CMS Made Simple Forums

I just wanted to say that this is a fantastic content management system.  I spent days trying other systems -- Drupal, Mambo, etc -- and found them complex and cumbersome just to get a page to look the way I wanted it to.  The design of my sites are extremely important to me (as a designer more than a programmer), so being able to create an actual original template was key.

I had my template set up in no time. With my site structure fully intact so quickly, I'm already on to customizing the admin area for the client and working out the menu system and other CMS specifics...

In the same amount of time spent with Drupal, all I managed to do was get it installed, find the PHP template system cumbersome and borderline ridiculous, and punch a lot of things. In three days I never got it working beyond seeing my test content wrapped in Drupal's default blog-theme (and trying to convert my design into PHP was a nightmare that just broke everything). 

In one afternoon I had CMS Made Simple running my whole site, looking exactly like I wanted it to.

What I like is, rather than taking a standard CMS template designed for a 3-column blog and trying to morph pieces of your code/design around that system, you take your own code/design and simply plop in pieces of the CMS. Seems so straightforward to me, I can't understand how the "bigger" CMS's can do it so back-asswards.

I just hope you guys keep your templating system.  I understand Drupal used to use XHTML and recently changed it to PHP.  That's all well and good (for "more power") if you want to learn a new programming language just to get your images to show up... but for those of us who design sites and put them in HTML, your system is perfect and straightforward.  Please don't stray from that!   :)

Anyway, just wanted to say how much I'm enjoying you work.  Thanks!

Thanks so much for the kind words.  You can be pretty sure that the templating system won't change.  I feel it's one of the strongest (and surprisingly unique) features that we have.

OH YA that is only one, but a major one, reason i took to this system so quickly and am never using anything else, i tried to find a blog software to 'embed' into it,which is easy enuf to do, but everything i looked at was so cryptic it made it almost impossible to make a design change much less figure out how, not being a 'programmer' i still decided to try and change some modules, and found them readable enuf to change one into a 'blog' module, turned out to be easier than trying to embed and style some other 'blog' software....
YES Keep up the GREAT work folks.... and it's not even 1.0 yet... WOW 

  mark

cwaz13 wrote: I just wanted to say that this is a fantastic content management system.

That's the reason why we are all beeing here  ...

There are so MANY reasons I got stuck with CMSMS --- but there is one true reason why I will never ever use another one if I am not forced to: The MenuManager. This is absolutely incredible! You can not only use it, but also abuse it!

But I also like the W3C-compliance (HTML & CSS) and the ongoing support for WCAG and ATAG. I just thought about setting up a website for "Falling in love with CMSMS" with people stating why they fell in love with this CMS ...

Regards,
Nils

I'm all for that.  I'll even host it for you if you want. 

Nearly all the commercial websites I make these days are based around CMSMS, I think I'm at around 10 or 11 now...! 

About the templates though, one thing that has always bothered me is the web interface. But I just  had a crazy idea.