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VERY simple text CMS, please help!
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Ratspittle
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Sep 3, 2007, 05:01 AM
 
Hi all,
I posted a thread about this over a year (I think) ago. I am still in need.
It boils down to this. I am a design guy primarily, I creat static html sites, and in the past I have been doing small text updates ( many times a month) for my clients. Problem is, as my client base grows, I am increasingly asked to provide a way for my clients to make their own simple text changes within these sites without contacting me. In short I need an extremely basic CMS. What I have found, however, is that most CMS solutions are WAY too complex for what I need. What I had in mind was a simple way for bands to input their own gig dates on certain pages, for restaurants to change menu item prices, and for my realtors to change property info. Replacing pictures are not an issue, structure and new pages are not an issue either. Just simple blocks of text. I want the pages to be "locked down" layout wise, with text changes only available in certain areas, such as the calender, news, or menu. I need a way to do this that is easy for my clients to understand. It would seem to me that I should be able to have an empty div tag or something that can accept new content without having to set up a database (is this possible?), and especially without changing the site to php or using templates. Is there a solution to this problem? If so, what is it? I do not mind paying a modest amount to have this ability, but it needs to be simple for both me and my clients to implement and understand.
Thanks in advance...
Ratspittle
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Ratspittle  (op)
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Sep 3, 2007, 05:11 AM
 
I also do not want to switch many of my older sites totally over to css, because I know many of my clients would not compensate me for my time. But I would be willing to insert and designate "sections" of css within those sites to find a means to my end, if that would make this possible.
Thanks again
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SpencerLavery
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Sep 3, 2007, 05:25 AM
 
I use WordPress as a CMS a fair bit, but have recently moved over to Expression Engine which, although not free, is much better suited to being used as a CMS.

ExpressionEngine - Publish Your Universe!

It all depends on your host, platform and preferred language though.
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Ratspittle  (op)
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Sep 3, 2007, 11:31 AM
 
Thanks Spencer,
I don't mind paying some money for it, but EE is still massive overkill for my needs.
Chad
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besson3c
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Sep 3, 2007, 11:49 AM
 
WordPress.

If you only want them editing a region of a page, create a new WordPress page out of this content, create a WordPress template of the page, and where the editable text goes include a call to display this particular WordPress page.

If you want simpler than that, you should look at creating your own. I've yet to find a CMS that wasn't focussed around being a general page editor of entire pages.

It really isn't hard writing your own basic CMS, you should look into this. If you can write good HTML code, this will really increase the value of your offerings.
     
Ratspittle  (op)
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Sep 3, 2007, 02:30 PM
 
Besson,
I think it was you I was talking to about this so long ago. I don't want to sound TOO much like an idiot, but I looked into word press yesterday and it all seemed a little overwhelming, almost like you had to "hack" it to use it as a CMS. Take a look at city bakery or the schedule page of darren nicholson. There are a lot of links in those pages, and the layout is some pretty complicated tables and such. I am afraid that template-ifying those pages will become a HUGE headache, I also worry that changing everything over to php will be an issue as well considering all the graphical element's paths and all of the links. I searched around the web for some detailed instructions to no avail. I also delved pretty deeply into php/mysql after our last conversations, but everyday life got in the way, and I retained none of it. Do you know anything about Contribute (since I use dreamweaver)? Seems like each one of my clients would have to buy a copy, and I'd rather just invest in a solution I could use universally with everyone. Thanks so much for your input.
C
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besson3c
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Sep 3, 2007, 03:26 PM
 
Contribute is a really really horrible solution. It produces absolutely garbage code, loves to mess up pages, has its problems with working with div block wrappers, and the Mac version is very quirky and often unstable. My wife and I used to teach a course at the university where the students relied on Contribute heavily, and it wasn't fun. Besides, your users would each need to buy their own copy.

The basic editing capabilities of all CMSes are all based on the TinyMCE WYSIWYG toolbar, or something like it. WordPress is included in this long list of CMSes that rely on TinyMCE.

TinyMCE does a pretty admirable job at providing WYSIWYG editing capabilities, but at the end of the day it is just incredibly difficult to design entire pages with such a tool, and even if you could the code is usually flawed anyway (as you know, both search engines and browsers reward pages that are marked up cleanly).

