CMS/Blog software?
coded (51 points) | Tue, 2005-05-31 18:58I recently re-designed the currently 'static' site at my current employer and now I'm spending much too much time doing manual updates to it. Also every minute change to the site has to be approved by at least three (though many times it will be 5 or more) people. I'd like to implement a cms of some sort that a few people could access and collaborate on changes.
I'm not a programmer but I understand basic php fairly well. I definitely can't create anything from scratch yet.
I was wondering what CMS/blog software everyone would recommend. I've been looking at things like Drupal and I'm already quite familiar with WordPress and was wondering what people would recommend? Blog software such as WordPress could definitely work for the site but I'm guessing that something like Drupal would be much more flexible in the long term.
I have mySQL and PHP5 on the server and I might as well get some use out of them.
The biggest hurdle I can see at this point would be styling the CMS to match with the current design. a minor problem that I'm confident I could do in an afternoon.
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Blog: Electricity & Adrenaline
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Drupal has very strong styling capabilities, but I don't think it can handle the approval process you need out of the box. What Drupal can do is that you may be able to work on an unpublished page until it's correct and then once it's ready you can publish it, but it can't follow up on who has seen it and who has approved it and such. You would need to coordinate the approval process manually. However you can always ask for new features for a fee from the Drupal programmers. I don't think it would be very difficult to do actually.
Let me know if you need any assistance with styling you Drupal page. I've done several Drupal themes, so I have some experience.
I think it is worth cheking out.
The customizations you can apply make it very flexible and the publishing process can also be setup to a certain extent. I agree with Ivan leave the articles unpublished and once they have been approved finalise them.
The main site also gives you a general idea with plenty of guides and tutorials.
Just chiming in to say that Drupal does does have an approval process that does what you're looking for.
You can set it up so that a certain peice of content has to have X-number of positive votes until it is automatically published.
You can set up certain roles (such as "staff" or "publishers") and then give them the ability to vote positive or negative towards content that no one else can see. Once the content gets the number of positive votes you determine, it goes live.
That's true. If you have a definite list of people approving the content you can use this module: http://drupal.org/node/11170
This sounds great. Just about exactly what I was looking for. Can the people approving content edit said content with that module installed? It's not a big problem if they can't but it would be a nice feature.
Is it easy to remove the "submitted by ..." area and the comments section of new posts? Static pages easy to add/edit?
I'm going to install drupal on a private server soon and attempt to get it working the way I want. Thanks for all your help guys.
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Blog: Electricity & Adrenaline
Yes. Easy to remove the "submitted by..." Yes. Easy to add edit static pages. You can install Drupal on your Mac easily to run your developer site locally. Let me know if you need help!
I finally got drupal installed locally (mysql is a pain). I Have no clue where to start for the theming. It's a bit different than what I'm used to working with. I'm working on restyling the 'gespa' theme for now.
If you'd like to take a look at my old files etc and maybe give your opinion on how I should proceed on styling this thing I'd very much appreciate it. The site that I''m trying to replace using drupal is currently located at www.elitesportswear.com.
My goal is to keep the site looking almost exactly as it currently is without many significant changes except for the backend. Though If I have to change the odd thing here and there that's okay as well.
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Blog: Electricity & Adrenaline
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Blog: Electricity & Adrenaline
That's relatively easy to achive. You may want to try to use Kubrick as a starting point.
If you want to have a look at all of the different open-source CMS and blog systems out there, have a look at openSourceCMS. It's a great site that allows you to log in as administrator to all of the various software packages, and see them from the inside out.
For what it's worth, I've settled on Mambo for CMS, and pLog for blog software. The right choice depends on what features you want; I'm not sure whether Mambo has an approvals module, but it certainly allows you to keep new pages un-published until they are approved, and it has comparatively easy content management for non-techies.
Good luck!
www.arvanadesign.com
Arvana
arvanadesign.com
Wow.. that's a great resource!
I've tried a few CMS's in the past including e107, GeekLog, Xoops, and a number of Nuke variants etc.
What I tend to like about things like drupal and WordPress µ etc. Is the simpler GUI (usually) and blog-like publishing.
