CMS Made Simple Forums

First describe the differences between an apple and an orange... then you will have an idea what is different between CMSMS and Wordpress.

1. Wordpress has its origins in blogging and is built around that idea.
2. CMSMS is a more general purpose CMS.

Having made those two statements, both platforms have evolved to a point where they can do many of the same things albeit in different ways. Both platforms have a plethora of extensions and modules that allow them to be used across a variety of scenarios. For instance WP is perfectly usable to build an e-commerce site, while CMSMS is capable of supporting a blog site.

The following are things I may consideration while deciding between WP and CMSMS for a given project. NOTE: Emphasis is on "I" - others may have different ideas:
1. Is the site primarily going to be a Blog, with a few supporting static pages? If so, I'd use WP.
2. Does the site need to support multiple pages and multiple levels of hierarchy? I'd lean towards CMSMS.
3. Is it expected that the site will need a lot of custom functionality to be written? I'd gravitate towards CMSMS, but that is because I am more familiar with its extensions framework.
4. Are you looking for a site that can be "themed" easily with a lot of choices for free/paid themes? Go with WP (this is not to say that CMSMS does not have a lot of themes available for it as well).

Because the size of its user base, WP tends to have more active support and you can find a large number of books and publications for it. CMSMS currently has two books (AFAIK), although I am hoping that more will come along.

Both platforms are built on PHP & MySQL (or similar db) and both support an embedded templating syntax. I think once you understand how it works, Smarty is a great tool and this given CMSMS a slight edge over WP.

Having said all that, I am still a fan of CMSMS, which is why I am here and not over there on WP's forum!

Hope that helps somewhat.
-S

I'd like to add that the backend of CMSMS is more intuitive and friendlier to the end-user.

I think the biggest difference is that WordPress is focussed to be a single user CMS. The developer is the content editor and vice versa. While CMS Made Simple is made for a situation where those are different persons.

This makes WordPress a little easyer for people with no web experience that want a quick website. But it makes CMS Made Simple easyer for a more advanced user, that wants to make a template from scratch.

That's why the backend of CMS MS is more intuitive, because you're not bothered with advanced features if you just want to edit some content.
It also makes CMS MS more flexible, because it's not built with a very strict structure in mind (of a blog with some extra content pages). If you want to do more than that, you will soon be working against Wordpress instead of wíth.
The downside is that the CMS MS developer needs to have some experience with HTML and CSS, because chances are big you'll be writing a custom template completely to your taste. While the Wordpress developer (user) can easily download a template that suits his purpose, and only has to change it a little to his taste.

mcDavid wrote:The downside is that the CMS MS developer needs to have some experience with HTML and CSS, because chances are big you'll be writing a custom template completely to your taste. While the Wordpress developer (user) can easily download a template that suits his purpose, and only has to change it a little to his taste.

It's not really a downside.. This is the audience that CMSMS is targeting, from a development point of view... However, once it's developed, it's easy for a non-techie to maintain.

CMSMS isn't for those who want to install, choose a template and go... The developer should have a good knowledge of HTML, CSS.. PHP and MySQL is a huge plus. The end result is a completely custom design.. Even modules are easily configured (in the admin panel) to match the design of the site..

I haven't seen a CMS yet that allows developers to create/adjust templates directly in the admin panel.

For our business we score CMS systems from 1 (worst) to 10 (best), so we can explain customers the differences between opensource packages. The result depends on several things:

- state/quality of programming work
- quality of the UI
- reputation (historically)
- frequency of updates
- size of the community
- available library, support, documentation and extensions
- legal issues
- specific properties of the packages
- integration possibilities with external packages

Both CMSms and WP score 9 out of 10. No other packages score 9 or higher. For score 10 CMSms has to increase the size of the community and improve overall support. WP has to increase their UI.

After all, both packages have their purpose. Use best for each situation.

SanderBroek wrote:For score 10 CMSms has to increase the size of the community and improve overall support.

Maybe you could also give some suggestions on how we could increase the size of the community and overall support?

When I look around this forum I see a lot of people being helpful, trying to solve people's questions/problems. What's missing?

I think it's very cool that we score a 9 in your book, but to be honest, we don't have much control of how many people decide to use CMSms.

