CMS Made Simple Forums

I am helping my school district make the move from basic html pages to a content management system. We have been searching for a CMS that fits our very specific criteria, and I was curious if anyone had any suggestions on how CMS made simple could be configured to match (or if anyone has a suggestion of a CMS that would.) The district has about 20 schools, and growing, and each school has a design completely different of that of the district home page. We would like to be able to control all pages through one system. Also, we would like to give other webmaster at each school, access to small parts of their school page. I have not been able to figure this out with CMS made simple..

If anyone has any suggestions on how to get closer to our goal, that would be great.

-Zach B.

With a single CMSMS site, you could create separate templates to provide for separate designs for each school. But there would be nothing to prevent someone from using the wrong template for their school's new page.

You could create a hierarchy of pages giving the effect of separate subsites for each school. But, there would be nothing to prevent someone from creating a page in the wrong part of the hierarchy.

You could manage all the pages from one admin panel. However, to the best of my knowledge you could not assign sub-administrators who would have access to only their portions of the page/site hierarchy.

I guess you could install separate versions of CMSMS (in subdirectories or subdomains) to overcome the limitations I described above. But, the "master admin" would have to log on separately to each sub-site's control panel to manage the sites. At best you could use the same admin user name and password.

In my tests of nearly all the open source CMSes out there, CMS Made Simple is by far the easiest CMS for laypeople to use for site maintenance. (It's fairly easy to set up and customize, too!) But, it's front and back end security features could be a lot better. These failings are being addressed in future versions.

Tim

I'm in the same situation as the original poster . . . have there been any enhancements to security / page / site hierarchy?

It depends on exactly what degree of freedom you want to give your site editors. It's very easy to limit which types of content they can change (pages, calendar, news, whatever) and to "hide" templates and stylesheets - you just need to set different security groups and assign the users to those groups. If you only want a certain group of editors to be able to edit certain pages, you can assign those individual pages to them. At the moment, I don't believe there's a functionality that would allow users to create pages, but limit which part of the hierarchy they could put them in (someone correct me if I'm wrong here...)

Probably the best way is to setup a test installation and see if the permissions options work in a way that matches your needs.