Can CMSMS Do This Stuff?

[mark99]

I must be testing about 10 different CMS solutions now, it's taking hours of my life up each day trying to find one that fits the bill. Currently I'm using a fork of CuteNews PHP that has been abandoned and really need something more modern to replace it with.

CMSMS is one of the 10 solutions I am testing but rather than spend another 10-20 hours trying to figure out how to do what I want, I thought it might be simpler to just ask the community. Here are my key requirements, can CMSMS do these?

1. Automatic 'Related News Links' generation, for linking similar news articles to a news item that has been posted (i.e. find similar news titles, perhaps based on matching 'tag' categories or something like that).

2. News Comments with Anti-Spam (i.e. recaptcha support).

3. Ability to add keyword "Tag" categories to news items, which are a bit like categories.. oh everybody knows what tags are by now hehe. A "tag cloud" would also be fun to offer.

4. Fast, low amount of queries and good cache management.

5. Ability to show number of article views (i.e. pageviews per individual "news item" to help gauge popularity and perform no.7 below).

6. Ability to display special summary news headlines (e.g. Top 4 news items from the past week, month or all time (based on pageviews and date range sorting)).

7. Link glossary, allowing specific words/names to be automatically linked in a news item (i.e. a name like "Joeblogs" and URL "joe.com" would be added and then any matching words are auto-linked in the posted article/news item).

8. Ability to output both Google Newsfeeds and RSS feeds for the site, ideally just for news content but the option to have additional feeds for other content would be a bonus.

9. Ability to put a news article into more than one category (multiple category selection).

10. Ability to split specific articles you write over multiple pages and output a simple index link for each page (e.g. Page 1, Page 2 etc.).

11. Ability to preview a news article before its posted to test that my styling works correctly; an effective WYSIWYG editor that shows what your article will look like on-the-fly would also work.

12. Easy access to templates, ideally through either or both the UI and direct file editing.

[mark99]

Slimmed down my wishlist a bit to the bare minimum as it was a bit long hehe.

[jmcgin51]

1. I believe there is a solution for this via a UDT.  Can't recall the specifics, but I'm pretty sure is possible.

2. Yes, via CGFeedback module.

3. Believe yes, although I don't use this feature so can't provide details.

4. Yes (define "fast", "low amount", and "good"????)

5. Believe yes.

6. Yes - might require custom UDT.

7. Believe this was possible via a module in previous versions.  Haven't checked to see if that module is still compatible with newer versions.

8. Not sure about GoogleNews, but definitely RSS via CGFeedmaker (works with any module that supports summary output.

9. Yes, via 3rd-party module (i.e. CGBlogs).  Unfortunately not possible with the default News module.

10. Believe yes.

11. There is no preview for news articles, but you can use the WYSIWYG or save the article as Draft and then have a (protected) page that shows draft articles.

12. Yes.  Core has db templates.  External access via the TemplateExternalizer module.

The above is correct to the best of my knowledge...

[calguy1000]

personally it sounds like you want to create a site that is based around 'articles'. like a magazine or something like that.

If I were you I would find an application that is centered around this idea.  CMSMS is certainly not. 
It can do some of that stuff, but as it is not it's primary focus, you will always be left with a few holes, and or workarounds for things.

Using CMSMS for a magazine type site, depending of course on the site could be like using a VW Golf as a cargo truck.... you may be able to get by, but it won't work that well and the suspension will certainly creak under the load.

[mark99]

Gosh I had no idea CMSMS wouldn't be able to handle an information news site, is there any reason for that?

[jmcgin51]

It's not that CMSMS can't do it, but that's not its forte.  If you really want to use CMSMS, and you're willing to put in the effort, you can probably achieve acceptable results.  But you may have to work harder at it than with a system developed from the ground up for article-based content.

From http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/about-link

CMS Made Simple™ is an open source ( GPL) package first released in July 2004. Its built using PHP that provides website developers with a simple, easy to use utility to allow building small-ish (dozens to hundreds of pages), semi-static websites. Typically our tool is used for corporate websites, or the website promoting a team or organization, etc. This is where we shine. There are other content management packages that specialize in building portals, or blogs, or article based content, etc. CMS Made Simple can do much of this, but it is not our area of focus.

[mark99]

I do like a challenge .

Anyway I'll keep CMSMS close to hand and maybe use it on smaller projects as part of an experiment. So far as I can see the main problem it has is, IMO, in its mod catalogue. The mod forum and database/catalogue are not well structured to inter-connect with one another and don't provide enough information. See vBulletin.org for how to do mods databases properly.

When I saw a mod that was useful it was hard to find anything beyond basic details. No forum, no screenshots, no extended descriptions.. its all too vague. That's fine if you grew up with CMSMS but otherwise it's a huge drawback that could be easily addressed with 30mins of work and a few standards for the mod forum.

[kendo451]

I've used CMSMS for several client websites that are magazines or magazine-type.

I created my own article and author modules using "TPL Module Maker" module.  Then I tied it in with Amazon's affiliate program.

My customers really liked it.

CMSMS isn't made for magazines out of the box.  But if you are comfortable enough with PHP to write your own modules for it, you'll find you can really do some amazing things with this little CMS platform.

The larger of the sites I'm running this for gets about 18,000 visits per month.