In regards to the support: I hope you understand that the people working on this cms are doing this in their spare-time. The members of the Dev-team simply do not have the time to hang around the forums the entire day and reply to every post/question/problem. (If you really need them, there's always the IRC channel)

When I see how quick the Dev-team reacts to bugs with the core, releasing new versions on a very regular basis, explaining changes to the public and answering difficult questions, I get the feeling they are doing everything within their limits to provide us a decent and awesome cms!

We do have a rather large, high-quality, community driven support group who help out others, feel free to join them

SanderBroek wrote:For score 10 CMSms has to increase the size of the community and improve overall support.

I agree to M@rtijn's reply on that just something small to add.

The problem is there are people like you, suggesting something but not following those suggestions themself.

There are three kinds of CMSMS user:
a) Using CMSMS package, never register to forum and find their own way when dealing with problems.
b) Using CMSMS and registers to Forum and logs in only when there is a Problem that should be solved by "community".
c) Using CMSMS visiting Forums regularly and trying to help others with their own experience.

Choose which one you would like to be

DEV Team tries to help, replies in Forums, IRC and Tweets about any "Idea", "Suggestion", "Change", "Function".
That is social enough isn't it?

ooops guys, i wasn't trying to intend support isn't good... To be honest i love this forum and respect all the contributors a lot...

So please, take in account that to our opinion only CMSMS and WP score nine points. We are comparing like 35 systems out there. We don't know a system with score 10 Other systems get a lower score. So, CMSMS is doing a pretty good job already.

The reason i start commenting on this forum, was to contribute, not to critisize. All i got is critisizm, just because i pointed one thing that can be improved. I thought we already discussed this particular thing at Geekmoot 2010.

To keep this post ontopic, i'll respond elsewhere on this forum to other raised points. And don't worry, my company is supporting where we can

Ahhh, Sander, I know that Your substantial sponsorship of last year's GM was also highly appreciated! And so was the news of CMSMS being used in the Tour de France campaign.

In the background the marketing team is working hard on developing campaigns to boost the community, but I cannot disclose anything yet on the forum as that would spoil the surprise

Will contact you personally real soon!

Anne-Mieke

Don't worry, we'll be in touch

with all that has been said, I find myself comparing WP to CMSMS.

I have been using cmsms for years, very little more as a quick editor as my dad website that needs to be updated many times a month and i tried all the big cms products such as drupal and joomla but found them just to over whelming.

i recently decided to build a few sites for a few local customers and one of my co-workers uses WP and suggest i try it but I find myself going back to cmsms

Reasons for going back to cmsms
1. templates are very easy to port if you have the html code, css code and images
2. backend that i can give to a facebook user and let them add content and pictures to the gallery if need be
3. ease of module installs

reasons i want to go to wordpress
1. more commonly used

the pros out wiegh the cons and I believe I am sticking with cmsms

little background on me

12 years as an network engineer working with servers, switches, routers and firewalls
hate web site design (i know i know)
not a coder at all

I use both WP and CMSMS, depending on the type of project.

As I see it:

WP is my choice when the project is based on publishing a lot of articles in short time - online newspapers & magazines, for example.
What I like about WP is the auto-building of archives, the ease of publishing - especially the handling of images - and the way how the updates are done. And it still works with 5k pages on a moderate server. Templates ("themes") are available by the thousands, both free and commercial. So, if you find a template that suits you, you are up and running in minutes.

The downside: Writing your own template is a daunting task, and most available templates are somewhat chaotic. Changing templates requires a lot of work, since they are all *very* different. And adding a number of modules results in a crazy mixture of .js and .css which are loaded all at the same time whether the page needs it or not: even a rather simple installation can easily reach 500k to download. So, optimizing a non-trivial WP site for performance can be a nightmare.
Oh, and re-structuring your content may result in major headache.

To sum it up: WP does best what it is intended to do: publish articles. If your project tends to run into that direction, fine.

