Is anyone else feeling CMSMS is more trouble than it's worth?

[Duketown]

What an excelent thread this is! Why: since everyone keeps an open mind and that gives/brings ultimately good quality.
I agree with Harlequinn that it seems to take to much time in some cases to make something work. As a professional IT person I normally (also in private live) try to push buttons until something works (think of the VCR to get recording etc). However when I try to make it do something special and not even pushing all the buttons at the same moment seems to work , I hear myself say RTFM (short for Read The F__ing Manual). And here CMS Made Simple stops, there is hardly to no manual.
I think that both the core development team (creating technical documentation) and the documentation team as mentioned by Westis have a lot of work to do. However all of us have limited time.
My request (I know it is to the whole community) is to write at least some documentation if you have discovered a trick or how to do something and send it of to the documenation team. They will have to shape the send information in a general layout and publish it (the sooner the better, since there is no reward seeing your documentation only being published half a year later).

[Sy]

I've used quite a few CMS systems, most are either to rigid or so dam flexible that it defeats the point of using one, most are full of security holes.

The NUKE variants are very rigid, easy to mod but are full of bugs.  MODX looks amazing, but I can't set aside enough time to get to grips with it, and it strikes me that if I have to do this I could achieve the same by writing my own.

CMSMS is a good balance of being extremely flexible and easy to use.  My first impressions of CMSMS was hell, this is simple.  Its very easy to work with, the lack of good boards is nicely filled by SMF which I can't rate highly enough.

All in all I think CMSMS is one of the best if not the best CMS around.

[Pierre M.]

Hello,

...I hear myself say RTFM (short for Read The F__ing Manual). And here CMS Made Simple stops, there is hardly to no manual.
I think that both the core development team (creating technical documentation) and the documentation team as mentioned by Westis have a lot of work to do. However all of us have limited time.

I hear myself say Read The Fantastic Manual, there is much of usefull information here :
-website : the features description, the roadmap, the screenshots... give a fair view of what the product is and how to use it (the technical approach behind it).
-wiki/doc and sample content : install process, upgrade, simple and advanced usage, light and heavy customization, roles and duties, under the hood technical information... newcomers (and old timers) seem to like these. It is not perfect but everybody can contribute.

The very best I have seen so far on the documentation topic as a support team member : sometimes several messages hit the forum all about a same "hot" topic, be it how to use a new feature or workaround a new bug or dealing with some advanced way of doing things. Once someone updates the doc (adding the "hot" topic to the wiki) and posts a reply in the forum with a link to the new manual information, the flow on the new topic vanishes in the forum. This means users find useful information in the forum+wiki and don't need to ask again.

BTW, sometimes, when given an answer, people say "thank you, I had'nt thought it could be that simple". As the product is wel designed it is not required to read much of the manual to get simple things done

Pierre M.

[Sy]

The fact that CMSMS is documentated at all is a big bonus, the fact that the documentation is so well done is another.  Most products out they're haven't got any documentation.

[Duketown]

I've not checked a lot of other CMS's and know therefor not if there are others with more/less documentation. I agree that on the documentation page there can be starting information found.
I took a better view at the documention starting page and selected 'special pages' (shown in the bottom). Now that opened new doors on how to look at the information available. I especially like http://wiki.cmsmadesimple.org/index.php/Special:Randompage. Using that one the 3rd trial gave me very handy tips and tricks. So I will have to reconcider my earlier RTFM mindspin and need to spend more time in the documentation part.
Would it help for all of us (newbies thru known-it-all allikes) to spend some more time in that part of the website?

[Dr.CSS]

Wish I had the time to add some of my posted answers to the Hand book...

[giggler]

To be fair, I thought I'd try EE.

Here's my first impression/experience:
1. install. in admin. now what?
2. I don't even know how to change a simple page like "about" or reorder things.
3. I just read this and scares me:http://www.inmostlight.org/2007/12/why- ... -wordpress
4. So no wonder why I can't find a page called about. There's only a template called "about" and you have to put your info there. So how can clients change this easily? Wouldn't they need to go into the template where they can make a mess out of the code?
5. It uses a different templating system. I love smarty and would hate to have to learn another...
6. template system is a bit of a joke I suppose...
7. seem like you have to manually put in the nav bar item.
8. I think I should give up now. I honestly don't now how this can be easy for clients to use if you have to dig into the template.
9. It does LOOK really nice and does attract designers because it looks nice...very easy on the eye.
10. I think EE is better for blogs, if you just want a blog though, wp is free.

CMSMS is by far the most simple...for me to use and for clients to use. It's flexible and I didn't have to read documentation so it didn't matter to me if doc was good or bad. Though I wish dev team had more time in their hands for commercial/paid projects or make a starter module that's easy to learn how to make a module =) I've tried whatever is in the forge, but no, can't do it.

