Looking for an easy cms system? flexible plugins modules, blocks, themes

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+1 Q:

Looking for an easy cms system? flexible plugins modules, blocks, themes

Hi I'm a big user of Wordpress however its not ideal for cms sites. I'm currently looking at pixie cms, however if say I want three columns, only one column can be allowed to change across pages and I can't apply specific templeates to pages. I'm also looking at impress cms which looks confusing in the admin although it has good reviews.

Does anyone have any suggestions what is a flexible cms for a designer who only needs to edit the html and css and maybe add a news feed in one column.

Thanks for your help

Regards

Judi

Is typolight any good? http://www.typolight.org/

Try CushyCMS. It is simple but would require you to mark editable areas with a class in the html.

Xinxua 2010-03-13 20:22:50

Thanks I have to pay for cushy though

judi 2010-03-13 20:41:13

There is a free version, ofcourse you have to be content with having their branding logos etc.

Xinxua 2010-03-14 06:28:36

why not WP ? in my opinion, it's very flexible for designers. also very easy for Theme Design. also I recommend SPIP

mgpyone 2010-03-13 20:23:20

Yeh I like WP too but mainly for blogs. Appearently its not so good for SEO

judi 2010-03-13 20:43:15

humm , for SEO, there are all-in-one SEO plugin for WP(http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/), you can try as much as you can

mgpyone 2010-03-13 20:52:11

Yes I know this however, seo entails more than you might think, I've heard from experts wp is bad for seo

judi 2010-03-13 21:21:31

SEO 'experts' are a dime a dozen. Most of them are using techniques that stopped working years ago. WP has excellent SEO if you set it up right, foremost being to set the permalinks up correctly. If you're lazy you can just drop the cash for Semiologic (http://www.semiologic.com/) and install it all pre-configured.

Hugh Brackett 2010-03-17 15:46:57

+1 A:

I'd probably look at Drupal which seems to be getting some very good press recently, Good personalisation and there also seems to be a good community around it which for any open soruce product is a huge advantage.

The community also contributes to drupals modules a list of which can be found here:

http://drupal.org/node/206666

I know of at least two individuals setting up companies recently that plumped for drupal and have not regretted it.

krystan honour 2010-03-13 20:27:20

I highly recommend either Drupal or Joomla - they are the most popualr CMSs ( I assume you are looking for PHP based - since you had experience with WoldPress). They have thousands of plugins, active communities - you tend to get a response within minutes or a few hours, thoroughly tested. I had more expereince with Joomla, but I heard good things about Drupal as well. If you are not a Developer yoruself, I would recommend sticking with one of those big ones.

Nick Gorbikoff 2010-03-13 20:30:12

Thanks very much but I've heard I have to pay for joomla plugins and drupal is very difficult for designers to learn

judi 2010-03-13 20:42:08

Nick Gorbikoff 2010-03-14 18:47:40

Also to add to my previous comment. It's hard to give specific advice without knowing your specific goal. Joomla or Drupal are the swiss-knives of the CMSs. Sometimes all you need is a kitchen knife, but a good one. So Typolight or Cushy might be better for a specific purpose. Then again if you need an online store I would go with oscommerse or magento. However these are all general purpose solutions, for most customer projects you would need to roll out your own based on some framework like CakePHP or Symphony. However I stopped using php-based products 2 yr ago - moved to rails.

Nick Gorbikoff 2010-03-14 18:53:21

What does rails do? I'll try out joomla I just need it for simple websites built in a day, but I need it to be quite flexible? I've just found out I can keep Pixie very small and neat which is good for seo and I can have page specific stylesheets so can completely change the layouts! Ands its great for seo

judi 2010-03-14 19:04:24

I hope joomla is small typolight is huge 10mb, which is bad for seo I spose

judi 2010-03-14 19:05:16

Then again wordpress is also 9mb

judi 2010-03-14 19:09:31

judi, the actual size of the app doesn't matter - even thou wordpress engine may be 9 mbs, the actual GENERATED content is mush smaller. Same goes for joomla or drupal. If those CMSs actually generated and sent 9mbs worth of html to you everytime you got to a page ran by wordpress - it woudln't be the one of the most popular bloging engines. Also I think it's fine for SEO - I can see GA for both our company site and my own, and we are doing ok for our our target words. Rails is a web-development framework for Ruby. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_on_rails, similar to what CakePHP is to PHP

Nick Gorbikoff 2010-03-15 08:56:10

IMHO Joomla and Drupal are a bit of overkill if it's just a simple site, a few pages of html and css. I've used Joomla in the past but struggled getting all the necessary modules to play nicely with each other. Recently switched to modX and can recommend it - transferring a static site it took half an hour to install, half an hour to create the template and half an hour to import half a dozen static pages.

Adrian 2010-03-17 15:46:48

+2 A:

Look at the ModX, it is very easy to apply (custom) different layouts, and it is more like a CMS type framework.

http://modxcms.com/

take a look at the list of videos about ModX

http://wiki.modxcms.com/index.php/MODx_Instructional_Videos

Update:

One more suggestion would be SilverStripe CMS, another Framework type CMS built on Sapphire MVC Framework. Again, very easy to apply (custom) layouts, and more natural then ModX, and more control over dynamic parts.

http://www.silverstripe.com/

download, showcase... http://www.silverstripe.org/

tutorials http://doc.silverstripe.org/doku.php?id=tutorials

I tend to use SSCMS

Dr Casper Black 2010-03-17 15:35:21

I'm sticking with Pixie :)

judi 2010-04-03 14:59:33

ansaurus

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Looking for an easy cms system? flexible plugins modules, blocks, themes

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