CMS Made Simple Forums

Hi there,
i have a c programmer for a long time now, but before a couple of years, i discovered the world of CMS, and stopped whining about updating my sites.
I have tried several CMS but only drupal hooked me, why: simplicity and power... if you take joomla! for example, i couldn't tolerate the graphical galore, too much for me.
So i have built a couple of sites for me, and several sites for clients using drupal.
Now i have a pending project at my hands, and this time i will be trying to use another cms for the sake of it.. and because of a couple of things in drupal.
So i have some questions:
1- Is cmsms "theme-breakable" proof? for example, when the teaser is generated,  does the opened tags gets automatically closed at the end of the teaser then re-opened ?
2- is there is a stable wysiwyg editor? maybe one integrated in cmsms?
3- is creating content in cmsms as intuitive as in drupal? like a simple form that you be easily accessed by the end-user
4- can i theme every content type up to my needs?
5- is there a good forums system in cms ms? i see that smf is being used here, so how stable the integration between cmsms and smf is?
6- how is the translation handled? and what is the state of existing ones?

i hope i didn't offend anyone by this post, i am just trying to get some quick answers about cms's, as i don't have the time to test them all.
eagerly waiting for answers...

Hello,

I think that if you know and like Drupal, you should be confortable with it for this project. I don't understand why you are looking for another CMS. I don't know Drupal.

To your questions now :
1. I'm not sure I understand your question but here is some information : with CMSms, the designer (of themes/templates) and the content writers' roles are split : the editor can't break the theme/template of the designer (as long as the roles are well set).
2. TinyMCE is the integrated wysiwyg. There are other optional wysiwyg (modules).
3. I don't know Drupal. I'm feeling if you try CMSms you are going to like it
4. Everything is template based (smarty is under the hood) hence you can render it the way your want.
5. There are forum modules. I haven't tried them and I don't know the level of integration.
6. The next(2.0) release has multilanguage, there are tips to achieve it with current 1.2.x

I'm really interested in your try of CMSms : you feedback is welcome.

Pierre M.

hi, thanks for your response, it has been very helpful, well i think i am going to miss on cmsms this time because of the multilingual  issue, but i am still interested to know some more info about cmsms
let me clarify my first question, maybe you didn't understand because drupal and cmsms works differently, anyway, here is an example:
someone usually inexperienced i s writing a post, using html tags, or the wysiwyg editor, but now a teaser is going to be generated and the em tag is not closed
and the article continues and the tag may get closed at the end, maybe not...

so what i am asking, does loose html like this written by the user or generated by the wysiwyg editor breaks or affects the page output where multiple teasers are displayed, or is there an already implemented solution for this, drupal 6 solves this problem but it is still lacking important add-ons and some features that are common-place in other cms's like inline display, etc... so i am trying to improve my choices by getting the hang on another powerful cms, so i am searching for one that fulfills basic usability features, then see how code can be written then choose one...
anyway, i have another couple of questions if you don't mind, does cmsms allows the creation of content from a simple end-user interface, and what i mean this, is a simple user interface, and not a scaled admin-like page.. and how much java oriented code is their? i like the java effects, but i am not good enough to make them myself, so it would be nice to know that there are some existing ones(well i should have paid a look on the modules page instead of asking this question, nevermind...)

so, waiting for a reply...

CMS made simple uses smarty for processing, smarty allows you to control the output however you want.

For example, in the news module we have a news summary field that allows your users to type in a summary to a news article.  A wysiwyg is provided for this textarea.

Sometmes, depending upon your sites needs you may need to limit this content to say 200 characters or something.... this can be done by adjusting the specific template to control how it is displayed, using smarty modifiers such as truncate.   

Now normally, if you 'truncate' the output to say 200 characters that could leave some HTML tags open.  However, smarty allows you to also strip the tags from the field so that you could limit the ouptut to 200 characters AFTER html tags are output.

Hence, CMS Made simple has a learning curve, but it is entirely template driven (via smarty) so you can completely control and style the output of all of the addon modules,

Thank you for the clarification (yse, I don't know Drupal, I don't know how it works). So about question 1, I would say :
End users are either HTML-able or not.
-If they write HTML but make mistakes, Smarty or some editor option may tidy the code before rendering. But don't trust me, I'd rather you figure it by yourself by trying.
-If they don't know HTML, they "just use" the wysiwyg and it produces valid HTML code (without them knowing).

About the new question about javascript (there is no Java in CMSms) :
I very much enjoy the simple admin interface but this is an opinion. Here are facts : the full administrator has a complete and still useable, simple interface, while the "end user" can have a very simplistic interface (because (s)he has not much rights and his/her wysiwyg toolbars can be reducelly customized). I find it even funny to see an "end user" interface after having logged out of an admin one : you can't do much except your job, easyly. Please have a look at it.

Pierre M.