CMS question

[Gravity]

I'm about to start figuring out how to implement joomla on a site... but before I do, I was just wondering what opinions were on the best CMS. Also, what is better, an open source CMS or Adobe contribute? I design all my sites in Dreamweaver btw...

[shalom_m]

So far, I find Joomla the best to work with.

[digizan]

I'm about to start figuring out how to implement joomla on a site...
Are you familiar with PHP? My PHP skills fall somewhere betweeen advanced beginner & intermediate and I just recently installed Drupal & Joomla to see which would be better for a client.

The installation of both was a snap and both have lots of 3rd party add-ons, but I'm going with Drupal because I found the PHP code much easier to deal with, it was highly recommended by serveral PHP programmers who are vastly more experienced than I, and—most importantly—because it's more suitable for the client's needs.

I was just wondering what opinions were on the best CMS.
It depends on your client's needs. A full-fledged CMS may be overkill if your client has no need for all the bells & whistles. There's a good CMS comparison tool at: http://www.cmsmatrix.org/

You might also want to consider customizing something like WordPress or Textpattern as they can also function as a CMS. Visit their sites and see what feautres they offer, google for reviews and/or comparisons, download them and poke around in the code to see if you'd be comfortable dealing with one than the other, etc.

Also, what is better, an open source CMS or Adobe contribute? Again, it depends on your client's needs. Which would they be more comfortable with? Do they have someone to maintain the site in-house, or are the going to contract you to do it?

A CMS shouldn't just be installed and left out in the wilderness by itself. It will require updates, security patches, database backups, etc. Adobe Contribute would also, however it wouldn't require doing anything server-side.

Hope that helps a little.

Digi

[dhdesignz]

Hi all, I am in the same boat as you Gravity. I am about to start a website design for a client in Dreamweaver, but the clients wants to update content themself, e.g. newsletters, calendar, etc. They basically want templates designed which they can edit. They are not web savy either so a simply CMS is required.

I am not familiar with PHP, and was hoping there was a simple CMS which I can lay 'on top' of the Dreamweaver site.

After reading your feedback digizan I am not sure I am comfortable with something that requires major coding - typical designer aye?

What would you guys recommend? I checked out Joomla too, but it looked asif one would be constricted to their templates.

Thanks for your input :-)

[hewligan]

Pretty much all CMS rely on some sort of template system. But it's usually pretty easy to write your own template.

The overwhelming majority of the content of a Joomla template is HTML. There are a few lines of PHP that have to go in them, but they tell you what they are, so you don't even need to know PHP - though if you do, you can do some more interesting things with the template.

[digizan]

After reading your feedback digizan I am not sure I am comfortable with something that requires major coding - typical designer aye?What hewligan said—i.e. you wouldn't have to do PHP coding just to create a custom template, but you would need to be comfortable with CSS & HTML.

You might want to take a look at the links below to get an idea of what you'd be getting yourself into:

http://dev.joomla.org/content/view/1136/79/1/0/
http://www.compassdesigns.net/tutorials/48-joomla-template-tutorial.html?start=2

I am not familiar with PHP, and was hoping there was a simple CMS which I can lay 'on top' of the Dreamweaver site. Because a CMS site like Joomla isn't static, that really won't work.

With a CMS, content is separated from presentation. When your browser requests a Joomla page from a web server, it recognizes the PHP code, passes it to the PHP processing module, then PHP runs the scripts that pull the appropriate content from a database (also on the server), inserts it into a template (on the server), and finally the server sends the output to your browser.

IOW, what you see has been assembled dynamically on the server before being sent to your browser for viewing. DW cannot handle that. You can still edit the code in DW, but not in the WYSIWYG manner that you may be accustomed to.

I hope that doesn’t confuse you even more—I often have a tendency to either under- or over-explain things. :o

Digi

[dhdesignz]

thanks for that Digi

Will have a read. I think I might have a play first. I do love challenges and want to know how to do this - its just the way I am. For this project I may have to admit to my limitations.

Saw there were plenty of templates (PHP) available on the site I was planning to host the site. www.3ix.org (http://www.3ix.org). So, I may just use one of these and try to customise the design. But don't tell anyone I did this! ha ha.

The client requires a site they could easily update themselves. This means the CMS needs to be easy to use for them. I've not worked with CMS before, but will give it a go.

Thanks for the help!
DH

[digizan]

thanks for that Digi….I think I might have a play first. I do love challenges and want to know how to do this - its just the way I am. You're welcome, DH. I'm the same way re learning new things. Good luck with the site!

Digi