I havent' found the perfect ( or good enough) CMS out there, I have settleled on one for now (textpattern), but I'm interested what are the requirement and features some other SEO people would like to see or have on a CMS. I plan to start working on a CMS on my free time soon, and suggestions from other people will be very good. Just mention here what things you would like SEO related, front end, back end etc. Some of the features I have 1) canonical url's (only use either the www version or the non-www and redirect the other (301) acordinly. 2) content should be accessible by one and only one url (no dupe content). 3) all the html and css is in the control of the user so valid markup or not will depend on the template the user have. ... what else?
I use a Mambo component which gives me great urls but there is the risk of duplication. Have you considered working with an existing CMS rather than recreating the wheel? There are so many out there and unless you'll be charging a license fee you'll need a "community" to build up around it to really keep it going.
Kinda, But havent decided yet, Im not a full fledged programmer but I believe I have good ideas. Depending on how the idea develops it might be based(forked) on an exiting project. Right now its just the Idea developing proceess, After I get a good understanding of what it will encompass then The desicion will be made of what to do. So far from what I see all the current CMS think seo and SE friendly means meta tags and clean-urls-that-are-very-longs-with-all-the-keywords.
Im using Mambo with the OpenSEF module for rewriting urls. It gives you full control over urls and is smart enough to prevent dup content check the urls at www.dneprimport.com
Xoops also has a module/hack for rewriting urls. If you want a clean static url, you can try website baker. Every pages ends with a .php extension, no session variables...
all CMS scripts IMO are too buggy to work with and you end up doing more work then you would if you built the pages manually, however i had my trial of CMS scripts my fav was drupal, pages were easily indexed (with mod_rewrite) and every page within went from pr0 - pr5 within 1 update so the pages are clean, however i stopped using it cos somehow it decided to corrupt itself
I believe wordpress is overhyped, Its a good piece of software but its not the end of all blogs/cms. I'm thinking of folowing the basic aproach of Textpattern and hack my own, I like their simplicity but some of it's functions and plugins do so many database queries, and sometimes for the same data. I think it be a fun experience.
I think that many people are confused by search engine friendly URL's...this is NOT all SEO requires at all. You shoud have much more control than only over URL's but already most CMS won't even allow you this one which is terrible in my opinion. Wordpress is great but let's face it, it's neither the best blog (but close to it, in my opinion) nor a CMS (come on this is a BLOG not a portal type of CMS) Mambo code is not clean at all, hopefully Joomla dev team will clean it up within the next few months. As for textpattern I had a demo from a friend of mine..never tried it myself, I found it very slow when it handles a lot of pages....that's a problem because the need of CMS is (with other factors) mostly when you have to handle large website... Unless paying $5000 at the least it seems that the option of creating your own CMS is the best...so where is the advantage of having a CMS system if you have to custom program your own, sounds like the good old day of coding your stuff for months on your own...it sucks!
Textpattern is slow because if does a lot of database queries (sometimes for the same data, also plugings have a lot of queires like Select * just to get one field, etc etc. It also loads a lot of unnesesarry stuff dunno why. I already hacked appart textpattern to do what i needed and be more SEo friendly, I will use that for my sites for now until I code my own.
You are so right! search engine friendly URL's are not helping you that much. But I must say that it's something that you need against other competitors.
I personally would hack a cms to your needs. Most of the time you want control like you say over the code. I wrote my own basic one which makes customising very easy and so far it seems to be doing ok. It's much more fun too I think to make something specifically for your own needs.
You should check Django ( http://www.djangoproject.com/ ) I read some texts from their site and it looks pretty easy to make something like a cms. The django site itself is build using django. You can download and study his source. Sorry my bad English
Not many host support phyton. I have found most of these frameworks constrain the urls and their formats to what they want with no regard for seo.
Sorry, but I disagree have you guys tried 1.5? A CMS it is. You can specify your own URL extensions, and you can also post "pages", rather than just blog posts...
Dreamhost (for example) supports it, and they rocks! About the url thing, in django you can setup any url format you want. Just check their website and their url struture. The site itself is running in django...
I'll check django, and see it. Mambo might be a good CMS by what many people say, but by some reason I really can't stand the admin interface.
Mambo is fine but far from being SEO firendly (whatever SEF fans may say), code is not clean at all and learning curve is not short since I'm not sure the roadmap was very clear when defining sections/tables etc.. It's a fine ready-website though and I used it but really needs improvements - hopefully Joomla will be better. To talk about wordpress again OK call it a CMS, NO it won't satisfy 99% of webmasters needs except for blogging...not a real solution.