CMS Made Simple Forums

I might get burned by this, but please bear with me.

I am a looooooong time user of the cmsms, but recently (a month) I've been 'forced' to use WP. Boy, quite a learning curve, but it has some big pros, as wel ass big cons. CMSms is still lighter more intuitive, cleaner of my type of sites. My main issue with WP it's bloated, becomes slow quite fast. Might be inexperience. It's been just a month.

And prefer the page structure of CMSms, I still have trouble understanding the full depth and power of posts, tags and categories in WP.
But.... I can create custom modules with extra customs fields, which are repeatable and draggable. So a page template can be extended with blocks/sections and ordering (or infinite 'fields-like-add-one-more), which gives a bit more freedom to the backend users.
And the media manager (instead of the somewhat crippled image manager/picker in CMSms) as well...
And documentation. With minutes I find answer to my (many) questions.

What I miss mostly in CMSms is the ability to create own modules like ListIt2 (but it appears not maintained anymore) and repeatable, order able fields. Have I missed this, or is it just not there?
And the url structure with the dangling page id? No work around I've found as of yet.
The MLE is somewhat working, just a matter setup following old tutorials still online.

In CMSms 2.0 what I noticed what looked like was mostly rearranging the templates (modules) however, still no repeatable or reorderable custom fields and the dangling id.

For smaller websites without modules I will use cms, being quicker and lighter. But these three 'things' would mean a lot...( I think.)

Just my two cents, and at the same time a question. (hoping I just missed these things and that they are existent, and would love to be pointed to it.)

Again, I don't want to burn anyone, each one has it benefits, I can work with most, but these 'things'...

So...

I couldn't completely follow everything, but I will try to answers some of your issues.

jack4ya wrote:
But.... I can create custom modules with extra customs fields, which are repeatable and draggable. So a page template can be extended with blocks/sections and ordering (or infinite 'fields-like-add-one-more), which gives a bit more freedom to the backend users.

CMSms makes a clear difference between pages and modules, which provides a better website page structure and IMO a more logic website layout.

Because of this separation we don't (and don't want to) have the add-on of infinite fields, we do have the option when creating a template to add additional content blocks and extending templates with template inheritance to give the flexibility for create a web site page.

When you need more than that you should be looking at modules that allow for the adding of 'infinite' number of custom fields.

jack4ya wrote:
And the media manager (instead of the somewhat crippled image manager/picker in CMSms) as well...

We have worked on this in 2.0 and continue to work on improving this aspect of the admin.

jack4ya wrote:
And documentation. With minutes I find answer to my (many) questions.

They have a much large user base, so they have a lot more volunteers that help with the documentation. We know are documentation is lacking, we are working on it but we have only so much time.

jack4ya wrote:
What I miss mostly in CMSms is the ability to create own modules like ListIt2 (but it appears not maintained anymore) and repeatable, order able fields. Have I missed this, or is it just not there?

There are one or more modules that will be replacing ListIt2 for the 2.0 version.

jack4ya wrote:
And the url structure with the dangling page id? No work around I've found as of yet.

What dangling page id? I have setup many CMSms sites none of them showing the page id. Maybe I misunderstand where you are having the problem since I do have seen WP site with this issue but I figure it was because the person setting them up didn't know what they were doing.

jack4ya wrote:
For smaller websites without modules I will use cms, being quicker and lighter. But these three 'things' would mean a lot...( I think.)
So...

My thoughts... Because of the size of WP you can do a fair bit right out of the box with templates and modules for setting up a site. But once you go off the path of what is already done and need to start customizing thing it is a lot more difficult in WP than in CMSms.

There are one or more modules that will be replacing ListIt2 for the 2.0 version.

Now that I find interesting! Would you mind pointing me to these?

I do use template/inheritance quite a bit, use several MenuManager calls to create menus with templates (like sidebar or even child/category pages).

But the 'repeatable'/'sortable' options to a page template would help a lot.
Let me try to give an example.
I like to approach of a page template per type of page. So a product page would get a productpage template (based on base template using inheritance) Within that page I would like to be able to order the 'sections' sometimes: video section, above manuals, or link to other pages. So literally ordering the sections.

Or add an image to the page... But how many? 1? 3? infinate? I now must create say 5 image fields, when maybe one is actually used. Or worse, it's not enough. (So I resorted to Gallery, but that modules claims another exclusive folder, doubling the image load on the server.)

Now the dangling ID... Yes, it could be my lack of knowledge, and this ID this is probably (only?) linked to ListIt2 as well.

And ListIt2 is a whole other issue, which most of use are familiar with. It will not be picked up in the meanwhile, and cmsmsV2 has been in dev as long as I can remember and still not advised for live site.

Can't go forward now with cmsms.

WordPress is disabling all things, dressing it down, but with CMB2 I can at least add extra info / blocks / fields / order these and call them in the templates. So I ended up creating my own base template, types, which allows for a user to create his own pages like a mini page builder (convined to what I've made obviously.) It took a long time, but now I can quite quick create custom themes.

But for a end user WordPress can be a nightmare. (Tags? Taxonomy? Posts?) I send a non savvy text writer to a cmsms site, later I asked her if she needed guidance. Turned out she all ready did heaps without any assistence.

So cmsms still has my love, but ...well... some (serious) gripes as well.

Now that I find interesting! Would you mind pointing me to these?

Here is the first one: http://dev.cmsmadesimple.org/projects/easylist JoMorg is also working on one, and I will possibly create a third. There might be others.

But the 'repeatable'/'sortable' options to a page template would help a lot.
Let me try to give an example.
I like to approach of a page template per type of page. So a product page would get a productpage template (based on base template using inheritance) Within that page I would like to be able to order the 'sections' sometimes: video section, above manuals, or link to other pages. So literally ordering the sections.

Maybe I don't completely understand, but I see this as using a module (like maybe Products or ListIt2) and having a category/hierarchy list view.

Or add an image to the page... But how many? 1? 3? infinate? I now must create say 5 image fields, when maybe one is actually used. Or worse, it's not enough. (So I resorted to Gallery, but that modules claims another exclusive folder, doubling the image load on the server.)

There is always more development to be done and more features that it would be great to have. This one is nice, but everything is prioritized by the number of people that request and will use a feature and items that people will sponsor(sorry the truth of the world is that money talks). So far this one hasn't made it up the list yet.

Can't go forward now with cmsms.

I am sorry to hear this.

I've been a long time user and lover of CMSms, but I've had to jump ship for two reasons. Firstly, and most importantly, the wide user base of WordPress means better support. If I'm having a problem, chances are, someone out there has had the same problem, which I can find a solution by searching, or somebody will answer my question on Stack Exchange. In addition to that, there's probably a plug-in that will do what I want.

Secondly, the back-end looks slick and my clients prefer it. Plus, they can search how to make things work for themselves in the back-end without bothering me for it.

Oh and there's a third – the Yoast SEO plugin.

The reason I'm here at the moment, though is that I've just seen that CMSms 2 is out, so I'm planning to check it out.