CMS Made Simple Forums

My answer would be 0 I guess.

However i had worked on 10 or so sites before using CMSMS, just they didn't use CMS's.  I guess my nearest experience to using a cms was installing and managing forum software.  My experience of this made CMSMS easy to install.

When i made my first site in CMSMS I was making the transition over from making sites in Dreamweaver to hand coding sites and starting to take CSS seriosuly.  As such my 'real' knowledge of css and html was very limited.  However I found customizing cmsms really quite easy.  A combination of trial and error and support from the community saw me making my own template very quickly.  I made both the Template and the css quite confortably in dreamweaver.

The only real sticking point for me was customizing the php in the news system template, but once again trial and error and support sorted this out relatively quickly.

Now I am hand coding all my sites and have a pretty good understanding of both html (and its variants) and css and am confident that CMSMS reall is the cms for small to medium sites.  Its perfectly pitched at the beginner to intermediate web designer and for that reason I think its great.

Richard

Hi (my first post here too)

My answer would be 0 but I am quite excited by CMSMS.

I have written a few 'static' sites with php backends for news and guestbooks and I have used Smarty before.

I have been playing with all the 'popular' CMS for a while now and I always just give up because they are too difficult to restyle. Also I have a lot of home grown JS that it was hard to integrate and they just do too much for the size of sites I get involved in.

I had actually decided to 'go it alone' and try to code myself something simple based around Smarty for a bit of a project when I found yesterday you had already done it.   

I'm going to  port one of my smaller sites over as an experiment - it'll be fun I think.

Steve

I had seen content managers before but I thought they were so complex and hard to use, then I heard about "Easy" CMSs like Joomla and Drupal and well... that didn't go so well, they're overrated and not Easy at all.

Then browsing thru opensourcecms.com I came across CMSMS and haven't looked back since. I had only done static sites before I found it and now I have switched quite a few of those static sites to CMS. So I guess the short answer to the poll question is zero.

I'm a little late to jump on the voting. But I have designed hundreds of sites (probably 25%/75% MovableType/WordPress) before stumbling onto CMSMS.  And now, after installing a sandbox for myself, I've embraced it. 

Everyone is on the WordPress bandwagon.  It's now being used as a full-fledged CMS.  And that's okay.  But sometimes, it simply is NOT the solution for every client's need.  But neither is CMSMS.  What it does very well is form building.  It has a very intuitive back end and all the modules have plenty of help.  It's also great that it runs on the Smarty system which has its own well documented help files. 

So far, I've built two web sites using CMSMS, first our neighborhood civic club, which was originally running Drupal. Drupal was so hard to figure out that it was no pleasure for me to work on the site and it was less of a pleasure for the civic club officers to login to the site to try to post content to it. 

Once I found CMSMS, I knew it was the solution and now the civic club members are busy posting news items, president's messages, uploading PDF versions of our monthly newsletter .. all with ease.  The design isn't a marked departure from the straight out of the box design, but we like it:

http://www.idylwood.org

The second site is a lawyer's web site, which is currently still in the late stages of development and is awaiting approval from the State Bar of Texas [which due to its strict ethics requirements, must approve every legal web site in Texas]. Again, because he needed some complex forms and wanted to post news items and updates on the front page, CMSMS was the preferred solution.  He too is pleased with how easy it will be for him to maintain his news section and updates. 

The third site is also a Drupal refugee.  I chose CMSMS for this due to this client's need to have a separate, secure login area for paying visitors (she is offering Serbian Lessons online).  There will be a lot of content and the MLE module will also come in handy.  This site is in its early stages of development and won't be ready until Spring.

I can't say enough good about this CMS. My only disappointments are that the forum and blog modules are somewhat weak. So much so that the CMS Made Simple website has chosen other software (Simple Machines Forum and WordPress) to drive its own forum and blog, respectively. 

I'm looking forward to hanging around here a bit more and really rolling up my sleeves and digging into CMSMS.

I'm also a bit late for this poll, but I'm also new to the CMSMS party.  I discovered CMSMS through a recommendation on the Macintosh community site www.macintouch.com.  I'm happy I found it!