What is better to do than looking for a general page editor is slice up your page into blocks and regions, and devise separate interfaces to edit this content alone. You could use WordPress/TinyMCE to edit this content (there is a table plug-in for TinyMCE that seems to work well, although it is not enabled by default in WordPress), but if you want users to be able to edit the content in a table cleanly without worrying about them messing up your layout or doing anything destructive to a page, it is better to whip up your own CMS to control this content. In general, if you provide users a gun they can use to shoot themselves with, count on them doing just that!

For learning PHP and MySQL, I would suggest separating them and understanding how they relate to one another. I always start coming up with a schema for my databases with a pencil and paper, and start creating the database using phpMyAdmin (I sometimes use the MySQL command client client too). Make sure your tables include a unique primary key that can be used as an index. I usually use an INT (integer) and set it to auto-increment.

Then, devise your end-user interface with PHP, pulling out database values from your table. mysql_fetch_array() is your friend, there are lots of examples for usage of this function on the php.net website.

Then, for coming up with the admin interface, just put the two together - use the interface you came up with, but provide editable fields rather than simply text outputs. Move this over to a separate password protected page.

I actually came up with this menu using only WordPress:

The Central

The person in charge of this content is computer savvy, so using TinyMCE and the table plugin worked just fine here.

For something as complicated as this:

Witz Apple Certified Training

I had to come up with a custom CMS solution. I will eventually be making my own CMS open source, which includes this particular calendar module.


Good luck, and let us know if you have any other questions!
     
besson3c
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Sep 3, 2007, 03:36 PM
 
Also, sorry to burst your bubble, but you will probably find that there is no universal CMS that you can use with all of your clients to edit any page you'll ever come across.
     
SpencerLavery
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Sep 3, 2007, 04:06 PM
 
You do have to hack WordPress to use it as a CMS.

I fail to see how a relatively simple CMS (Expression Engine is nice and simple compared to the likes of Mambo/Joomla and Drupal) can be overkill. If it has features you don't need - don't use them! To me, and to most designer, if it is easy to install, easy to skin, and easy to use from a clients' perspective - then that is a simple CMS. It doesn't need to lack features to be simple, and in fact most that do, end up a lot more complicated than those considered 'overkill' because they're not built very well.

However, I'm getting the impression that you're not a hand-coder, and that using a template system is a bit beyond current capabilities, in which case I would have to concurr and recommend Contribute. However, I do personally disagree with that application on principal, being that it is used primarily by amateurs.
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SpencerLavery
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Sep 3, 2007, 04:14 PM
 
ps - I've done a calender-based 'gigs' CMS module for a record label web site - and that was some of the most advanced stuff I've done with a CMS, and I've done hundreds of dynamic web sites. A super-simple CMS simply will not let you do things like that, without some very advanced hacking. Sounds like you need to either build a CMS that suits your needs specifically, or employ someone else to do the same.
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besson3c
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Sep 3, 2007, 04:54 PM
 
Originally Posted by SpencerLavery View Post
You do have to hack WordPress to use it as a CMS.
Not really.

WordPress pages are easy to create. About the only thing WordPress is missing is a mod_rewrite editor to allow you to assign your page to a custom URL. I would be interested in knowing how other CMSes tackle this problem... What does Expression Engine do?
     
Ratspittle  (op)
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Sep 3, 2007, 06:18 PM
 
Actually you are right, I am not a hand coder, generally my workflow starts with photoshop, moves into dreamweaver, and then I go into codeview and tweak any of the problems that arise in the code. I am extremely familliar with HTML and CSS, I just prefer not to hand code everything, it seems to take me longer, and I have a hard time visualizing it as I write. When I first started doing websites, I had the "I am a hand coder" mentality and was proud of it, but it just seemed that once I started using WYSIWYG editing, things moved a lot faster, and now I use my knowledge of html and css to correct dreamweaver's mistakes. If you look at my websites...www.chadbattles.com, you will see that most of my band calenders are not in a dynamic form, they are simply listings. I don't see how that can be more complicated than regular editable regions of text. Also I am not looking for a universal CMS for just ANY page, just certain sections of certain sites that I author. I am going to look more into wordpress this evening. I also found a promising looking little solution called Content Control that uses tinyMCE. I guess I was just wanting to find out if there was a way to implement a little text-y style cms in my existing sites, without changing everything over to php or creating templates (aka re-doing whole sites), that was fast. One of my clients was looking for an immediate solution to update an event schedule on his website. Looks like there is no such thing. SO, with that being said, I will start researching wordpress a little more. I am not sure that templates are outside of my ability as much as I was hoping it wouldn't come to that. I thank you both for your input and please feel free to throw any more my way...
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Ratspittle  (op)
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Sep 3, 2007, 06:18 PM
 
