To CMS or not to CMS?

gord

gord

gord

Soldato
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Well, its come to the point where we want to update our company website and I am a one man team.

I recently did one of the group's sites using Interspire Website Publisher. It's a good product, but has some drawbacks, such as a lack of login area.

Basically, I am stuck,

Do I build a bespoke site?
Do I find a CMS that can actually do what I want?

The last bit is where you guys may be able to help. Its difficult to evaluate a million CMS options. Does anyone have any ideas for the following requirements:

Full control over the homepage (this will be a jquery rotator advertising the key areas)
Mega menu navigation (pref auto populated with category/pages)
About 8 categories, with 20 pages in each (searchable).
Registration for members access content
Contact form

I've looked at Wordpress as an alternative but it feels so Bloggie.. I know it is quite flexible, but I don't know if it can do all the things I want.

Any help/suggestions/thoughts much appreciated.
 
Wordpress could easily do all the things you want and a lot of the stuff will be readily available through plug-ins.

Regarding it looking "Bloggie", WP can look exactly how you want it to as long as it's skinned correctly to match your design.
 
From what you have said for the site, Wordpress would certainly not be out of its depth.

Wait for Wordpress 3.0 to come out of Beta.

It's moving towards a CMS rather than a blog with the much awaited Custom Post Types (without the need for a plugin). It also has a new menu system built by WooThemes which will make customising the navigation even easier/better.

Google for Wordpress 3.0 beta and you can find out more :)
 
Thanks for that. Wordpress is certainly looking like a great option, especially being free. Still need to sell it to my boss, especially as its a different CMS from one a sister company recently implemented.

I saw this site posted by someone else: http://themeforest.net/

Very impressed by some of the designs on there and how much they have worked with wordpress. I'm tempted infact to take one of the themes there that has incorporated the majority of jquery etc I want and use it as a base.
 
Wassat Slinky?! You've caught me off guard with your crazy post!

Is that a WP customisation?
 
Expression Engine is another PHP based CMS.

I love developing with EE but as Slinky has said, you do have to pay for it.

It's much more CMS based than WP and a lot more expandable/powerful now it is built in CodeIgniter(a PHP framework) but it would require you learning a lot more to code proficiently in EE instead of WP.

http://expressionengine.com/
 
We are great fans of MODx as CMS - both in it's 2 forms Evolution, and Revolution.

Evolution is a one of the fastest CMS's out there (it rips WP to shreds in website speed).

Revolution is more scalable, and has a nicer admin panel (drag and drop Ajax in the page tree) and such. A touch slower but it's the future because the API has been re-worked to proved a robust platform.

It requires a bit of getting into because you don't need to do shed loads of programming. Whereas something like Joomla needs plugins for everything .. MODx just needs a few lines of code. For example an indexing of child pages you can construct it by about 1 line of code, plus 10 lines of HTML formatting for the output. Nothing more

There are many different engines inside MODx, which you supply input parameters to, and output HTML and the processing is all taken care of.

Here's an eample of one we did a bit ago: http://www.jumjo.it
 
I know that you've had a lot of recommendations but I'd suggest Concrete5.

I've recently started using it over joomla for small projects (<20 pages) and next time I get a large project will seriously consider it.

It is incredibly easy to use compared to Joomla. All you need to do is watch one of their screencasts and you'll be using it in no time. I also find it easier to theme as well. It's got a very very nice Ajax interface that allows you to edit pages and sections of pages.

It comes with an inbuilt JQuery rotator, very easy to use form generator and navigation generation. You can allow registration and member only content but I don't have any experience of how easy this is to do, but I imagine it wouldn't be hard. A small project that I've just finished with it using nothing but the previously mentioned features is oughtibridgegala.co.uk
 
blade007 said:
We are great fans of MODx as CMS - both in it's 2 forms Evolution, and Revolution.

Evolution is a one of the fastest CMS's out there (it rips WP to shreds in website speed).

Revolution is more scalable, and has a nicer admin panel (drag and drop Ajax in the page tree) and such. A touch slower but it's the future because the API has been re-worked to proved a robust platform.

It requires a bit of getting into because you don't need to do shed loads of programming. Whereas something like Joomla needs plugins for everything .. MODx just needs a few lines of code. For example an indexing of child pages you can construct it by about 1 line of code, plus 10 lines of HTML formatting for the output. Nothing more

There are many different engines inside MODx, which you supply input parameters to, and output HTML and the processing is all taken care of.

Here's an eample of one we did a bit ago: http://www.jumjo.it
Click to expand...

basically what has been said above.

if you take your time to read some of the guides it really becomes quite easy to use, just dont be put off by the high learning curve at first.

Tim
 
I don't want to hijack this thread but i have always made my websites in photoshop and then sliced and did CSS.

Now i realy want to use a CMS instead but how do i go about taking my custom made websites from photoshop into a CMS?

I don't want to compromise my designs though
 
Depends on which CMS you use as each one is different. But as a general rule you just slice up your HTML file and add bits of PHP here and there. Should be any compimise in the design if done correctly.
 
stoke1863 said:
I don't want to hijack this thread but i have always made my websites in photoshop and then sliced and did CSS.

Now i realy want to use a CMS instead but how do i go about taking my custom made websites from photoshop into a CMS?

I don't want to compromise my designs though
Click to expand...

Depends on the CMS, but I guess you'd need to get aquainted with a CMS, learn how to make templates for it and then do new versions of your own templates for that CMS.

If by compromise you mean change, I'm pretty sure you will need to make some changes, as in a CMS template might need you to include some bullet point graphics or something, that you might not have needed in your existing templates.

If you have a look at www.rockettheme.com, they release a phpBB themes for every Joomla theme they produce. They do a great job of it and they seem to use a template building platform called Gantry. Not sure what Gantry is or how it works though.
 
Yeh, I've given it some thought. I saw a site the other day that teaches you how to make your own CMS so I am thinking about following that to see how it goes.

Time frame is tight, but extendible if it's worth doing.
 
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