CMS Made Simple Forums

The Thread website http://www.thread.co.nz, was build originally from v1.4 over a year ago. It is based almost entirely on the News ( with some significant modifications ) and the Poll modules. It is worth noting that I use PostgreSQL not mySQL as the database backend.

I am not a designer and left the look and feel to another company.  They produced templates and graphics which I then had to load into the CMS.  As this was my first CMS Made Simple site I made a number of mistakes, hopefully all fixed now.  It was a great learning experience and I concur that CMSMadeSimple lives up to its name.

The biggest issue was coping with how the designer supplied all the CSS for the pages and how to make templates and page definitions that worked the way the site's owner wanted them to.,

I posted the patches I made to the News module for the developer but they haven't yet made it into the main distribution (which is a pity).  I have them as a patch file as I need to re-apply after each update.  I'll be moving to 1.6.6 this weekend. The most significant change was allow selection of news articles based on the custom fields.  I came up with a crude but usable syntax i.e.


  {news number="1" summarytemplate="feature-summary" detailtemplate="thread-article" moretext="read more" customfield="feature_article = 1"}

wow. i think its great! i really like it. because it does not look like cmsms!
you did a good job! i can imagine how difficult it might be to realize those tasks given from the designers.

Please put the link in the content of the post...

www.thread.co.nz

You may want to run it thru validation and it scrolls real slow, nice looking site...

Link now in content.

I have tried to correct all the validation errors but some of them are in code I am not generating or have no control over 

I meant to say when I first looked at this that I think the site is fantastic.

Good job!

Wow good work, 10,400 pages in Google. I take it there are few actual pages with lots of news categories?

It is really nice and quick, with so much content. A great design too, I would say this is a contender for the best CMSMS site I have seen, certainly the largest.

On my news items when I have a picture in the listing I like to use phpthumb 2.0 to scale and crop the photos on the fly to have some nicer images. Did you use the extra field for the image?

I would say the right hand side of the page has a lot of unused white space, maybe a most read article module would have sat nicely there or most searched phrases?

Is there any reason why you did not use a comments module?

With postgreSQL do you get significant performance increases?

I think that this site is fantastic!

The only thing I would suggest is to improve the quality of the images.. The headers are pixelly, and the thumbnails on the articles aren't resized properly. They are scaled, which shows up choppy in IE and FF.. Safari scales images nicely however. On the fashion page, there are 12 of these, and if each one was 60K (like the few I checked), this could lead to longer download times than is necessary.

How I would take care of this is to have a UDT resize the image and save it as a thumbnail the first time the page is loaded.. The UDT would then display the thumbnail the next time. I noticed that in the article, the image is shown larger, but is still resized.

Other than that, this site is amazing!