CMS Made Simple Forums

Well I suppose I'll throw my hat in this ring.  My feature requests stem from a LONG journey in finding a CMS and what I found that I liked and disliked.  So here goes.

1.  Form creator/manager.  One of the CMS's that I used had a tool like this.  However I guess I would want it to be sort of turnkey.  I would want to be able to create the form anyway needed with any amout of fields.  I would also like to be able to point it to a database and it store it there and obviously the perverbial email notification to me and copy to the user.  One important thing, for me anyway, would be the ability to generate auto-incrementing numbers.  That is to say when the user submits the form it generates a number that is specific to that form for later look up and use and so forth.

This may be a stretch, but it would be heaven if within that form I could use point and click mathematical functions.  In other words tell the form generator to add this field and that field together, multiply it with this field.  Show these fileds to the customer and hide these though still do the calculations.

I paid for a commercial version of something like this (PHP coded), good money I might add, and it worked but I ran into some issues with other functions of the software and then discovering the absolutely horrible customer service I just gave up on it and requested a refund.

2.  I see some posts on image gallery's, so I dont know what I could add to that other than to just wait for a solution on that as one of my websites is a showcase for my photography and that would be an important feature for me.  Has anyone tried or accomplished porting Coppermine to CMSMS?

3.  I saw a hack to port ZenCart over into CMSMS, I havent tried it yet but I would definately like to see a solid, powerful eCommerce solution for CMSMS.

4.  This is huge and may be beyond the scope of a CMS in general, but I'll throw it out there anyway.    CMSMS offers a great advantage to me in that the presentation of the site, not the content, the presentation is fairly easy to set up.  Easy access and modification of the CSS is a definate plus in CMSMS's favor.  I would like to see a dedicated Presentation Management System module.  Something where a new user, to CMSes especially, could generate their own templates without having to be particularly if at all knowledgeable of CSS and HTML.  Sort of like a frontpage or dreamweaver for CMS.  Where the user can point and click and say I want it to have this layout, this be that color, that that color and so forth and the CSS and HTML automatically generated, all compliant code of course 

If I were more of a coder this would be my one project I would focus on.  Presentation is SO much of the web today that its, for me at least, difficult to think of a CMS that doesnt have a Presentation Management as a major part of its overall function.


Okay, I'll stop there.  You've allowed me to go to the mountain top to shout, I'll patiently wait to be thrown off now 'cause I know I asked alot.  Be nice now, LOL.

I'll be the first to bite with my responses.

The nice part about cmsms is that it's largely user contributed, especially the modules.  So if there is something you need, write it, or beg somebody with time (and that's rare enough) to write it for you.  The other nice thing is the plug-and-play ability, we can easily add and subtract modules, try them out, do various things, without having to modify any code (usually).

But on to other points.

1) The feedbackform is almost what you want, but it doesn't store the results in a database (yet).  I hear SjG is trying to find time to replace it with a module that will though.

The math bit though, is a bit of a stretch.

2) Most of the image galleries (with the exception of the quick hack I threw together for simpleviewer) are bridges, and not ports, with various levels of integration.  This allows us to embed image galleries, etc. without having to maintain code.

3) As far as I know, the oscommerce module, etc, are bridges as well.

4) A wysiwig template editor thingy would be way cool, even if it just listed the tags and allowed you to pick and choose which ones you wanted (or even maybe add that ability to fckeditor) or something.  I agree with you completely.  One of the biggest problems people have is not knowing the template syntax, or what tags are availab for creating templates.

Ahh yes, the community.  Well hopefully as my coding skills grow I can contribute, but for right now they are not that strong.

Its too bad that I couldnt simply just point CMSMS to the program and have it run it but keep it under the styling of the CMS.  Kinda like creating a new shortcut on your desktop, you just point it to the executeable and when you double click on it, it runs and even though it is an installed program that wasnt part of the windows install, it still maintains the theme colors and such of windows.

I'll see if I can dig up the feedback form and see what I can do with that.

I'll come back another time for the difference between a bridge and a port, LOL.  Thanks for your reply though.  I so need to just take some courses on PHP, MySQL and be done with it.