edinburghrc.co.uk & lochmaben.org.uk
Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 5:24 pm
I've put up a couple of community websites using CMSMS this year:
http://www.edinburghrc.co.uk
http://www.lochmaben.org.uk
Running on v1.2.1 and v1.08 respectively (to be updated to latest releases when I find some time...!)
Both of these sites were originally running on Java code that I hacked together to give simple CMS facilities for editors, but which had become increasing difficult to update and limiting in the features that they offered. I wanted to replace these with a proper CMS that would make it easier for me to administer the sites and easier for editors to update content.
I spent a long time looking at different CMS solutions until I settled on CMSMS. For me, the killer features of CMSMS were the following:
Ken
p.s. For Edinburgh RC, we use Google Calendars to manage our club event calendars, because we find this has the best interface for easily handling recurring events, and it is easy for several people to collaborate on the same calendar.
I wrote some custom code using the Zend Google Calendar API to take the Google Calendar feeds for 5 different calendars and turn it into a single diary page with different categories:
http://www.edinburghrc.co.uk/whats-on
This page also uses a bit of JQuery to show and hide event details.
I hacked this together using UDTs to call php code. I wondered if this might be something that would be worth turning into a more generic module to allow CMSMS users to add a view of any Google calendar(s) on a web page. I'm not familiar with the module development mechansim, and I don't have much time to work on this at the moment, but I would be happy to put the code out for anyone else that wants to play with it. PHP is a new dev language for me, so I hacked things together as quickly as I could, and it could definitely be tidied up by someone who knows what they are doing.
http://www.edinburghrc.co.uk
http://www.lochmaben.org.uk
Running on v1.2.1 and v1.08 respectively (to be updated to latest releases when I find some time...!)
Both of these sites were originally running on Java code that I hacked together to give simple CMS facilities for editors, but which had become increasing difficult to update and limiting in the features that they offered. I wanted to replace these with a proper CMS that would make it easier for me to administer the sites and easier for editors to update content.
I spent a long time looking at different CMS solutions until I settled on CMSMS. For me, the killer features of CMSMS were the following:
- Flexibility and customisation. CMSMS works out of the box, but there is an immense amount of scope to get under the hood and modify things to suit your own requirements. A lot of other CMS applications that I tried made it really difficult to modify the core site templates or add functionality
- Ease of use for non-specialist users. I cannot overstate how important this is for me. Community websites stand or fall on whether non-specialist users can easily add and update content, and they stagnate if every change has to go through the bottleneck of one technical specialist. I develop software for a living, but some of the well known open source CMS solutions I experimented with left me scratching my head when I tried to work out how to use their admin interfaces. I find the interface and content structure in CMSMS very intuitive, and more importantly, so do my site users!
Ken
p.s. For Edinburgh RC, we use Google Calendars to manage our club event calendars, because we find this has the best interface for easily handling recurring events, and it is easy for several people to collaborate on the same calendar.
I wrote some custom code using the Zend Google Calendar API to take the Google Calendar feeds for 5 different calendars and turn it into a single diary page with different categories:
http://www.edinburghrc.co.uk/whats-on
This page also uses a bit of JQuery to show and hide event details.
I hacked this together using UDTs to call php code. I wondered if this might be something that would be worth turning into a more generic module to allow CMSMS users to add a view of any Google calendar(s) on a web page. I'm not familiar with the module development mechansim, and I don't have much time to work on this at the moment, but I would be happy to put the code out for anyone else that wants to play with it. PHP is a new dev language for me, so I hacked things together as quickly as I could, and it could definitely be tidied up by someone who knows what they are doing.