 3.0 to 3.6 (or some such). The biggest reason is that 3.6 allows you to unpublish articles. But it's not backwards-compatible, so it pretty much involves a complete re-write [at least, that's the approach he's taking. I never saw the current source, so I really don't know how hard it would have been to upgrade]. As soon as this port's done and published, he's planning to toss the CMS and re-write the thing as a low-level bunch of JSP's, or something along those lines. Don't forget ease of use. I'm using postnuke right now. (Well, I'm using a few different things. That's the only big "CMS" I'm using...my other sites are roll-your-own) I'm really not happy with it, because it feels kludgy. I feel like I have to do much mouse-work to get anything done. But, then, I'm a little old-school. I like the command line and vim. You could always spend money to get someone else to develop it for you. Or make friends with a programmer and convince hir that it would be a fun project for the weekend. That might well be the best approach for you. Personally, I'd be most concerned about the community. Big and helpful are two really important signs. Another problem with ezPublish is that there's pretty much no community. A post might sit around in the forums for days before anyone notices it, and the IRC channel's a joke. You might very well be right for you. Not necessarily right for other people. Different people, with different skill sets and needs have a different "right" answer. That's why there are so many different possible solutions out there. Nope. But I don't believe in putting all my eggs in one basket. I think different projects have different requirements, and each one needs to be evaluated carefully so the right tool can be chosen for the job. I tend to use the simplest/litest tool available which meets the requirements--I figure the fewer moving parts, the less pieces there are to break. Then again, I don't really fear porting content from one CMS to another, or writing my own plugins if needed. Just personal preference. I don't particularly like software that does a bunch of work behind my back. Or that makes me spend a lot of time pointing and clicking on its "easy" interface. Or that forces you to wade through an entire directory tree to find all the pieces to its page templates. *shrug.* There is no "right" answer. Just whatever works for you.
Lite/simple for me means the following: Easier to work with Easier to learn Easier to modify For me that last one in bold is the most important as a coder myself. One of the KEY aspects to consider when trying to be the next big thing on the internet is innovation. If you grab an extremely complex CMS like PHPNuke and the like you'll have a great list of features. Unfortunately it'll be the exact same list that everyone else has If you start with a simple CMS with simple code that's easy to understand and not bloated with stuff you don't need it's easy to integrate new features into. For example you have a site about cellphones. There's hundreds of cellphone blogs and portals out there so you need something that makes your site unique. You can win over those readers by simply having a different way of displaying the same content. Your competitor shows the content and the author. What if yours showed the content, the author, a commenting system, a rating system and had an auto-generated affiliate link to buy the product? What if yours simply places a picture of the item being reviewed in just the right spot. That also brings up the point of design. Often bulky CMSes make it a pain in the ass to modify, some to the point where you need to hire an expert on the CMS itself to design a "skin" for you. The simpler the CMS the easier it is to design around
As to hosting limitations, you can still choose many all-in-one / powerful CMS (eg Drupal, Mambo). So it is not the concern in this case. They can live with many free hosting on the Internet. That may make some senses. Something like CMSMadeSimple will be very easy to learn and use. But I'm not sure if it is really difficult to something like XOOPS, Postnuke, Drupal, Mambo. They are generally more powerful but the learning curve is still low at the same time. (This is just what I guess, based on my observation. Tell me if wrong) Sorry, what do you mean by crap-shoot? What I say is crap?!? Although you may not stick with the same CMs forever, it seems to be true you need to stick with it, since it is not an easy option to make a switch. There're a lot of work to make a transfer (there are some scripts for some CMSs, but I tihnk they are not reliable. You still need to do some follow-up work). That's why I think picking CMS is NOt a soft option. Sorry what is kludgy? Buggy? Can't bother to hire one since my project is voluntary too. I have no income for this project. Better go for the persuasion track. Yes, this is the most important for me. Exactly how hard is it to port from one to another? Care to describe? How long? Your experience/example may be a good start As to lite tool, what do you use? And it seems there are CMS for developers (eg Drupal). The codes for some powerful CMS are said to be nicely presented, so people can add plugins or hack the CMs easily? What do you think for these kinds of CMS?