What is a mod_rewrite editor?
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besson3c
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Sep 3, 2007, 09:43 PM
 
Originally Posted by Ratspittle View Post
What is a mod_rewrite editor?
An editor to edit URL rewriting rules for the site's .htaccess file (located in its document root). .htaccess files are simply text files, so this editor would be more of an interface for creating rules.
     
besson3c
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Sep 3, 2007, 09:45 PM
 
Ratspittle,

It sounds like you are confronting the classic divide between designers and programmers. Generally speaking, designers don't make good programmers, and programmers usually aren't good designers.

If you want to learn this stuff, it is totally within your grasp, but if you are looking for something quick you probably would be best off subcontracting somebody else to handle this task for you.

Just my two cents...
     
Ratspittle  (op)
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Sep 3, 2007, 10:27 PM
 
I couldn't have said it better myself besson...thanks for your two cents I will have to keep trying though.
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SpencerLavery
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Sep 4, 2007, 02:33 PM
 
The "Pages" in WordPress can be used with CMS-type effect, but it's still not a CMS. Many sections need to have date-based AND category-based entries and Pages cannot handle this. For example, back to the record label web site; 'releases' need to be added as individual entries, inside a 'releases' category. They should be date-based and appear as so. Pages cannot do this. The same can be said for the gigs section, and the news section. The idea of a CMS is to store and group articles in a database, using Pages can only relate entries by 'Parent' is a watered-down version of a Category, as it does not support cross-categorisation nor does it support the display all related Pages on one page properly. In order to get WordPress to act as a true CMS it requires a lot of hacking indeed. A real CMS should be able to pull in the latest 5 releases, the latest 5 gigs, and the latest news article for the front page dynamically, Pages simply cannot do this. If you have a simple 5 page web site that needs a little bit of text changing from time to time, such as phone numbers, then yes WordPress can do it, but if you have large amounts of date and category-based article architecture, WordPress needs a lot of hacking. Trust me, I work with it day in day out, I currently manage over 60 WordPress web sites.

On top of that, for all of the sites I have used WordPress as a CMS for (not for blogs, for actual CMS functionality) the clients have had a very hard time understanding how to update/change things. WordPress is fine for web designers and the like, but once it's been hacked into a CMS getting your average Joe Blogs who doesn't know the difference between Outlook and Outlook Express to update it is a hard task indeed. They find their way around our custom CMS interfaces far easier. I have even taken to hacking the backend of WordPress installations recently to help clients, but all of that hard work's undone when I need to install an update.
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besson3c
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Sep 4, 2007, 02:43 PM
 
Originally Posted by SpencerLavery View Post
The "Pages" in WordPress can be used with CMS-type effect, but it's still not a CMS. Many sections need to have date-based AND category-based entries and Pages cannot handle this. For example, back to the record label web site; 'releases' need to be added as individual entries, inside a 'releases' category. They should be date-based and appear as so. Pages cannot do this. The same can be said for the gigs section, and the news section. The idea of a CMS is to store and group articles in a database, using Pages can only relate entries by 'Parent' is a watered-down version of a Category, as it does not support cross-categorisation nor does it support the display all related Pages on one page properly. In order to get WordPress to act as a true CMS it requires a lot of hacking indeed. If you have a simple 5 page web site that needs a little bit of text changing from time to time, such as phone numbers, then yes WordPress can do it, but if you have large amounts of date and category-based article architecture, WordPress needs a lot of hacking. Trust me, I work with it day in day out, I currently manage over 60 WordPress web sites.

On top of that, for all of the sites I have used WordPress as a CMS for (not for blogs, for actual CMS functionality) the clients have had a very hard time understanding how to update/change things. WordPress is fine for web designers and the like, but once it's been hacked into a CMS getting your average Joe Blogs who doesn't know the difference between Outlook and Outlook Express to update it is a hard task indeed. They find their way around our custom CMS interfaces far easier. I have even taken to hacking the backend of WordPress installations recently to help clients, but all of that hard work's undone when I need to install an update.

Thanks for this... I've always just assigned a page to a parent, but my WordPress sites have always been pretty small. The largest WordPress based site I manage is this:

chasesanborn.com

I have found that, like you, most of my customers appreciate my custom CMS for when content gets complex enough, although I like to use WordPress with simple sites where I can avoid reinventing the wheel.

