Am I on the right track? (project management) Topic is solved

[Lars Pontoppidan]

I'm in the process of selecting the right CMS, and I think CMSMS is my answer But before I invest a lot of time, let me quote what I asked in the opensourcecms.com forum: (and got no replies yet)

The key thing is that I want to publish projects. A project may consist of different resources: Hierachical documentation, downloads, photo gallery. But all these resources must be files in a folder.

Ideally, when I publish a new project I'll place all the files in a directory and edit a certain XML file declaring the resources of the project. Only thing to add to the CMS database would be name of project and path of mentioned XML file. The CMS should then show the project in the navigation, and the hierachical documentation plus the other resources should fork from that point.

I'm prepared to code mentioned project handling myself, but I'm not prepared to code the visual layout, news blog, forum, comments system etc, which is why I want a nice CMS to build on

Would it be feasible to code such a system for CMSMS? (I consider myself an able programmer)

Btw. If I'm completely in the woods with this kind of project management, please drop a line why...

[jelle]

Yes you would be able to that with cms, but I don't think it will be as easy as you think.
On the upside, apche can present files in a directory and with some trickery you might be able to present it in the same style as the rest of the site.
Uploading a whole directory tree with the default filemanager included in cms will be a pain, as you can't do mass uploads AFAIK.
rights management will be non existent.

What I don't understand is why you call this 'project management'? Usually this would be associated with Gant charts, task descriptions, assignments, milestones etc. 

[Lars Pontoppidan]

Thanks for the answer

Yeah, it might not be project management in the traditional sense. (aka use 50% of your time doing other stuff than the project...  )

The reason I want this, is because I have quite a number of hobby projects scattered around on my harddrive, and I want to manage them somehow. A requirement is that the projects should be "zippable" so I can do easy backups, and this leads to the concept of having a folder containing all resources. Then I thought, ahaa, I'll write some PHP that will make these project-folders render nicely on a webpage, and then I learned about CMS and there you go... 

So I won't be submitting file by file with the cms, I'll be ftp-ing folders. Perhaps that'll break the principle of a cms somewhat...

[fredt]

Perhaps you should just play with Project Management (the way you described it, not Gantt and co) tools from 37signals.com : BaseCamp or the lighter BackPack would probably be fine - and they offer free entry-level accounts. And it seems you also can publish things in it just by sending an email.

BTW, update-by-email would be a nice feature to implement in CMSMS...

[jelle]

BTW, update-by-email would be a nice feature to implement in CMSMS...

For a blog module: yes, for news entries: yes, for regular articles: won't do, you need more info than just the article text.
@Lars: maybe CMSMS will disappoint you. I don't think the developer(s) had the same thing in mind as you do.