CMS Made Simple Forums

Well the 'target audience' subject has come up alot in the past few weeks.... and I had a brainstorm.  I thought I'd throw together a quick poll to ask people about there experience level.

Personally, and I'll answer honestly..... I did 0... zip... none.... I was not a professional web developer when I found CMS Made simple.  I was however a professional programmer with 10+ years of programming and systems administration experience.  It bought me a fair bit.

So here's your chance.... answer honestly please..... your honest answers may actually cause us to re-think a few things.

I have been creating websites (I started to say "designing", but I am no artist), for about 10 years now.  I currently host about a score of active websites which I have created (in conjunction with an artist or using professional templates like those in oswd.org). 

That being said, I consider myself a programmer and a systems designer as I have been programming much longer than I have been building websites, in fact I have been programming since 1970.  These days PHP is what I program most, but the one thing which has never sunk in for me is "object oriented" as obviously my education predates that innovation. 

At this point I prefer to take a high level approach to web engineering and I use existing tools or pre-written programs wherever possible.  That is why I love CMSMS, because it has all that.  I also like the basic architecture of CMSMS: the basic unit of a website is a page, and a page can be part of a menu.  Web owners can change content but I set up the structure for them.  That is what I like doing, and CMSMS gets me out of a lot of trivial maintenance.  It makes my clients happy to do it themselves too.

I hope this helps.  I would also like to know about the background of other CMSMS users.

Like starbits, I've been creating websites for about 10 years and I've used one of "those other" CMS systems for a couple.

My background is also in programming, since about 1985, and system/network administration.

I was drawn to CMSMS by the "Simple" and the helpfulness of people in the Forum. I read through a lot of posts, read the wiki and played with the software for a bit before using it in production environments.

Now I have about 12 clients that are on CMSMS - about half of them I also host.

I've played with some of the other CMS packages, but found that, for the most part, they were too difficult to train non-techies to maintain/update. This resulted in a lot of hand-holding with my clients. Also, I found a lot of "elitism" in some of their forums. Too many "RTFM, u stoopid noob" types of comments - turned me right off them.

I've been a designer since late 90's during the dot.com era. I stumbled on CMSMS while looking for specific modules and also looking or a CMS that used smarty. I've tried Mambo turned Joomla. While it is probably powerful for community sites, it's also probably too much for a simple corporate site. Creating a page was a two or three step. Tried Drupal but seem to require more technical knowledge.

After messing with CMSMS only for a little, I was amazed at how easy it was to setup pages and rearrange things. A lot more clients are also asking for a site where they can update "themselve" which is a scary thing since most of them will mess it up before you know it. So having the permission setting is useful. The permission limit the better so they can be put in a box and not mess things up! This allowed me to accept more projects that I may have not been able to do since I'm not a programmer.

The downside I've noticed is that it is a little difficult to get help whether commercial or just community for some modules. This is a little frustrating since sometimes you just need things done, but can't find the help to do so even if you want to pay. The only downside so far. It would be nice if the module creators will be more available for commercial help since they are familiar with how things are setup in CMSMS, Smarty and their own module. Charge a lot, I don't care, as long as I get the help needed!

Other than that, CMSMS is simple and pretty powerful in the way you can change templates and stylesheets for any page. So I hope the ease of that never changes.

Glad I found it!

bump.... just to keep this poll at the top of everybody's lists for a while, I'll do this every day or two.

I think that the 'target audience' of the CMS should be actual website developers, followed by the end-user. As long as CMSMS has a powerful and easy templating system, can be extended by modules, and made dummy proof for the client, I think CMSMS will go far. Any developer can form and mold a CMS to fit their needs, but they will likely pick a solution that will be easy-to-use for their end client, and easy to template themselves.

I work full time a  high-production marketing firm. Nearly every site we do is done in CMSMS. Once you start to get 30+ installs on a single box, things like patching security holes for every installation can be a major headache. Some things that would greatly help me are: Multi-site installations and full page caching, these would do wonders for performance, and security. Both of which I know are planned for some point

I seem to be the opposite of everyone else who's posting, but not of everyone else who's voting.

Before CMSMS, I had always HTML hand-coded both my personal website and the website for the small school where I work. I started looking for a CMS when it started taking up too much of my time to re-do all those individual pages by hand each time I wanted to change a minor layout point. (I also had the optimistic idea that other staff members might want to update pages on their own, but so far they all scurry away whenever I mention THAT...)

I tried out at least a half dozen other CMSs, but they seemed mostly designed for community portals and /or had templating systems that were too complicated. CMSMS, OTOH, was pretty much exactly what I had imagined.

I'd be sad if the developers moved in a direction that would exclude users more like me, since it seems like there's not a lot out there for people who need to make something more than a personal website, but whose jobs aren't to be programmers. IMHO, of course.

Well, we're not aiming at eliminating web developers, (wether full or part time).  infact that is our target audience (it seems).... people that know what HTML, and CSS are, can handle some upload problems, find their php error log, and know what it is, etc.

