CMS Made Simple Forums

NOTE:  This is in no way scientific.  If you are looking for a review of any sort, move along and look somewhere else.  This is a story about how I ended up with CMSms.  Feel free to correct me anywhere I'm wrong here.

This comes after many thousands of um, seconds, of research.  (I've spent about 2 weeks looking for a CMS).  I know what I want the end result to be so I've been looking for a CMS package that's as close to generating those results as possible.  Having a user friendly CMS is not #1 priority for me as I'll be the only one maintaining the site.

Actually this started a little over a month ago when I started looking for an e-commerce package.  We are eventually going to be selling products from our brick-n-mortar store online but for the time being I just want to get a catalog showcasing the products we carry as well as having a place to put articles and useful information for people.  I haven't found a simple, easy to use e-commerce package.  Magento is the closest, but they haven't hit a 1.0 release and I don't want to use it in a production environment until that happens and they've solidified their changes.

I've looked at Drupal, WordPress, CMSms, MODx, Typo3 and demo'd a couple of others that I didn't even bother installing at http://opensourcecms.com/.  Pretty much any of these would do what I want so it's really just gotten down to a couple of features.

This list is not in any particular order.  I actually tried MODx after installing CMSms.

Drupal
It's almost there for what I need, but they really force you down some of their [the developers] ideas for how to get things done.
--No trailing slashes.  So now I have to change the way my site is already setup.  That's not thinking very far ahead guys.  Getting trailing slashes and automatic aliases would require code changes in the core and an add-on module.  Not impossible, but it would have been almost easier for them to make it more flexible than to specifically check for and remove trailing slashes...
--Not easy to get keywords or description into Meta data.  Again, back to the what the developers (and their followers, er community) believe.  So what if search engines don't utilize them that much any more, supposedly.  It's still a great spot to put some keyword and description information for programs to read.

I liked the Drupal installer, reminded me of the Gallery2 installer (I've spent a lot of time with G2)

WordPress
Also, almost there for what I need.  Hey they allow trailing slashes.  What a concept.  WP is actually very, very configurable in allowing you to craft your URL the way you want it.

Now I'm wishing I took some notes, any notes.  There was just one little thing that was irking me about WP, so I decided to keep looking.  I think there were still some hoops to jump through to get keywords and description metadata, but I from searching I could see that it was at least possible without major changes.

Hope I'm not confusing this with Drupal, but out of all of the ones I tried WordPress' installer was by far the easiest.

Typo3
I junked that literally after a few minutes.  I just did not like it.

MODx
I like it, but it's just not there yet.  It's got the feeling of a lot of changing happening or that need to happen before a 1.0 release.  CMSms just has a few years and some stability on it.

CMS Made Simple
I actually demo'd this one at opensourcecms.com and 5 minutes later was up and running on my server for a more in-depth look.

The community here and the over all feel of the project (I'm not a coder so I can't judge the code) reminds me a lot of Gallery2. Again I've spent a lot of time with G2 over the years.  I've been trying to not make comparisons to G2 in every single one of my posts....

CMSms can deal with trailing slashes.  CMSms makes it easy to customize metadata at the page level.  I'm not sure how I feel about having the stylesheets and templates in the database.  But I see that it works really well here, it allows one to just be anywhere with web access and they don't need an SSH or FTP client to upload or change files if you need to change the look and feel of the site when you're say visiting Grandma in Florida.

A few minor issues, maybe I'll need to bring these up in other posts as this has gotten a bit long winded.

1) CMSms, doesn't really care about the URL, only the page alias (the last chunk of the URL):
http://forum.cmsmadesimple.org/index.ph ... l#msg90606
Yes I will be issuing a bug report and I'm trying to find a fix for this myself.  I think I have one, but I'll be popping into #cms on irc and asking in the dev forum if there is a more efficient way.

2) CMSms doesn't like duplicate page aliases.  I can see why this was done from the start.  Gallery1 was like this.  But with Gallery2 URLs became important and the idea of a 'alias' (or album in Gallery terminology) became secondary.  Instead of a "page alias" you have a "page path".  I don't envision fixing this will be easy but I'm not a coder and don't fully comprehend everything that's going on in the code base and the database.

I would like to see index.php?page="path/to/page/" instead of index.php?page="alias"

Then we can have our Pretty URLs actually enforced (without the hack I'm dreaming up) and people can have:
/2008/photos
/2009/photos

We could also have, /news/category/title instead of /news/1/34

You already do this, if someone creates a page with the same name as another page you append -1 or -2 to it.  So someone creating a duplicate news title or company name shouldn't be a big deal.  Either give a warning (change current behavior) or append -# to it (keep current behavior).

3) There doesn't seem to be a ton of development in the modules even for ones that appear popular, they've had almost no activity for weeks, months or even more than a year.  I just hope that as the core becomes more solidified, that some of the more popular modules can be polished by the developer or a developer, get reviewed by the core dev team and be brought into the main package and maintained by the core dev team.  Same with some of the themes.  These are some of the growing pains that Gallery has gone through, so I've seen all of this first hand.

Now, I'm not saying CMSms isn't solid, it just sounds like there is a major 2.0 release being worked on with a lot of changes coming down the pipe.

I also haven't been around very long so I don't have a good feel of what direction the dev team is wanting to take CMSms, but with what I've seen on the roadmap for 2.0 it looks like they are wanting to add more features instead of keeping it just a really minimalistic package that you have to get 4 (or 10) different add-ons for to get the functionality most people need.

Well I had more to say, but this has gotten too long and I started this 2 days ago....

You've made some very thoughtful comments. Dev will hopefully chime in on some of your points. For me, I think you've made some great observations. 

CMSms does support PRETTY URLS, just look it up in the documentation.

