CMS Made Simple Forums

I have been experimenting with cmsms with a view to transferring an existing website over and handing the editing tasks over to non-technical staff. But I'm finding it very very difficult to find good descriptions of the functions of modules so that I don't have to waste a year trying out the modules for best fit.

The current website (a business association) has 5/6 separate pages which are updated every couple of months with news including pictures.
There are 20 or so pages which rarely change (these don't need to be editable by staff).
We have a "members profiles" page which includes logos and/or images - each business gets 200/500 words. I would like this to be updated by the end-users themselves if possible.
We have a photo gallery section, where photos of the events held during the last year are displayed.
We have a free classifieds using a very old Hagen script which I have to rename every couple of months to prevent spam attacks. This will be scrapped and probably just stick with members profiles. (unless there is an alternative)
I NEED an event calendar, and a way for people to book a place in the event (approx 2 events per month).
I NEED to be able to sell advertising space somewhere.
It would be nice to have an auction page - registered users can bid on items, but not place their own items.

I know this is a newbie question. Before you tell me to go through the list of modules - I've done that and it is just impossible to know the difference between Company Business List and Company Directory or indeed if Catalogue-Like Content Modules would produce a better result because there is insufficient description and no samples or examples anywhere that I can find.

So, oh wise people, can you give me a list of the best modules for the job?

In the install admin go to extensions > module manager and look thru the list of modules and when you find one that looks like it might work click the Help link to see what it does, I use FF and click my scroll wheel to get aa new tab so I can go back to the tab with the MM open so I don't have to go thru them again...

Well Mark, if the help section provided any reasonable description I wouldn't have to ask dumb questions, would I?

Hi jillc,

I can share your point of view. It is often very hard to quickly identify the best module. There usually is already a solution that someone has created for a specific cms tasks. However I found myself looking for the right thing for ages by times.

What helped pretty good, was to use google to search the forum for topics. And you really need to split your functional desires down to the core problem and then look for that. That worked for me quite often. From what you have told, I would suggest these modules to look at:

FEU and SelfRegister Modules to let users register them selves.

Calendar module for the calender thingy. I think it is possible to team it up with the front end users using the custom content module. Alternatively, I like to use the formbuilder module to create event sign-up pages. You could create forms and link them from the calendar.

Concerning the "members profiles", there are different ways to approach it. You could solve it with custom fields for the user profiles in the self-registration process.

The Albums module should cater for most gallery needs.

Depending on how you want to maintain your advertising space, you can implement you ad providers code in the templates or you can use global content blocks if you want to maintain the ads yourself.

I have no experience with the auction topic. Maybe you need to write an own module.

Hope this could give you some brief directions. CMSMS is bit like playing with a big box of lego - it takes some time until you find the cool items and combinations.

Best
Nils

Thanks Nils,

I've set up the album and it does seem to do what I want and I'm somewhere along with the calendar ... it will probably work. I'll have a look at your other suggestions. Thanks.

Jill.

Please let me throw in my coin that the module manager is not the best solution to find the needed extension, as it happened to me that it installed sometimes not the most actual versions

There was a categorized module directory. This is gone. For some reasons. OK

But for many other reasons it would be helpful to get a categorized module directory back.
I do not know why this is not done already.

As there is just an alphabetical list in the moment, who is not seduced to name a new module AAAAA...something? Just to get the visitor's eye..

There is a lack of quality management, for sure.
I whished there were one. Or the users would add their disappointment etc. to the module home page...