What we don't want to target to is the 'amateur photographer' that wants to put up a website, or the 'auto mechanic' or the 'accountant', etc.  We don't want to replace frontpage, and we can't.

But obviously, you understood things like 'templating' and seperating 'layout' from 'content'.... and stuff like that.  This is the audience we've agreed that we focus on.

I started with Frontpage 7 or 8 years ago in High School because that is all our school had for web development. No one knew how to use it (including the instructor) the sites we created in our technology class could have been made in MS Word. I found web development intriguing and tried to learn more. I borrowed Dreamweaver 4 from a friend and became fond of it very quickly. I ended up convincing the school to buy Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Flash. Then I self-taught myself for a class credit. My instructor took some "teachers" classes in Dreamweaver but I actually taught her more from what I learned on my own.

I continued to use the Macromedia/Adobe products up until a year and a half ago when I had a client that wanted to make updates to their own site without a lick of web development experience. I was vaguely familiar with CMS applications and I didn't want to use Adobe Contribute. I had some people try to get me to use Typo3 and Drupal but just wasn't satisfied. I did my own research and liked the features, modules and (most importantly) good technical support/documentation of CMS Made Simple. I did a trial installation and never looked back. Most of my work is done with CMSMS now because of easy templating and styling. I still use Dreamweaver once in a while but I just find CMSMS easier to work with. I only have three sites running in CMSMS but I am currently developing a few others, even if the client doesn't want to update the content on their own site.

Hi,

pretty much the same picture over here ...
10 years of web coding/designing, with previous programming background.

Did a lot of SSI semi-static/semi-dynamic websites.
Always coded by hand, still do that. I know what I want ...

Cheers,
Alex

I agree with tyman00 - now I'm getting used to the way CMSMS work and it's so much easier to develop a site with it rather than from scratch using dreamweaver/CSS (what I use to use also).

The simple factor for client is really a big thing. I don't want to spend forever training them. I only learned about this early Oct, so I guess a couple of months and already did 2 sites and one more will start once design is approved.

The final decision was also the modules that were available.

bump.... just to keep this topic alive.

My back ground is design, I ended up as client side developer (html / css) slightly against the plan about 10 years ago working for a large agency, got made redundant around 2000, got back to design as well as build and now i am self employed designer-builder. CMSMS fits me perfectly.

Sometimes I wish I knew PHP better, but I can usually pick my way thru it if I need to. CMSMS has enabled me to deliver a huge amount of functionalaity for the meagre sums most of my clients (primarily artists) can afford, fairly quickly and whats more my clients can work with the admin - its so intuitive in comparison to all the other systems I tried (and it was a lot). I dont see myself looking any further.

Couple all this with an active and friendly forum and its a pretty winning combination for me.

Edit: Just realised i didnt actually directly answer the question.. Prior to CMSMS I had built a lot of 'flat' sites hand coding bespoke designs, then working with a dev team, building templates, again quite a few, still do this sometimes on freelance projects but anything I am directly in control of goes on CMSMS theses days

Hi,

Zero websites for me in front of using CMSMS that I got money for. I manually did a website for my wifes shop. Manually build and updated a website for a sportsteam. I got used on how to do that effectively, but knew that if it would be more that one website I would end up in time problems. So I did my surfing, located Xoops, tried it and it gave me.... nothing but a major headache (I should mention that I in an early stage wanted to prepare my own build modules). Waited some time for my headache to go away  and started surfing again. Tried CMSMS and loved it from the first moment. I now support websites for two sporting teams. Build one for a customer, one for a project of the company I work for. And next to this, one website that holds the work I do as a hobby --> building modules for CMSMS.
Wish my hobby was my work

I am not a programmer, I am not very fluent in CSS and even less so in php. I'm pretty good with HTML. I have built websites, mostly by hand,  for about 10 years. I like to tinker. Tools that make my job easier but that also produce clean, compliant code are where I've been heading in the last two years.

I also use RapidWeaver for some of my sites that don't require a CMS.

I've never used FrontPage or Dreamweaver to build sites. Always I've hand-coded in BBEdit. Up until a couple years ago. Once I discovered what CMS's were and how they could help me and my clients, I started moving over to buidling sites in them. Previous to CMSMS, I had used PHPwebsite for a couple of sites. It was torture using that platform. About the same time I discovered CMSMS, I had also been toying with Exponent CMS, WebsiteBaker and MODx. I just couldn't get my head around them. But CMSMS instantly made sense to me... at least on a basic level. It was easy to make pages and relatively easy to substitute a few of my graphics for what were provided as the default.

I've learned a lot from the forums and working with the CMS for the last year. I guess my wishes for the future are the following...

Better documentation, particularly for modules
I wish there were more pre-built templates available.
I wish there was an easier way to upgrade sites. Something built into Admin maybe.

I learn best by doing. More tutorials, and more complete documentation would help me a lot.

Michael