I just finished migrating my site from another CMS (Plone) to CMSMS:

http://www.sfsidewalkastronomers.org

The new site is based on CMSMS with a modified version of the "Clean Orange" theme from the themes site.  It took about three weeks of research, CMSMS setup time, content migration, editing, and finally moving everything to the hosting site.  I pretty much worked on it weekends and other bits of my spare time.

I'm happy to say I didn't run into many issues or problems in setting up CMSMS and getting my site running. The CMSMS installer is a thing of beauty, validating the system's environment so that things will work once you clear the installer.  About the only thing that could have been better would be premade scripts to set the proper permissions on the site directories.

I chose CMSMS over the other leading candidate (Website Baker) due to CMSMS's use of Smarty as the template engine.  I really like the simple syntax of Smarty and it's very convenient to work with.  I looked at other CMS systems and was scared away by the adminstration interfaces - especially Joomla, which looked like Mission Control and made no sense to me at all.

CMSMS is a breeze with its simple system of templates and stylesheets, and the ability to assign any template to any page on the site.  Smarty makes it simple to customize templates, and the CMSMS module tags make it easy to drop in bread-and-butter stuff like a sitemap, a calendar, or a contact form. What I really want from a CMS is something that allows me to spend as little time as possible on site maintenance, and it looks like CMSMS is very successful in this regard.

My old CMS (Plone) was just a disaster and I'm happy to be rid of it.  The Plone management UI has a thin veneer that's friendly for entering and editing content, but if you want to go beyond that for customization and maintenance, you have to work with the underlying Zope management console which was the most cryptic thing in the world.  I'm a professional software engineer with nearly 20 years development experience, and I found it difficult to work with.

Finally, Plone had performance issues, used too much memory, and some of its modules (news and events) were very inflexible and forced me to work within their limitations.  Good riddance.

I do have some issues and wishlist items for CMSMS, mostly as pertains to the Calendar module.  I'll save those for another post.

I had done probably a dozen or so static sites before I found CMSMS, but none with a CMS...always wanted to creating dynamically-driven sites, but all the other options (joomla, Drupal, etc.) just seemed more hassle than they were worth. CMSMS is an answer to prayer for me...I can finally develop a website for a technophobe, teach them how to use it, then hand it over to them.

reidjazz

Before I found CMSMS I had tried about every single cms on the Open Source CMS directory. I had made about 3-5 different web sites, the only professional one being my hosting. After finding CMSMS I moved my hosting and IT consulting site over to it and also began creating web sites for other companies. So in short I had tried others, but never actually had any good professional web site until I used CMSMS.

I...

1996: used Microsoft Word "Internet assistant". Built my first website.

1997: moved on to Microsoft Frontpage. built some more sites

2000: changed to MicroMedia Dreamweaver. was able to make nicer websites, but still static.

2004: was introduced WebGUI. That was interesting: I was able to build a (tables based) template in MMDW and use it inside WebGUI. My first dynamic site was a fact. The downside however was, high requirements on serverside. You can't make a WebGUI site on just any host.

2005: started thus looking for a PHP/MySQL alternative. I found 2 interesting ones in cmsmatrix.org.
- Looked at Jommla for a bit, found it too complicated and saw no way to include my own html-tables-template.
- was able to use CMS Made Simple fairly easy, and with my html-tables-templates!

2008: run about 6 CMSMS sites now. The recent ones based on the div-structure that comes with the installation.

I can get a site up in about 10 minutes now.

I am very impressed with the wide functionalities available in CMSMS. The reader will have to trust that I am not affiliated to the CMSMS team, nor requested to write this. As far as I can oversee, this is just simply an example of the success of the Open Source Model. The credits go to a core group of programmers / enthusiasts.

I can teach my clients to use the system, in about one hour. By phone even. The wysiwyg is intuitive. I usually start with the upload of some pictures, but then after a while I discover the client has started uploading his/her own.

I have no idea how to program PHP nor MYSQL. How to formulate CSS coding, I don't know either really. I usually copy it from somewhere else. When I don't need a line, I coment it out, in order to keep the syntax.

I'm very happy with CMSMS.

I do however have this constant slight fearfull feeling of what will I do if one day a site goes down completely... I would not have a clue where to look for the solution. For this reason I have actually never upgraded any site.

