I'm new to CMSMS and I must say that I like what I see so far. The other day I decided to start using CMSMS for one of my sites. Most of the activity on my site is related to the forum (I am running SMF) which is growing quite nicely. I have used many portal/cms systems, but none of them really seemed to cater for the needs of this particular site. I've tried, Joomla! (that was a long time ago), Mambo (mmm... even longer), Xoops, Drupal, you name it. The one that I stood out was Drupal. A fantastic system but overkill for my needs, especially since I am using SMF for the forum. I've tried to bridge the forum and the cms software on a few occasions, but this always caused issues when upgrading. In the end I decided not to bother with bridges and keep the cms and the forum completely separate.
I started using a cms system because I wanted to create a "knowledge base" on the portal that would cover a big part of the frequently asked questions on the forum. Due to the large amount of information on the forum there was no way I was going to create all the articles on the portal myself, so I got a few people to help me. After a week or two, the creation of new articles seemed to slow down. I guess the need to log in to the cms and the portal seperately and the difference in text editors used by both systems was the Achilles heel.
When I stumbled across CMSMS the other day, the fresh, uncluttered interface and the easy navigation instantly appealed to me and I decided I was going to use it. Obviously I still needed to come up with a way to get my users to help me populate CMSMS with articles. Basically, the same applies to CMSMS as to Drupal: the text editors are different, the need to log into both systems seperately etc. That's why I decided to create an import tool to copy topics from a certain forum board to CMSMS. This will enable my users to use the text editor they are familiar with and they don't have to log in to any system other than the forum. The tool is coming along nicely and currently imports new topics, creates the menu links (even using international characters such as ä, é, ö etc.) and updates topics that have previously been imported. It will take me a little while to add all the functionality I need, but I'll get there eventually!
To cut a long story short: Thanks for this great piece of software.
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