I see what you mean. Again for similar questions, what lite tools/CMs do you use? And sometimes it seems powerful CMS (ie the ones which have many features supported by either bulti0in or plgins) can be suitable for developers too (eg Drupal). The codes for some powerful CMS are said to be nicely presented, so people can add plugins or hack the CMs easily? What do you think for these kinds of CMS?
I can start another blogger site in about 30 seconds. That gives it an edge. And if you don't have all this prep time and design wrapped into a particular site you can try ideas out with little investment of time. Since I'm always adding content, and from different locations, this is the point of CMS for me anyway... but the lite and quick ones I feel more free to bang out an idea without taking a lot of time to polish... duh I guess I'm talking blogs vs websites. See! This is an example of the kind of knee jerk stuff I would throw up on a "cms/lite" site. But I know what you mean about posting content to postnuke. Too much submitting and checking and selecting topics and categories and previewing and posting. I think in Drupal there is a post without review option, haven't tried it yet. I think an experienced Drupal user could setup a very simple site...but the plugins are soooo tempting to me i spend hours adding modules everytime I do an install. Eventually I'll standardize my own package and be able to load and update all my drupal sites easily. There is no way I would go without the seo mods. I think any site I'm really invested in, I would go with one of the more adaptable hard to learn CMS like drupal, mambo, postnuke; but it's also a matter of comfort level and preference. I like trying them all. Yikes!!!! I could have left work half an hour ago! I should be home doing this!
I think I will spend time to learn too since my site is going to be feature-rich. In your experience how long do you need to learn Drupal, Mambo, Postnuke etc.? How do you compare with some very easy to learn CMS like CMSMadeSimple in terms of learning curve?
Actually I haven't tried CMS made simple. But now I think I will. In design and music "limiting my pallete" on a project often leads to unique results. I'll come up with a no frills plan for a site and give it a go. ...as soon as I finish a couple dozen other things. As long as it goes fast and easy I'll throw a cms ms site together. But a couple snags and I'll ditch it. What I really want to do later in the year when I have time is learn to design my own php cms site. I've seen a book focusing on building a php/mysql site. I bet I could do it in a week when I have the neccessary chunks of time; and the php experience is bound to pay off.
I really should have clarified that better. I don't really consider Drupal/Mambo all that powerful. I was thinking more along the lines of plone. I've come up with a new reason to like the lighter CMSs. Nearly Free Speech web hosting charges you only for disk space and bandwidth you actually use. So a CMS that takes up 50 MB is going to be more expensive than one that fits into 500K. For a big site with tons of content, that's probably not going to be as much of a factor. Personally, I don't have any sites yet with that much content. There isn't a right/wrong answer here. It all boils down to individual preference, really. No, not at all. It means you evaluate what's out there, pick the one that seems to best suit your needs, then roll the dice, take your chances, and hope that it doesn't bite you too hard when you try to get it to do something the designers didn't plan. If you're going to be working on a serious site, it's definitely not a decision to make lightly. Hmm...More idioms. Sorry. Yankee ingenuity. Baling wire and duct tape. Umm...kludgy means you do things that aren't really right in order to make something mostly work. This winds up happening a lot in the corporate world when programmers are getting close to a deadline, working ridiculous hours, trying to get a product shipped. They'll write a quick fix for a problem that really needs to be taken out and get a couple of days spent on it, planning to come back to it when there's time. They generally don't ever get the time. It also happens a lot with amateur programmers who don't recognize that something needs to be completely re-written. So far I've managed to avoid what I imagine is quite a painful process I'm evaluating tools right now, though, for a port from PostNuke. So far I've had good luck with WordPress. I've heard at least a few others say it does everything they need. If I have to write a plugin, I'll probably start looking for another CMS.
I would have to go with the all-in-one, but maybe for a different reasons. Bigger communities associated with bigger cms's have lots of different templates/themes/looks around, most for free download. Your site can look like anything. With a lite, you will be more restricted