CMSMS is different, as it is intended to work as a CMS. So, restructuring content is easy, and the templating system is excellent. In fact, it is so simple to write templates that there are only few templates available (compared to the masses of WP templates) - it is just so goldarn easy ...
Editing pages is simple enough, but I wish CMSMS would handle images the way WP does. THIS would make it shine, really. For those who don't know WP: When you upload an image, it gets
- reduced to 3 sizes PLUS the original size
- auto-archived in a searchable mediatheque
- auto-linked with "big" image (configurable)
- you can edit the image right in the upload dialogue
This makes the process to insert a picture SO fast you won't believe it. I wish CMSMS had that ...
Apart from that, editing pages is still reasonably easy, and if you don't need to publish huge numbers of articles/pages with lots of images, CMSMS is almost perfect. (As long as you don't use the micro tiny).
Writing little extensions for CMSMS is fun, many things are dead simple when done with SMARTY, and writing a plugin with a little php knowledge is simple, too. This is WP's biggest "flaw" (IMHO): just try to add a simple functionality only on one page or on several pages. Depending on your chosen theme, your hair may turn gray ...
(That's why most WP pages look the same).

Regarding modules/plugins/UDTs etc.: WP has a lot, but if you want to customize them, ouch ...
CMSMS does not have the sheer number of available 3rd party modules/plugins, but almost all you *really* need, and they can be customized extensively.

Downside of CMSMS: Don't go over 500 pages (or so). Not for mass-production of pages/articles.

To sum it up: CMSMS is more about content *management*, and it excels in flexibility/customizability.

Hope that all makes sense ...

Cheers,
Alex

faglork wrote:What I like about WP is the auto-building of archives

What do you mean by this? I've never needed to do anything other than something like {news number=5}, then a "View archive" link which has the rest of the articles with pagination. Does WP do something beyond that?

faglork wrote:...but I wish CMSMS would handle images the way WP does. THIS would make it shine, really. For those who don't know WP: When you upload an image, it gets
- reduced to 3 sizes PLUS the original size
- auto-archived in a searchable mediatheque
- auto-linked with "big" image (configurable)
- you can edit the image right in the upload dialogue
This makes the process to insert a picture SO fast you won't believe it. I wish CMSMS had that ...

I don't see that this is necessary with a little configuration. Easy to have a 'page_image' content block, and embed GBFilePicker into the page using {cms_content ...} to allow users to upload. No need to have three different sizes, I use SuperSizer to resize images on the fly (and cache them)... CMSMS doesn't assume what you want, but is easy to configure to exactly how you want it.

CMSMS doesn't have those nice editing features, but I use supersizer to auto size and crop to the necessary size and shape, so that users can upload directly off the camera, and have the template place it exactly in the correct place, with the correct styles, so that they don't have to 'tell' it where to go and how it should look.

Wishbone wrote:

faglork wrote:What I like about WP is the auto-building of archives

What do you mean by this? I've never needed to do anything other than something like {news number=5}, then a "View archive" link which has the rest of the articles with pagination. Does WP do something beyond that?

Yes ... just have a look at the possible archive configurations.
And: the uploaded media get auto-archived in corresponding folders. And the media archive is searchable, too.

Wishbone wrote:

faglork wrote:...but I wish CMSMS would handle images the way WP does. THIS would make it shine, really. For those who don't know WP: When you upload an image, it gets
- reduced to 3 sizes PLUS the original size
- auto-archived in a searchable mediatheque
- auto-linked with "big" image (configurable)
- you can edit the image right in the upload dialogue
This makes the process to insert a picture SO fast you won't believe it. I wish CMSMS had that ...

I don't see that this is necessary with a little configuration. Easy to have a 'page_image' content block, and embed GBFilePicker into the page using {cms_content ...} to allow users to upload.

When you don't know whether the article has 1 or 10 images, this just does not work ...

Wishbone wrote: No need to have three different sizes, I use SuperSizer to resize images on the fly (and cache them)... CMSMS doesn't assume what you want, but is easy to configure to exactly how you want it.

CMSMS doesn't have those nice editing features, but I use supersizer to auto size and crop to the necessary size and shape, so that users can upload directly off the camera, and have the template place it exactly in the correct place, with the correct styles, so that they don't have to 'tell' it where to go and how it should look.

Well, I can only tell about *my* view of the process, and *I* find the WP solution better/faster. Did you ever work with WP? I mean, really *work* - publishing a lot of articles? I am sure you would see the difference, too. The searchable media archive for itself makes a big difference. Of course, we are talking about bigger sites here ...

Nevertheless, CMSMS is my weapon of choice - I have about 30 installations running, but only 2 WP - those newspaper/magazine sites.

Cheers,
Alex