CMS Made Simple Forums

Hi all
I'm a designer who needs to adopt a boiler-plate CMS for the increasing number of clients who want a mostly-static site 'with a couple of pages that I can update'.

For me, the most important thing is that the code corresponds to web standards, including table-free layout and proper XHTML layout. Use of JavaScript, if not unobtrusive, must at least degrade gracefully with no loss of functionality. Yadda yadda yadd....you know what I'm on about. If I can get started on it with a gentle learning curve, and ramp it up as necessary, so much the better.

CMS Made Simple looks, at first, second and third glance, like it might provide a solution, but just as I was about to throw away the 100-odd pages of documentation I was about to read about PMWiki, I read an opinion that CMS Made Simple left something to be desired when it came to be security.

I'm no zealot; afaiac shutting the obvious vulnerabilities, and patching as and when, is enough; also, Secunia report no open problems with this product (http://secunia.com/product/5641/).

But I wanted to give the real users a chance: on the whole, is this a good product for me to begin to use as a professional web maker, do you think, or is there anything that should make me think again?

thanks for all your time and opinions

mark

Go for it i for one will never look back or go to another system...
tried numerous ways to design, code, impliment, my web sites and this by far is the most like the way i did it when i hand coded..
except it's a 1000 times faster and way more dynamic, can you imagine having an 85/200 page web site and every time you added another page you had to go thru every page and add a new page link to each menu WHOA fun... now i just make a new page tell it where in the menu to go and i'm off and running...
i've look at others and it was way to much, make a blob for this code into this, make another blob for this and code it into here, oh yea you forgot to do this and now it don't work...etc. etc.
with this it's make a termplate like normal (read not table based layout) html, with a simple stylesheet tag, with out the content, add content tags, as many or few as you want, goto add page fill content boxes, and you can reuse style sheets for mutliple pages by attaching them to the diff. templates...
i could go on and on but i'll just say I LOVE THIS CMSMS system  i'd never use any thing else, they will have to "pry it out of my cold dead hands" or however that saying goes...

I agree with Mark on every point he made.

This CMS is the best one I've seen, it has a very clean design, as though the designers specifically made the thing to integrate into everything nicely.

The template system is the simplest I've ever seen, integrated with smarty tags make for a very happy designer. Combined with the content system and a little creativity you can actually make dynamic templates and other really crazy things very easily that you couldn't do anywhere else.

I'm kind of paranoid so I checked into security and so far no bug reports. There was an XSS issue back in the day but nothing serious and well taken care of now. If you have a decent understanding of .htaccess security can be tightened up well enough for anyone without too many problems.

I just got started on the CMS though and don't have enough understanding of the core yet to be able to contribute much, but I definately plan to as things progress.

I haven't found one limitation on this CMS yet. It's very well suited to static pages with a simple page creation system, and can easily handle very active community sites. It's also simpler than my other preferred CMS, drupal. Not as big of community but it will be, its inevitable.

-K

this system is only about a year old...
barely got our first teeth...

that's the amazing part.

Would you recommend CMS Made Simple

Yes!

I've tried a dozen cms'es and this one is the best sollution so far.
Security is not a bigger problem than any other software around.
Simplicity is the keyword!

And for me the most important part: cmsms makes it possible to port any design, any website, everything I have on the web into a cms.
My clients love it.