Which CMS do I need? Needs to be easy to post a certain kind of post

Question

Hi,

I'm creating a site for a video store and it needs to be CMS. I'm doing this for free so I need to use a free CMS like Wordpress, Drupal or Joomla.

Do I need a new CMS, a plugin or some PHP of my own?

What I need: User accounts Categories Custom post

Here's the site as it stands with WP: http://sundancevideo.ca. Right now an experimental site to try to work this out.

What I've done now, is created a "Draft" that includes a template table with images and text and so on. The user would then have to copy everything, past into a new post and replace necessary. This really isn't working well. As you may notice by the condition of the posts.

What I would prefer is if it was integrated into the WP UI. Like a field for "Description" and field for "Image" where they can upload the images as necessary. This would then generate post, with a table including all the information and images, for as many movies that were added in the UI.

Please ask if I'm not being clear.

Please help, any suggestions are welcome.

Thank you,
Vian

Answer 1

If you want a full CMS backend then you can't use Wordpress without extensive customising. You might want to check out pods cms for Wordpress which is an extension to attempt to turn Wordpress into a CMS. However, I have tried using it before and you will still be left with a confusing UI for your users. It will allow you to do the custom fields you want, however.

If you want full control over the UI, you will have to use either your own PHP or Drupal. Which one depends on how complex the project is and how much experience with Drupal you have had. If it is simple and your Drupal experience is limited, definitely go with your own PHP because Drupal is hard to learn. I think it would take you more time to learn Drupal than it will be to get a simple interface going with PHP.

I think this post will be helpful, depending on your experience, if you go with your own code.

Answer 2

i don't have particular suggestion for you custom need. Except beware for how much you give permission for your member. Please make sure they were a contributor and not author. In wp, the contributor role has no ability to publish. They have ability to post something just as a review. Thus, Administrator can review them and then published if it appropriated.

The problem with this situation is when you need them to upload things. The member with contributor role has no ability to upload video, image, or song. You have to custom this.

But if you only need their snippet or HTML link to the video (probably in youtube), then you don't have to change default wordpress role.

sorry if i mislead by your question. just trying to help as much as i can

Answer 3

I guess it depends on your shop's needs. I understand wanting to use wordpress, and you can do it, but at this point it almost makes people think... 'why?' If youre just going to use paypal and have a few products it might be a good idea but I think carts like zencart and oscommerce that are much better suited to store's needs. Though they are a little older. Magento and opencart are more modern, and all free. Though I've only ever used zen cart. None of these are terribly hard to set up. I guess You could always have you wordpress from page and use a link to your carts store menus.

Answer 4

MODx is brilliant for customisability - it was designed from the ground up to be extensive. It runs on PHP and MySQL.

You can create your own templates, add fields to those templates that appear in the UI when someone wants to create or edit a page based on that template. It has widgets for different data types, like images, dates etc that your users can use to add data to a page.

You also have full control over the HTML because you write the templates yourself. If the core code doesn't do what you need, you can write snippets in plain PHP to change the behaviour.

I've used it on a few projects over the past 3 years and I love it. I'd recommend MODx Evolution (v1.0.3) as that's stable. There's a brand-new rewritten version (Revolution 2.0.0) which is a release candidate at the moment, so you might want to have a play with that instead.

I reckon once you know MODx enough to create the site design, it'd be fairly easy to implement an off-the-shelf shopping cart into it (there may even be a MODx plugin that already does this.)

Answer 5

I would suggest taking a look at PodsCMS as a great way to implement real CMS functionality in to WordPress. It allows you to create various content types, relate these content types, and more importantly live outside of the "WordPress bubble".

You'll find a fairly good codex and user guides (the ones authored by Johnathan Christopher are a great start). There is a solid API for this in the event that you need to integrate Pods in to an existing plugin or one you are creating. There are also developer and user contributed packages for Pods and there is even a YouTube video package you may want to check out.

PodsUI (soon to be merged with PodsCMS) allows you to create administration menus in WordPress very easily and allows you to pretty much make it look and feel how ever you want.

Flutter is a dead project and while it may be a little more user friendly than PodsCMS it lacks in in development, support, and over all usability.

Feel free to drop in the Pods Chat or @ them on Twitter.

As for the user accounts you should read up on WordPress user roles/capabilties and also check through the WordPress PHPxref. A lot can be done in the way of using WordPress' current user system and you can even add other meta information for users if needed.