Is CMSMS right for me?

[mattandaniel]

Hi there,

I'm currently trying to settle on a cms to use for my clients. So far CMSMS is in front when it comes to ease of use. I really like the way you can have multiple content blocks - so cool!

Anyway, I have to do a site for a client which will serve as a good test case for CMSMS. Here's a couple of quick questions:

1. The site will be for both Australia and New Zealand. The majority of the content will be shared, although some pages will be 'Australia Only' or 'New Zealand Only', and there will be some pages where there is a different version for each country. When the user enters the site they will select their country and be shown the appropriate content. Does this sound possible in CMSMS.

2. I'm a bit concerned at adopting CMSMS for a commercial site before it's even at 1.0. Is it stable?

3. How far off is multi-lingual support?

4. Is there an e-commerce module in the pipeline?

5. I really like the ellnav functionality you have. Is it possible to have the left menu display submenu options as well?

That will do for now. Thanks for your help, and congrats on a good-looking CMS!

Matt




P.S. Sorry if this thread should be somewhere else 

[Darwin Web Design]

Hi there
I can only comment on second question.  I'm a professional web designer (usually Dreamweaver) and just created a commercial site for an Australian company.  I had no practice with CMSMS first, just decided it was what I was going to use as I had a 'feeling' it would be right and I was spot on.

The site I just completed features a search engine, a member login area, event calendar, training calendar and news module.  Quite a bit daunting for my first cms site and apart from some tricky installation problems and a few queries here and there (devleloping on my own WAMP server then trying to move across to the client's Windows Server then eventually moving to another hosting company), I can highly recommend it.  I now have 3 more clients whom I'm developing sites for and plan to stay with CMSMS for all of my future sites.

I researched for days on a suitable CMS and particularly liked CMSMS for ease of updating for the client, I was extremely fussy when I researched and was easily put off by some of the bigger heavier cms's like Joomla, Typo3 etc.  Afterall, the client wants to edit their own site these days and only have computer knowledge at word processing level.  The admin section is very very simple to get around and you can customise it with the client's logos etc, set permissions for the client so they cannot accidentally wreck any templates or style sheets.  The list goes on.

I completed staff training for the site last week, it took a few hours to cover everything - and the client was very impressed with ease of use which is the main thing for me - that the client is happy and the site looks good, loads fast, utilises CSS.

And ofcourse for designers we are not restricted in any way, we can still design using CSS and there are lots of exciting modules to try out.  Most queries can also be found or answered on the forums.  My next site needs a photo gallery and I'm researching which one to use.  The only concern I have is that I may need to do an e-commerce site soon so I may just have to use another package for that and use CMS for everything else.  I believe ecommerce modules are in the works though?  Good luck.

[mattandaniel]

Thanks for your reply, Gecko! It's good to hear that you've been proving CMSMS out in the real world.

Sadly, the more I look into CMSMS, it doesn't seem like I'll be able to do the multi-site thing without hacking the code somewhat. I may have to go elsewhere to find what I need - but I'll be back, I promise!

[Elijah Lofgren]

Sadly, the more I look into CMSMS, it doesn't seem like I'll be able to do the multi-site thing without hacking the code somewhat. I may have to go elsewhere to find what I need - but I'll be back, I promise!

Ted plans to make CMSMS truly multilang for 1.1, but it will be a long time before that. We need to get 1.0 out the door first.

You may want try out CMSMadeSimple Multilingual: http://dev.cmsmadesimple.org/projects/multilang

This is an inoficiall multilingual modification of the CMSMadeSimple core. Every page shows in multiple languages. The site must have identical page structure in all languages.