CMS Made Simple Forums

Greetings,

I've been looking around for a CMS solution which is appropriate for your typical end-user - ie, simple to use without sacrificing too much.  Looks like I've found it   Other systems are either way too complicated (like Joomla), or are not professional enough.

I'd like to bounce a few questions around and hopefully learn from the experience of this community before I start trying out CMSMS in earnest to see whether it meets our requirements.

0.  To support many users/sites, presumably the best approach is to have a fresh install of CMSMS for each user/site - each with their own DB?  If so, how do you handle upgrades/patches/plugins for many installs of CMSMS?  Is it a matter of crafting some bash/perl scripts to handle this on a global/server scale?

... or can CMSMS handle many sites/users from a single install?

1.  Has anyone used CMSMS in a typical hosting business environment?  If so, what's your experience been like?

2.  Related to 0, how often is a new version of CMSMS released?  Does a new release include an upgrade script (for site and DB), or does it require a fresh install?

3.  Is support for PostgreSQL complete, or an after-thought (in favour of MySQL)?  I see mention made of DB abstraction, but I'm asking anyway (been burnt before).

4.  Templates/themes:  I checked out the online demo, but this only has a single template so I couldn't see what the other templates looked like.  How many templates are included by default (during install), five?   Let's say we wanted to include a whole bunch of templates for users to pick-n-choose (eg, from http://themes.cmsmadesimple.org/), what's the best way to get those templates/themes into the system without doing it manually?

I'm thinking maybe install a 'skeleton' CMSMS, install all the desired templates/themes (manually if required), then "clone" this install for all new users/sites.  Sound doable?

Any comments appreciated.

Thanks
Henry

0. CMSMS is not designed to handle multi sites on one install (at present). It is best to have individual installations. Yes, if the sites are on the same server, you could use a bash script to copy the files, but in some cases, you'd need to run an upgrade script on each site.

1. I use CMSMS for almost all of my business hosting.

2. Updates are regular, every month or so. Some require an upgrade script, many don't.

3. I believe PostgreSQL is supported, but I've never used it, so I can't say how well it works. CMSMS used ADODB Lite as the data abstraction layer.

4. In the upcoming version 1.6, I believe there are 8 included templates. Themes have to be installed manually.

You could do a local install (WAMP) of the base package, with the additional themes and modules that you might commonly use, then use the Sitepusher module to copy (clone) this to all of your server installs.

I think you'll find that this is the easiest CMS for your end users to grasp. I know it has been for mine.

Nullig

Thanks Nullig, this sounds promising.