htp://www.mudsonline.net/ - Melbourne University Debating Society

[Jaani]

Hi all,

I thought I'd share with you a website I designed recently which uses CMS Made Simple for its backend.  It's a very basic site for a university society, but has some features worth noting:

• Clean URLs: all subpages are of the form /section/pagename/formaction (if any), without any extensions for longevity
• Three-level CSS dropdown: dynamically generated, displays fine in IE, Opera, Safari [??] and Mozilla
• Dynamic section sub-categorie:s automatic sibling listing in the right column using an additional content field
• Multiple content fields: using the {content_section name="blah"} tag
• Valid CSS and XHTML: amazingly, it actually validates
• Inline calendar implementation: using the display="list" mode in the right column

You can view the website here:

http://www.mudsonline.net/

Please post any comments or bug reports in this thread.

[Ted]

Yup, looks great in Safari. 

Very nice site, for sure!  I love the simple clean ones.  Nice job.

[Bjoern Kvernstuen]

Fairly developed page! I lke it!

IMPORTANT!
Since you've used CMS Made Simple to make this page, remember the licence CMS Made Simple was released under.
From http://www.mudsonline.net/admin it looks like you have used CMS MS and simply turned it into your own product, with pretty much CMS MS' functions. Unless you have made major changes, this is NOT your product, and you're obligated to have the CMS Made Simple logo and/or its footer atleast on the logonpage.

[koehler]

Looks nice and the icons on http://www.mudsonline.net/whats-on
are very interesting. Own made or licensed ?

[sjg]

Looks really nice.

I'm interested in your Revision Control extensions. Are you planning on releasing that back to the community?

[Ted]

Well, this falls into a grey area.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.htm ... stedPublic

However, I do think it's sneaky and just plain not cool to take something that's free, change a few lines of text and selling it as your own for $70/month.  Oh well, what can I do?  I don't think I can force him to even post his adminitrative alerts or revisions code because he's really not "releasing" the code.  It's just being run on his server...

*sigh* I hate having to deal with this crap.  But it definatly is a turn-off and makes me wonder if it's worth doing this kind of stuff and releasing it under the current license.

If anyone is smarter in the ways of the GPL, please let me know.  Thanks!

[Jaani]

Hi everyone,

Just to clarify, I'm not charging anyone to use CMSMS, nor am I redistributing it in any form.  The debating society is a non-profit organisation and is using it freely; they have access to the source code, too, which has all CMSMS copyright notices intact.  I am also more than happy to make all the modifications available to the CMSMS community.  CMSMS is a great product, and I wouldn't want to pass off the hard work of the community as my own.  The rebranding of the administration interface is purely cosmetic.

In any case, one of the great strengths of open source software, in my view, is its ability to be incorporated into commercial projects.  The GPL provides a legal mechanism by which to ensure any subsequent distribution occurs within the terms of the licence governing the original software, that is to say, that its source code also be disclosed.  The upshot for the open source community is that more commercial developers flock to open source projects like CMSMS (thus supporting their development by recontributing code to the base), and more users benefit from better, more widely disseminated FOSS.

Thanks for the positive feedback about the website.

Regards,

Jaani.

[Ted]

Jaani,

Thank you very much.  I didn't want to get too crazy about making accusations or starting any flame wars without hearing all sides of the story.  Glad to here everything is on the up and up.  *whew* 

Anyway, yeah, I'm sure everyone would be interested in any code submissions that you might have.  The revision history stuff was actually on my list for version 2.0, but who's to say we couldn't do it earlier? 

Thanks again!

[Jaani]

Looks really nice.

I'm interested in your Revision Control extensions. Are you planning on releasing that back to the community?

Hi sjg,

Alas, I haven't actually developed a revision control module for CMSMS yet, though it's certainly something I'd love to play a role in developing!

In Australia, there is a statutory requirement for websites of government departments to use CMSs with version tracking and rollback features, so this addition would really position CMSMS as a serious contender for these kinds of projects.  Currently, I have to use MySource Matrix for those applications, as this is the only CMS I know with reliable version management features.

koehler, the icons are free stock icons, but quite effective I think!  That listing of sub-sections is statically coded, but the sub-navigation menu in the right column is just a {bulletmenu} tag with the root node set to be the current page, which works quite well as a kind of breadcrumb.  I've added that as an extra content field, so it can be edited on the fly or have information placed above or below it (as is done on the main page).

Regards,

Jaani.

[kishman155]

There is a display problem at 8 August in
http://www.mudsonline.net/moduleinterfa ... returnid=7
with firefox and ie6..

its small but its there

Kishman155

[Jaani]

Thanks for pointing that out Kishman.

It looks like it's user error, unfortunately.  I'll edit the page to fix it up.

Cheers.

[koehler]

koehler, the icons are free stock icons, but quite effective I think!  That listing of sub-sections is statically coded, but the sub-navigation menu in the right column is just a {bulletmenu} tag with the root node set to be the current page, which works quite well as a kind of breadcrumb.  I've added that as an extra content field, so it can be edited on the fly or have information placed above or below it (as is done on the main page).

Could you please tell me the url of the stock from where you
get these very interesting icons, i love to put some of them into
a project.


Regards,

Michael

[Jaani]

Hi Michael,

I believe they were released as part of various packages at http://www.deviantart.com/.

Regards,

Jaani.

[koehler]

I believe they were released as part of various packages at http://www.deviantart.com/.

Sorry for beeing late, but *thank you*!