So, my poll reply would be option 2: 1-5 proff sites. (namely 1 WebGUI site).

tkemmere wrote: I do however have this constant slight fearfull feeling of what will I do if one day a site goes down completely... I would not have a clue where to look for the solution. For this reason I have actually never upgraded any site.

That is a bad approach which may eventually lead to the crash you tried to avoid. Upgrading is not only about new functions, but about fixing security holes and stability issues. I suggest you test the upgraded version of cmsms on your local install/website's subfolder (or both) AND backup before you apply the upgrade on both testing/live sites (there are modules like MySQLbackup MySQLdump or PostgreSQL backup PostgreSQLdump (installable by Module Manager)(AND copy generated compressed .sql files from admin/backup/ folder in your cmsms directory to some place on your/client's computer, just in case something went wrong with the server)

I have built 0 websites with a CMS before CMSMS.  I mostly built websites using FrontPage, Dreamweaver and other HTML editors.  I'm a programmer rather than a website designer, although I have built a few websites.  I have also dabbled in graphics for a few years. 

I have looked at/tried several CMSs in search of a good one (eg. Joomla, Mambo, Drupal, Xoops, SubDreamer, Expression Engine, Typo, etc.) and then I found CMSMS and couldn't believe how quickly and easily I could get a website up and running.  The only downside I see to CMSMS is a lack of a serious shopping cart and very few professionally designed templates.

Regards,

Steve

I've been making websites for the last 12 years or so and for the last 6 years ive been using osCommerce, Zencart, DragonflyCMS and Mambo. Just came across CMSMS in the last few months and im using it for a production site now (and learning a lot!)

Im a Flash user too and really think CMS's should talk to Flash more, its an area ive been wanting to get into but havent really had the time to do it yet. CMSMS would be perfect coz you just want to rip information from the CMS for each page and not really look after a shopping cart or anything through Flash.

So, how would i, say, grab the info from a page-alias called "test" in CMSMS and display this information in a Flash file? I know its possible and im confused as to why nobody has designed Flash front-end templates for CMS systems such as CMSMS yet? Coz you could use CMSMS admin for adding new content and then use Flash to rip and display this info in the nicest possible way...
Well its either that or else wait for a FlashCMS to be developed, the ones that are out there now are a tad too simple but look like they have some amazing potential, like the simple Flash CMS: Flabber, made by a Chinese guy...

Has anyone looked into this yet; using Flash to display the front-end of a CMS site?

I am very new to this game! Been professionally designing websites for about 2 years now and only used cmsms to date. It came reccomended by a colleague developer with more experience than me.

I find it okay to customise on the more basic level but I struggle a little with each new module I use as there doesn't seem to be back up documents which would really help. I am nervous of using the forum to ask questions too regularly.

But clients like it and it fits most needs!

Thanks

@sonictrip
Most sites using CMSMS are trying for more accessibility options, flash doesn't always come thru on a screen reader, but your more than welcome to develop a flash content module...


@jospanner
That's what the forum is for...

i have almost 5 year experience in designing ....and good command in HTML

I've designed perhaps 10-12 sites before using CMSMS, all using Frontpage, then Dreamweaver.  Slowly started doing more css. CMSMS was my first foray into using a CMS -- I think it's becoming more and more obvious to those of us doing Dreamweaver-type design, why we needed to switch over.  But it's daunting -- Php isn't necessarily our forte. But so far, CMSMS is easier than Joomla or Drupal, as far as I can tell -- though I'm a bit jealous when I see some of their documentation, which is significantly more detailed, on the average.  I've now done 4 sites using CMSMS.

So, echoing others here, I'd love to see a few more video tutorials, especially around using modules -- which can be confusing. I wouldn't make the assume that all of us immediately know how to change parameters, etc.  A couple of examples for each module would be great -- as soon as we "get it" we're off and running. But I think it takes some patience from those of you who live in Php--land.

FYI -- I find the annotated templates very helpful (e.g. css templates that are well-organized and notes embedded within that help you identify what part of the page is being affected -- makes it much easier to edit. Thanks for this).

Thanks for all your work so far!

-- Twwitt