I'm a web developer by profession, but in my day-job I work exclusively with ASP.NET (yeah, yeah, I know - boo! hiss!
). Late last year, I accepted a sideline project for an aspiring performer (and personal friend) who wanted me to redevelop her website after the previous iteration (built by someone else) fell rather short of her expectations.As she was operating on a very low budget, yet had a fairly high set of requirements (ain't it always the way?), I first investigated open-source .NET CMS solutions, but while there were a couple of options that I felt might be suitable, I eventually decided to look for a PHP alternative after giving more thought to the hosting, user administration and support concerns. It seemed that with the broader offerings and community on this side of the fence, it would be cheaper to host, easier to eventually pass the site over to someone else (I could only commit to build and launch it for her) and there were also a lot more options to choose from. So armed with my requirements for a solution that would be flexible, extensible, easily administered by a (completely!) non-technical client and hopefully not too arcane for me to learn, I finally settled on CMS Made Simple after much research.
To begin with, the plan was just to replicate her previous site with a proper CMS backend plus some additional functionality, but in the end, due to my professional curiousity (combined with her professional guilt-tripping
) we ended up with a fairly full-featured instance (currently running 1.9.4.1)Installed modules:
- CGFeedback 1.3.3
- CGSimpleSmarty 1.4.8
- Cart 1.8.1
- CGExtensions 1.25.3
- CGEcommerceBase 1.3.1
- Products 2.11
- FormBuilder 0.7
- Gallery 1.4.4
- Captcha 0.4.3
- CGBlog 1.7.2
- CGFeedMaker 1.0.14
- CGPaymentGatewayBase 1.0.10
- PaypalGateway 2.3.4
- FrontEndUsers 1.12.16
- Orders 1.12.6
- SEOTools 1.2
- DestinationBasedShipping 1.1
- DownCnt 1.1.1
- Banners 2.5.1
- A custom theme (based on techjunkie, if anybody's interested)
- Heavy template modification
- Custom UDTs
- Custom "request handlers" (that's what we call 'em in .NET-ville, at least, not sure what the correct local lingo would be) for image gray-scaling, file download tracking and what will eventually be background image rotation
- A JS media player for mobile browser support
- A sprinkling of JQuery and CSS3 goodness
The owner is extremely happy with the end-results, so I feel I owe a big thank-you to the community here as whilst working on this over the last six months or so (in my spare time, at weekends, etc), I have never once actually had to post a request for help as many of the (numerous!) bugs and issues I encountered had already been documented in the wiki or reported and solved in these forums. That's a sign of a great community, in my book - so kudos to all of you who have unknowingly made my life that little bit less painful.
Anyway, I think I've waffled enough for now, so all that's left is to share the link itself. There are still a few minor things that I would've done had I had more time and opporunity, but I gladly accept any constructive feedback, whether it be positive or negative.
Rochelle Arthurs
Thanks for the pointer though, I've had a look and it would've definitely saved me a good deal of effort had I known about it previously, but I'm sure it'll find it's way into use at some point.