The Wonderful and Terrible world of CMS -- advice?

[Josh Roby]

Hey there!  I've been merrily setting up my imprint's site and before I get too far along I want to set it up 'right' with a Content Management System rather than a handful of static, hand-written pages using my five-years-old HTML skills.

I've gone though this handy list of open source CMS packages, and... well, it scared me.  I think drupal is my best option, both in terms of features and community support, but I'm hardly the expert, here.

Does anyone have any words of wisdom in setting up a CMS, either for a publishing imprint or other use, that they'd care to share with me?  I'm looking to start installing things later this week.

[Andy Kitkowski]

Hey dude, I've been working with massive-content sites (both professional and fan) since like 97, and moved a lot to CMS over the years.  Great link BTW, I'm glad someone took the time to seperate one from the other.

Honestly, if I were you I'd do this: Start off with your crappy HTML skills. Start off that way for, say, the first 6-12 months of the release of your product. Then, take a look back on what you've done, what you've created, and then begin looking for the right CMS tool to organize that stuff, and continue on from there.

It's like there's two camps:
One camp has a cluttered house, so they go to Organized Living or The Container Store and look for the perfect containers to contain their stuff, that fit with the nature of their stuff and their personal and house layout aesthetic.
The other camp has a new, completely barren house, so they go to Organized Living or The Container Store and look for the perfect containers early on that match the house aesthetic, and get containers that they anticipate will be the best to contain their stuff.

It's simply a matter of choice.

I'm firmly in that first camp, because I've had two outcomes when I've pursued that second camp that I don't want to repeat:
1) About two years after using a great bells-and-whistles CMS solution, I not only had to get rid of it, but to completely migrate tons of data over to a new solution (which is the Real Pain) because it became apparent after a while that while I thought CMS Solution A was the needed solution to the organization of my data, 6-12 months of use proved that it wasn't nearly as effective as Solution B.  Moving to Solution B was long and painful.
2) In another case, I chose a solution that had a lot of extra cool tools. In the end, I didn't need them, didn't use them.  But since I saw that potential going unactualized, I ended up forcing myself to make content that made use of those tools (those tools stood out like sore thumbs when not in use: I'm thinking here a tiki that had a wiki, mailing list, chat and file features that sounded cool at the time but later became baggage). In the end, maintaining the site became unsatisfying because I chose the wrong container to house my crap, and trying to fill those empty drawers with stuff just made the whole project feel transitory and meaningless.

Just wanted to lay that out for you.  I'd say go for simple HTML and the like for 6-12 months, and when you have enough real content to start organizing it, move to a CMS solution.  Just one opinion.

-Andy

[Eero Tuovinen]

Andy sounds like he knows what he's saying. Here's my experience:

I bootstrapped my own site at http://www.arkkikivi.net (which I don't recommend for IE users if you plan to respect my coding at all, because I decided to scrap IE compatibility just a couple of days ago) just the way he describes, except I've practically built my own content management to go with it as I went along. I started with static html at first, then put the headers and footers into shtml-include files. After that I learned PHP and started playing with all kinds of server side functions. After I got a forum (phpBB) I decided to implement a first-page news function, which I drew from the forums (made a "news" forum in the forums and set the first page to draw it's contents from therein). I did similar content management shit via forums for other pages as well, but my thirst for knowledge sent me next over into the databases. After learning MySQL I wrote my first simple, actual content management database for displaying product (the website is a combined web store / publishing company); if you'll go to the page http://www.arkkikivi.net/kauppa/tuote.html?&t=sorcerer and change the last argument in the url to 'polaris' or 'capes', for instance, you'll see how the page queries my database to show descriptions of different games. After that I've expanded the database solution as necessary into the side-menus and other places.

So, I've pretty much gone from basic html/css to xhtml/css organized through a forum-based content delivery (which I still use for news and blogs) and customized databases as needed. Personally I think that this is the way to go, because by learning everything as you go, in little steps, you get an iron knowledge of the web programming needed. Also, the end result, when you plan the upgrades to the pages right, is a flexible and customized data control system that fits your needs and has no excess overhead or other problems associated with generic solutions. There's always problems, too: if you plan to work this way, you'll end up revising your pages some 5-6 times before all the appropriate databases are set up. To make the work efficient you should work with some kind of html templates (as in: make non-content code identical on all pages) to begin with, so you can just search and replace any changes to headers/footers/whatever in all your files when you make site-wide changes. Good html/css coding practices and some preplanning go a long way in this regard, as well as some moderation in starting new pages; if you already know that you'll be needing over twenty almost identical content pages, then by all means start a database right away. My case was pretty much  that of starting with a small page and adding content over time, and a development model suited to that is not something that works with a huge start.

