Set up CMSms sites for IT-challenged users to manage themselves

[rab]

I've searched the forums for many hours and found several useful posts for pieces of what I need to do, but still not sure how the whole project can be done. If anyone can point me in the right direction, I would be very grateful. The idea is this:

I need to create multiple CMS sites for people with zero website expertise to manage all by themselves. My idea is to build the initial site for them, and include an admin section which would work similar to this:

1. They click on some button to put them into "Edit site content" mode
2. They view their site the way it is displayed in normal mode, navigate to the page and section they want to change, then click on the section (content block?).
3. The system displays all available content (in summary form) that would work in that specific section, i.e. if it's a news article all news articles are listed, if it's a link all links are displayed, if it's the Joke of the Day all jokes are listed, etc.
4. Once they then click on the item (article, link, joke, whatever) they want to use, it automatically replaces what was in that section originally.
5. Done!

The source of the new content would include the website's own DB as well as that of a master "library" site which all website owners have access to. If the user (website owner) selects content from the library site, it is automatically downloaded and saved to their site's DB, then inserted into the appropriate section.

How easy(?) would this be to do? I'm not looking for someone to detail exactly how to do it (although that would really be nice!), just want to know if it's doable (either exactly as described or similar) and where I could go for guidance. I only know very basic php, html and css, but have created several ecom sites (via Zen Cart) after lots of documentation reading, trial and error coding and forum posts, and hope I can do the same with CMSms.

Thanks!

[Pierre M.]

Hello,

I don't think CMSms is the product you have in mind. If I understand you correctly, you want a big set of "content" and some "broadcast switch" to send each content to an appropriate "section", as would operate the editor in chief of a news paper. May be the news module can come near to your need managing news only. But I think CMSms is more a webpage maker where you structure the content hierarchy and attach a layout to each page. I mean it is more a structured tree of layouted pages than a layout of unstructured content. CMSms allows you the always reorder the structure as much as you want (independantly of the layout) and may be this structure reordering can cope with your "set of content" managing.

BTW, for your point 1 only, have a look at the help of the {edit} tag. For point 2 only, you are close to describe CMSms' Content->Pages feature.

I think the best for you is to try CMSms.

Pierre M.

[rab]

Hi Pierre,

Thanks for the response. I really like CMSms and plan to use it for several new projects in the works. However, the project described above is at the top of the list right now. If you think CMSms may not be the right tool for this, do you (or anybody else) know of a system that is?

Quite frankly, I really believe this is a direction CMS package developers need to explore. As simple as CMSms is (especially when compared to other popular CMS products), there is no way someone without knowledge of html, css, ftp and a bit of php, plus lots of time, could even hope to put a web site together. But if a "developer" created a basic site, then provided simple online forms and menus to allow the site owner to perform their own updates/edits - well, I think the potential there is enormous.

I'm going to continue to pursue this using CMSms, but if anyone knows of a system that has these capabilities already, please let me know.

Thanks!

[michelG]

Rab,

If you do not mind an open source using ASPX:

Similar to your concept but even easier for the person editing the content: investigate DotNetNuke V4.6+

http://www.dotnetnuke.com/


Michel

[rab]

Hi Michel,

Sorry for my delayed response - got sidetracked by a different issue. Anyway, thanks for your suggestion, but it took me too long to learn what little php I know now - I just couldn't justify having to learn a new language. I also don't much like MS. However, on the positive side, I think I may have actually figured out how to do this with what limited knowledge I have - I hope so anyway!

Thanks again for the help.