And there are a whole bunch of modules that are worked on all the time. A bunch of them are stable enough that don't need updating, but there are indeed another bunch that have been forgotten by the Devs. New modules are always emerging though.

Yes, CMSms has Pretty URLs, but there are several fundamental flaws.  I don't believe the flaws are with Pretty URLs, but with how CMSms handles aliases.

http://forum.cmsmadesimple.org/index.ph ... l#msg90606

If CMSms forgot about the concept of "aliases" and changed to use the concept of "page" and thus, /path/to/page/ then 2 things would automatically be fixed.

1) People could have "folders" or "categories" with the same name:
/2007/photos
/2008/photos

Right now in CMSms you cannot do that

2) It would enforce URLs and thus the topic I linked to above would have never popped up.  Right now CMSms can (unlikely, but can) generate duplicate content in the eyes of search engines.

Example:
In a default install, this URLs exists:
www.example.com/how-cmsms-works/pages-and-navigation/

This URL should not exist:
www.example.com/pages-and-navigation/

This URL should also not exist:
http://www.example.com/some/dumb/path/t ... avigation/

But all 3 of those examples will work.  They are 3 completely different URLs displaying the exact same content.  In reality the likelyhood of a search engine finding the same content at the bad URLs should not happen.  But if someone were to link to a page and make a typo somewhere in the URL, but get the last chunk of the URL correct, then they wouldn't know, you probably wouldn't as there would be no 404 error in your logs and a search engine will eventually find what is now a duplicate page.

As for the modules.  For those that are stable is would be great if there would be some sort of notice or ownership shown.  I was just looking at one an hour ago that hasn't been modified since August 2006.  That's nearly 18 months ago.  If it still works in the current version, that's great.  But it would be great if there was some note.  What if the developer that created it is no longer using CMSms?  If those sorts of stable, popular modules haven't either been integrated into the core release package of CMSms or responsibility of ownership taken over by a core dev team member how do we know that module will ever be updated once become incompatible?

And please don't give me the very weak "the source is available, you can update it" argument.  That argument always has and always will hurt FOSS more than help, turning away users/customers/etc is bad.  As the CMSms userbase grows you are going to have fewer and fewer developers in relation to non-technical users.  You'll end up with a ton of users clamoring why some module that's popular doesn't work with a new release of CMSms.

This is all hypothetical of course and again, I've only been hanging out for a short time so I may be missing some key points.

But I do believe that the more important for popular modules eventually get code reviewed and brought into standard maintenance mode by the core dev team.  Even if they can still delegate to the original dev of the module, if that dev goes MIA, then a core dev team member would still be responsible for updating or maintaining that module.

Now I'm not saying this needs to happen with all modules, just the more popular ones, the ones that almost everyone (or a very large majority of the user base) installs to get CMSms doing what they want.  Heck CMSms might already be there.  But I just don't get a good feeling about using a module that's last release was 18 months ago and the most current release of CMSms was less than 2 weeks ago.  It leaves a lot of questions open, like is that module dead?  Do I need to look for something else when or if it becomes incompatible?  Maybe, just maybe, I can hack it to get it going.  Or worst case, I can't upgrade CMSms because my site depends on module X that's incompatible with the latest version and there is a security hole with CMSms.

Now, in my situation I may not actually end up using any modules that don't ship with CMSms, maybe the Cataloger module, maybe.  I'm just an outsider looking in and expressing some observations.

nivekiam - that's great. It's true, you can put /anything/anything/page-alias.html and the page would show up and it is bad for search engine. The likelihood of it going to a link like that is low and probably not likely since no one will be linking to it...BUT if someone decide they want to link to it to mess with you, then you will be penalized for duplicated content.

Search engines don't make up links they just read the ones in your site or ones from other sites that link to you, so yes you could get messed with from another site but it shouldn't reflect on you as it's not your site with the incorrect/duplicate links...

I agree, it's pretty low anything like that would be exploited.  But it is a flaw that if you 1) want to have a Pretty URL feature in CMSms and 2) don't want a flat site structure, should be fixed.

I don't consider it a security flaw, but it is a flaw.  And it is something people have complained about.  Maybe not this exactly, but the example of:
2007/photos
2008/photos

By fixing this flaw you could, you don't have to, but you could kill 2 birds with one stone.

I'm hoping, though I don't suspect it's true, that version 2 does away with the reliance on having to have a unique "page alias" and gets to using "page url" or "page path".  This is how Gallery solved this issue when going from Gallery 1 to Gallery 2.

What I've been dreaming up as a hack to "fix" this and generate a 404 for non-valid URLs is to check the alias, where is that alias suppose to be in the hierarchy, generate the path for that hierarchy and check that against the requested URL.

This doesn't fix or allow for what CMSms currently sees as duplicate aliases, it would just fix this one issue.

Yes, search bots don't make up links like /some/junk/prefix/path/to/page
But this may be a security issue for people wanting to protect /secured/area/page1 and /secured/area/page2 because may be the protection could be circumvented by pointing to /some/junk/pageX
(speaking of URL protection. I know CMSms FEU+CC page protection works whatever the URL)

Pierre M.

I know CMSms FEU+CC page protection works whatever the URL

I know what CMSms and FEU mean, but what is the CC page protection.  Is that a credit card module?  Searching for 'cc page protection' only finds your post

The CustomContent module is what he means.

I think search engines penalize sites WITH duplicated content... I don't believe they penalize the site with the incorrect/duplicate links (or say person who wants to mess with your site and link to a bunch of /anything/anything/page.html, by mess with- we mean having something like google index these different links).  So if your sites shows that you have duplicated content, they may think you are trying to trick the SE. In a way though, content alias does this same thing...it creates two pages that are identical but with different url name...