[Josh Roby]

Thanks for the responses, guys.  My on-call computing expert (ie, my brother) has informed me that for my intended uses, WordPress will suffice perfectly well, and if necessary I can upgrade later.  So sort of a middle road to your options, Andy.  Thanks both!

[Jason Morningstar]

FYI we chose to go with a pair of Wordpress instances for the public side of Bully Pulpit Games (still evolving).  I've been very happy with it so far, having migrated from hand-coded HTML to PHPNuke to Movable Type to WordPress over the years.  Our back end is PHP and MySQL.  We chose Wordpress because of the ease of use, ease of ensuring valid markup, and friendliness to modification and integration.

[CommonDialog]

If I may make a suggestion, I've dealt with Xoops and phpNuke personally, and my company (I do computer consulting) has also looked at Magnolia, eXo, Liferay, Jetspeed, Jetspeed2...  Anyway, if you can get by just doing phpBB, that's great.  I've heard good things about Wordpress, but if you're up to the challenge, XOOPS is my number one choice.

It very easy to install and there are a ton of modules for it.  Skinning it (making it look how you want in terms of header and footer) is not something I've done.

Another option is one I ran across in for a job I just finished.  The host of my client had phpNuke preinstalled.  If you can find a host like that, most of your troubles are over.

[Per Fischer]

Andy has good advice.
Personally I found that Postnuke was the easiest to work with (ie. could be moulded and fitted to whatever purpose), but that was in 2004, and loooong time ago considering CMS. XOOPS was already then up and coming and should by now be very attractive. Postnuke also has extensive support forums, which I found invaluable, because you will run into problems. Wordpress looks very impressive too, but consider how much you would need to tweak it yourself, or if you can do with the design/packages/skins already available.

There is a comprehensive site displaying all open source CMS systems here: http://opensourcecms.com/

The site has working demos of every CMS (just log in and fiddle around) plus reveiws and discussions.

But, read Andy's post again ;)

[Bryan Hansel]

I blog off of Wordpress and love it.  I still need to upgrade to the new one - bad me.

What Andy wrote above is outstanding advice.  My paddling site is still in xhtml, because after waiting to see if I need a CMS, I discovered I didn't.  I'm glad I waited.

If you're just looking for simple, you should check out http://www.lucidcms.net/.  I've played around with it in the past, and it seemed to be able to get the job done.  If you try it, make sure to get the latest version, instead of the one linked to on their front page.  Their forum is the best place to go first.

Bryan

[greyorm]

What about those of us who have been working with other solutions -- mainly our own aging HTML/PHP skillset -- for the last 6-12 months (perhaps longer for me) and want to switch to a CMS? Does anyone have any recommendations for a publisher with multiple products, multiple product lines, and multiple services? Unfortunately, I have absolutely no experience with the various CMS systems on the market right now, beyond testing out both Joomla and Wikimedia and thinking, "Uh, no."

Here's what I'm looking for: I want the site to be easily updatable and easily skinnable on a per-item basis, whether that is per product or per service. EASY being the key word, here: I do not want to have to spend the time learning the ins-and-outs of the CMS just to make the damn site present information the way I want. A little CSS manipulation here and there is not out of the question, but I'm trying to get as far away from having to hack the codebase as possible.

Secondarily, I must be able to fully control the content displayed per page. That is, I don't want the same sidebar displaying all over the site, or to be trapped into a particular format for every page and/or every section. I desire centralized, web-based control of all content. What I'm not looking for, by example: I know WordPress does not fit the bill for me. It is far too structured regarding its display and utility. I have no real ability to create the above, not without digging around in the code and writing hacks myself. Joomla I found to be too difficult to easily skin or adjust content, or Wikimedia, which was far too difficult to skin. Rather, what might be termed "drag-and-drop" solutions are best.

Note: I realize I could make something for this myself, but I don't have the time to do so, nor do I particularly want to spend the time building my own CMS right now if I can avoid it. My life is not exactly lousy with free-time, so I prefer to spend what time I do get (that isn't spent with my family) creating content, not creating the boxes to put the content in.

Does anyone have a suggestion(s) that meet these criteria, or at least come close?

[Clay]

My own highly biased recommendation for a CMS is CeaMuS at http://www.ceamus.com.  I say biased because I'm the author of the package.  It's easy to use and has very minimal requirements from your server, since it doesn't require any plugin modules, scripting languages or database engines.