The AJAX store in the Chase Sanborn site is my work, for instance, as well as the AJAX calendar link posted above.

The nice thing about custom CMSes though is that if you have the luxury of putting all of the sites on a single server (which I do), I can share a lot of common libraries, objects/classes, and various other bits and piece symbolically linked back to a single directory. This way, when bugs or found or I want to push across new features, I simply update my master copy and my sites inherit these changes.

Always interesting to hear how other web developers with similar backgrounds and strengths work with various tools. Thanks for sharing!
     
SpencerLavery
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Sep 4, 2007, 03:04 PM
 
Nice site! Loads very fast, can tell it's not WordPress Nice url-rewrite on it too.

The best example I can show of a site I've done using WordPress as a CMS is:

South Coast Sounds

I hacked the news, gigs and releases to run off of posts, the rest using pages. Pretty happy with the result although they find it very hard to update. Especially when it comes to using images as article hooks (currently I use the 'above the morelink' hack for the images) which is really tricky for clients.

WordPress is a truly great platform but it leaves a lot to be desired as a CMS. That's why I like Expression Engine.

For any designer-cum-developer looking branch into writing their own custom CMS they should really take a look at Ruby on Rails, it's an incredible framework and makes building backend systems effortless and ridiculously fast. I wish the company I work for would give it a chance, but for the moment I have to use it on personal projects only.

Ruby on Rails
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besson3c
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Sep 4, 2007, 03:12 PM
 
Originally Posted by SpencerLavery View Post
Nice site! Loads very fast, can tell it's not WordPress Nice url-rewrite on it too.

The best example I can show of a site I've done using WordPress as a CMS is:

South Coast Sounds

I hacked the news, gigs and releases to run off of posts, the rest using pages. Pretty happy with the result although they find it very hard to update. Especially when it comes to using images as article hooks (currently I use the 'above the morelink' hack for the images) which is really tricky for clients.

WordPress is a truly great platform but it leaves a lot to be desired as a CMS. That's why I like Expression Engine.

For any designer-cum-developer looking branch into writing their own custom CMS they should really take a look at Ruby on Rails, it's an incredible framework and makes building backend systems effortless and ridiculously fast. I wish the company I work for would give it a chance, but for the moment I have to use it on personal projects only.

Ruby on Rails

Awesome design! The Chase site was the last of my sites I did the graphic design work for myself, I'm subcontracting work out now since I'm not really much of a graphic designer. Would you like some work?

Would you like a copy of my musician CMS and Events Calendar module? I've yet to post a demo of the admin pages since I just completed it recently, but it does work very well and I plan to have that demo together shortly. You can however look at the template I came up with that pulls data from the database maintained by this module:

Witz Apple Certified Training

Feel free to contact me via PM if any of this sounds of interest to you, I'll hook you up with my email address.
     
SpencerLavery
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Sep 4, 2007, 03:28 PM
 
Thanks Besson! That's certainly not one of my best sites though.

I'm always looking for extra work, I've recently had a few of my sites featured on some showcase websites recently and it's inspired me to put together a portfolio so I'll send you a link once it's up. Only converted to Mac from PC a month ago and the transition with regard to my workflow has been difficult, but I'm getting used to it now and fingers crossed it'll do what it was meant to and actually boost my productivity soon .

That calendar module looks awesome! I'd love to have a look at how it all works with the backend. At my day job I'm a User Interface Consultant so I may even be able to lend a hand with the design of it if that's something you're interested in - obviously I haven't seen it yet and it's probably great already (judging by the front-end anyhow!) but just in case.
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Ratspittle  (op)
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Sep 4, 2007, 11:48 PM
 
Guys,
Thanks for all your input. I actually found a really really perfect solution with ContentControl and Ben (the author) has been most helpful in getting me up and running. It is always good to know there are people like you to offer advice in such matters so freely. Thanks again.
RS
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besson3c
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Sep 5, 2007, 12:48 AM
 
Originally Posted by Ratspittle View Post
Guys,
Thanks for all your input. I actually found a really really perfect solution with ContentControl and Ben (the author) has been most helpful in getting me up and running. It is always good to know there are people like you to offer advice in such matters so freely. Thanks again.
RS
Glad you found something! Just FYI, the editor of the BarnyardBBS thing just happens to be TinyMCE. It looks like basically the same sort of thing as we were describing, except flat file based, and likely easier to install.
     
   
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