I currently use e107 on a community/portal site that I run and WordPress for my personal blog. The site I'm slaving over at work isn't a portal OR a blog but fits somewhere in between.
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Blog: Electricity & Adrenaline
Hi everybody, i'm new.
I've been looking for some CMS aswell and i've been testing textpattern for a while now, but it's just not the CMS i want. The CMS that arvana pointed out, Mambo, is closer to what i want. It's just huge! Is it easy to change? I'm thinking it will take ages to get to the look i want.
"Easy" is a relative term in CMS -- I don't think that there is any package that lets you create an extensively customized design without getting to know their guts a little.
The systems that use Smarty templates are great, because once you get the hang of them your knowledge will apply to other systems in the future as well. The best approach if you're starting out is probably to work with an existing template and tweak it until you have it looking just the way you want it. I don't find that Mambo has all that many template files, but there certainly may be other CMS's that are simpler to customize.
One thing that I find interesting on the openSourceCMS site is that there is very little difference in the ratings of the top 10-12 systems. Making a choice mostly depends on what features you want to have on your site -- each of them has their particular strengths and weaknesses.
Realistically, you should expect to spend at least a week, full time, getting a new CMS site up and running. The more customization you want, the more time it will take you. But it's a great feeling when you get it all together!
www.arvanadesign.com
Arvana
arvanadesign.com
Templetes are very nice. I'm actually looking for some CMS that's totally based on templete files. I installed Drupal earlier this day and i can't seem to find any templete files there. Do you know any CMS that uses templetes with only the two features of image gallery and page management?
Drupal has several 'template engines', so you can do just what you want.
The default template engine so far is xtemplate, but it is being replaced by the much more usable 'PHPTemplate' engine.
I'd recommend downloading the PHPTemplate engine for your installation, install it (easy as uploading a directory).
And in your /themes directory are several themes which you can edit.
I personally like the Bluemarine PHPTemplate theme, as I think it is a good base to edit for your personal site or use.
On a side note, I wish I had more time - I'd really like to re-code Bluemarine as a 100% CSS theme with no tables to replace the default tabled layout.
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Josh Stevens | Nautilus7 Design
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Josh Stevens | My Site
My CB Blog
That would be great! Friendselectric is a pure css theme. Have you tried it?
I've seen/tried Freindselectric on the Drupal Theme Garden, and I think it's really nice.
I imagine a CSS version of Bluemarine would be quite similar in structure, as is Kubrick.
On my site I used Bluemarine as a base, and it is a kind of hybrid CSS/Table layout. I replaced half the tables with CSS, but didn't get around to the other half. It turned out how I wanted it, so I stopped fussing with it LOL.
(I'm reverting back a different CSS theme I made for WordPress when I used that before Drupal though, and the Drupal conversition isn't finished yet).
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Josh Stevens | Nautilus7 Design
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Josh Stevens | My Site
My CB Blog
Ivan has persuaded me to use Drupal for my new site which will be online sometime when mother of time is being nice to me and let me finish the site..
Design is pretty much done, just the CSS and some tear apart the drupal code left and the man to help me with that is Ivan (Our beloved CB founder)
Drupal seems nice, even for beginners like me, but some things would be nicer if they made such as web install and so on =)
I've been looking at Drupal system but i can't seem to find any image upload thingy. I would like just something like the critique section on this site. I'm not finding anything like that on drupal.org.
Can anyone help me with that?
Check out the image.module here:
http://drupal.org/project/Modules
Ok thanks, i didn't see that one. And it's not working properly for me. But i think that is server issue not something to do with the module.
I'll post a local Drupal installation guide tomorrow. That will hopefully work better than working on the server.
Thats great Ivan, thanks alot.
I'm just curious.. Do I really need to have login for other people then the admin on a Drupal site?
If not then it becomes more and more a community script?
Are you asking if it's necessary to log-in for all users other than the admin? The answer is no. You can have only one user the admin and all users can post/comment as anonymous or non-verified users.
I'm not sure what you mean by community script...
pmachine is a good alternative. They're giving pmachine pro now for free, and it's pretty good.