I also agree with the news/blog. I'm waiting on that to have search-engine-friendly-url. Also waiting for the mod_rewrite to exclude things like put/anything/here/page.html from working.

[sonictrip]

time I'd rather spend developing not problem solving.

Isn't developing all about problem solving?

[seafdamon]

CMSMS RULES. That is all.

D.

[avon_g]

Ive played with other cms progs....have no php skills, found cmsms by accident and now have a website with some help from forum members (big massive thanks to mark )...is it mor trouble than it's worth? sounds to me more like do you have much patience and did you ask the right question? CMSMS is great....cant wait for version 2 and the other cms's you mentioned all started somewhere! Yes the News module could be better but I'd pay if someone was up for the task...no such thing as a free lunch and donations go a long way....

[calguy1000]

avon_g well said

[styson]

I love CMSms and I have had to hack up a few modules to get them to do what I needed.  This is the beauty of OS software.  I also worked with the Author of of the Forum module and he included functionality I wanted as part of the module.  He did the changes in a weekend and it saved me from forking his work.  I offered to do the coding and submit it but he was gracious and did the work himself. 

CMSms' module's only grow and get "better" or more feature rich if users work with the module's developer to add features/fix bugs/etc.  The Forum module is now more flexible because I brought a new paradigm to the table.  Submit your changes back tot he News module's maintainer and you might find that it gets rolled in to the base module. 

With all of that said, CMSms is like any other tool, it has it's applications and limitations so it wont work for all sites. 
This site http://www.cshp.org/ has about 55 pages so it's not a brochure site at all.  It uses the FEU and Customcontent modules for secured sections.  I added my own module to hook these two modules to an existing security system for user authentication.  The Forum module was modified to display an alternate field instead of the FEU username for the article's poster.  The client is very happy with the results.  Easy as pie to maintain. 

[rab]

I felt like harleyquinn several months ago, and complained on the forum that while the CMSms sales message implied it was simple enough for any user, reality was that it's pretty difficult for non-programmers, support is not geared to newbies, many of the modules don't work right out of the box, you're dead if you don't know CSS and Smarty, many support questions never get answered and many that do only in vague programming language. So I went off in search of a "better" CMS, i.e. Packt winners Joomla and Drupal ...

and came back to CMSms in a hurry!

What the big boys have that CMSms doesn't yet is better documentation, cleaner modules, and more people to help out in their support forums. What CMSms has that the big boys don't is a much cleaner and intuitive interface, a simpler process to get from initial installation to actual site publishing (albeit a fairly basic site), and most important, far less complexity - if you know CSS and Smarty, you know pretty much all you need to know!

I just published my first CMSms site yesterday (www.mylaxteam.org) - not that it's done, not even close! - but time constraints forced it's release. Although there's a lot of cleaning up to do, a lot of content to add, and a couple modules to try to get working, what's there now "ain't half bad"! I'm not a programmer - I use copy-paste trial-and-error coding in php, html and css - and I can't figure out why the footer is in different locations depending on whether I use 1-col template or 2-col, I never could get the php code from the original site to work properly as Smarty tags so ended up using Calendar and CompanyDirectory to provide similar functionality, and there are several things I would love to do on this site that I've seen work beautifully on other CMSms sites but have no clue how to do ...

BUT - the site's up and it ain't half bad! And isn't that the whole point?!

So I'm sticking with CMSms. As soon as I get a free weekend I plan to curl up in the den with the Smarty manual, maybe read my CSS Cookbook as well. I'm also working on a CMSms Beginner's Manual which more or less describes all I went through to get my first site up. And I think I'll contact the authors of some of the modules I'd like to use to ask for some help and/or offer a suggestion or two.

In the meantime, I'll be working on the lax site!

[yankee80]

I lurrrve CMSMS, but still can't help agreeing just a tiny bit with the original poster.

I would say I have excellent HTML+CSS skills and average PHP skills, still every time I start a new site I worry about getting the dynamic menus to look the same way as the webdesigner designed them.

Also, 99.9% of all websites require SEO friendly URLs, still (last time I checked) it's not implemented in the News and Calendar modules. Yes, I can tweak the PHP code myself, but it will be gone once I upgrade to a new version of CMSMS.

Today I've spent 20 minutes trying to figure out how to change the default hard-coded size of the Search input-box (don't want to change the module's php code).

Small, yet quite frustrating things.

Lots of thanks to all the friendly people in the forum helping out though!

Cheers
Eric

[nivekiam]

Today I've spent 20 minutes trying to figure out how to change the default hard-coded size of the Search input-box (don't want to change the module's php code).

You mean like this:

Code: Select all

#cntnt01searchinput {width: 20em;}