CMS Made Simple Forums

I want to develop a Photography community website where the work of artist is reviewed and voted for by the community.on the lines of www.gfxartist.com, www.terminus1525.ca, www.phirebrush.com. I think AJAX will prove very useful to me. What CMS (with AJAX capablities) do u suggest. I was thinking of Drupal with embedded Gallery 2. But on one of the forums i got this advise.

>It seems gfxartist is completly SMARTY based. They have created their own CMS. To get a jump start on something like this you are going >to have to start simple and build. Drupal is not simple to build on.
>        My suggestion for doing a gfx like site would be to go with CMSmadesimple, Gallery2 ,SMARTY and xajax for ajax support. I think a >package like this would be the easiest to work with and not have things fighting. You will also get more coding support than going with >Drupal would give you.

Gfxartist is what i m looking at more.
But also have a look at www.terminus1525.ca made using Drupal.
Does anyone know something like those 3 sites but made using CMSmadesimple.
What do U think guys..... Drupal OR CMSmadesimple  ..  Gallery2 OR something else with CMSmadesimple  ???

As a (somewhat overwhelmed and behind-schedule) CMS MS developer, and having just finished a site for a client who wanted it done in Drupal, here are some observations.

Drupal and CMSMS are targeted at slightly different, but overlapping uses:

Drupal is designed from the ground up to be for community-edited sites. It is designed to have users with different roles, and doesn't really differentiate between "front-end" and "back-end" users. Most users are able to submit content, and most users are able to comment on content. Drupal does not impose a hierarchical structure on the site -- in fact, it goes out of its way to avoid that. You can create multiple structures using Taxonomy, menus, etc, but the core concept is more fluid than CMSMS. Drupal has a good module system, a reasonably good forms API, and large numbers of developers. It has a legacy problem of module and template compatibility from one version to another.

CMSMS is more designed for providing content management of a structured site. In CMSMS, there is a separation between "front-end" users who do not maintain or edit content, and "back-end" users who maintain the site. CMSMS has much better support for the admin to maintain templates and stylesheets, and it's much easier to make a custom layout that doesn't look "typical" for the CMS. The module system in CMSMS is, thanks to the new event code, even more flexible than that of Drupal. CMSMS has a smaller development community, but it is very friendly.

I could go into more detail, but this is a high level summary. In both systems, the core is very well written and well thought out. In both systems, the modules are hit-and-miss -- there are some that are buggy, security risks, etc. If I wanted to create a community news portal, I might go with Drupal. If I wanted to enable people within a company to maintain their corporate site, I'd go with CMSMS.

OK, all that aside. If I were going to write a community art site, where there was voting and comments, I'd actually start with Gallery2. I haven't looked at the code, but the feature set is nearly there. It should be easier to hack on than either CMSMS or Drupal.

Well, you wanted opinions. That's mine

dakoo wrote: Gallery2

There exists a module for including gallery2 in CMSms - please look here:

http://dev.cmsmadesimple.org/projects/g2mod/

But you need some patches to get it work. To the first you must switch database from AdoDB lite to AdoDB in config.php.

$config['use_adodb_lite'] = false;

Then you must change the following. If not news module will not work. Go to lib/adodb/drivers/adodb-mysql.inc.php and search for entry like
Change it to
For other patches please look at the attachment for this post

http://forum.cmsmadesimple.org/index.ph ... l#msg27687

There I've made a patched version of g2mod module with most of forum suggested patches inside  .

I do like the concepts of Drupal, but not its data access side of things.
I found that due to the design of the system, that the data access side of things did'nt scale very well. On one page I was getting 100 db queries ! This is fine if you have a monster DB server, but on our LAMP setup it was slowest of all the CMS's I tried on a fully featured page (yet was one of the quicker ones for simple pages).
They also do hideous things with the DB, like not using auto increments, and having to lock any table that needs a row inserting (lock to get last row ID, then add one to the id and insert new row with new id, CMSMS gets round this neatly by using a seperate table), including stats and the page cache which stored in DB.

Also, I noticed the quality of programming in the modules varied. Some people cached data that was reused, some would requery that database everytime for example.

The module API is very good and very well integrated - as good as CMSMS (from my brief look at CMSMS code), reusability is probably better than CMSMS - eg there is an image module and the gallery is a seperate sub module and then you use the taxonomy or category module to categorise rather than in CMSMS where News and Image Galleries dont reuse the same code for categories.
The Taxonomy system is a GOOD taggin system, that can be used to categorise content, but not very good for browsing categorised. content, there was a good beta Category module that allowed true Heirarchical categorisation and navigation.

Thnx guys for the replies
if u check http://www.terminus1525.ca/ U will see it is very slow.
There is one prob with Drupal when used with G2 it need a hell lot of resources.

Though after some more research.I now am confused btwn. say PHP based CMS and Ruby on rails.
So if anyone know if RoR (ruby on rails) can b used to acheive a site like www.gfxartist.com
Also Can G2 b used with RoR. Also how is Gallery2 useful for such projects...

Ruby on Rails is just a framework.  You still have to code everything yourself.  It's just the basic building blocks that you need to make web development easy.

Saying that, I'm a huge fan of RoR as it gives a developer like myself a lot of resources to make coding a nice web app easy.

Also, PHP and Ruby on Rails are not interchangable.  They can be on the same server, but not in the same page request (at least I'm pretty sure about that).  You're most likely going to have to take G2 as a base and develop on top of it to achieve what you want, since it seems like a pretty specialized purpose (social artwork).