Features

CMS Made Simple offers quite a few features.  SEO friendly URLs is at the top of the list and is a refreshing change from the standard CMS URLs that require a bit of fancy programming or modification to work with the major search engines.

There are a number of integrated features making this product an excellent choice – help, file manager with upload capabilities and an audit log.  User and group management are included as well as a group-based permission system.

CMS Made Simple allows for a unique web site design with the ability to change templates with ease.  The included admin panel is not only available in English but supports many other languages as well.  The program also boasts several extra features available with add-on modules – WYSIWYG, polls, blogging and calendar add-ons are just a few offered.

Support

The CMS Made Simple web site offers several avenues for support should the need arise.  Full documentation is available online as well as an FAQ, user forum, mailing list and an IRC chat channel.  If this isn’t enough, the company also offers a direct e-mail connection to a developer to have support issues handled when all other support routes fail to garner a user the answer they need.

The development side of this company’s web site allows users to report bugs and request features – a nice addition for regular uses of this CMS program.  This area also shows current releases and a roadmap to future developments of the software.

Beyond software

Going beyond simply producing and offering a CMS solution, CMS Made Simple also offers professional services for developers needing more assistance or something more than just what the program offers.  Among these services are support contracts purchased on a per-site basis, software development to help with solutions outside the standard program and the ability to contract one of the company’s developers for large projects.

Testimonials

As with any open source CMS program that may not be as popular as the biggies on the market, knowing that the product is stable and used by others is important.  The CMS Made Simple web site lists out many satisfied customers with complete testimonials regarding the product.  This web page shows the product is easy to use and is well-liked by many web professionals and business owners.

Final Thoughts

It definitely isn’t one of the more well-known open source content management systems out on the web but it is slowly growing in popularity.  CMS Made Simple is exactly that – an easy to use open source content management system.  This CMS program is worth checking out.

A CMS (content management system) is a specialize piece of software that allows you to efficiently maintain and update all the contents of your website.  Drupal is one of the very best at this, offering tremendous out of the box functionality along with support for a number of additional modules that can be used to extend its default capabilities.  Being an open-source software application, a community of users have contributed many components and modules for the overall betterment of the project.

Easy to Install and Set Up

Installing Drupal on your web hosting account is simple, especially when using an easy to use application installer such as Fantastico.  After installing the program, you can go through the process of designing your site and select from the array of content types that it will be compromised of.  A comprehensive wizard is available to walk you through the entire process and when setting things up, you are able to see a preview of what your site will look like when it is done.  This gives you the luxury to go back and make edits at any point during the design process.  Learning how to master the basic functions and options of Drupal is something that can literally be done in a matter of minutes.

The Benefits of Drupal Hosting

Due to its soaring popularity, Drupal has become a mainstay on the hosting market as several hosts now offer the software in their service plans at no additional cost.  Even though it has a reputation for being more complex than similar packages such as Joomla, all it takes is a basic level of technical skills to create a powerful and professional Drupal site.  In fact, if you can work with a simple word processing application and web browser, you can excel from the default functionality this dynamic CMS has to offer.  Drupal requires no programming knowledge of PHP or HTML to either create, maintain or update your website.

Conclusion

Drupal is a robust software package that offers the ability to create, manage and update various types of content.  It is primed for Web 2.0 applications so you can easily implement desirable features such blogs, forums and much more.  There are many CMS hosting solutions on the market and honestly, Drupal may not be suited for your needs.  For this reason, you should evaluate this product in and out to determine if it can meet your content management requirements.

Creating ASP.NET Applications

Webaptive works closely with the web server to add CMS functionality to your applications.  From within IIS, you can choose the application you want to enhance. Once you make your selection and a database is automatically created, you can then enable existing applications or develop new ones.  Because the method in which Webaptive associates itself with applications is specific to the ASP.NET framework, it is strongly recommend that you create your pages and applications using standard ASP.NET programming practices.

CMS Features

Though rich in ASP.NET functionality, Webaptive offers many of the same capabilities found in other CMS products.  For instance, it has a built-in WYSIWYG editor for easily creating articles and blog posts, a CSS editing facility, and support for multiple authors.  Some of its more advanced features include localization and campaign management as well content inheritance options for managers and administrators.  Another unique quality of Webaptive its seamless integration with Perifigure, Striquent’s sister product.  Perfigure is a powerful analytic tool that analyzes site performance and provides detailed statistics on traffic, marketing campaigns and several other business related activities.  These capabilities alone make Webaptive a very attractive CMS for business users.

Standing Alongside and Out from the Crowd

Marketed as a CMSaaS product, Webaptive shares a few qualities with similar hosted SaaS CMS solutions such as CushyCMS and Surreal CMS.  Many of these platforms work by mildly blending content management features into a web page or website.  Though effective for the most part, they are not all that intrusive in regard to the core technologies and as a result, only provide limited CMS functionality.  Although Webaptive performs in a similar manner, it goes beyond the basics by digging into the code at the ASP.NET application level.  This gives it the ability to interact with ASP.NET controls as well as the standard HTML elements.  When all components are properly configured, this CMS can truly help you take your web applications to the next level.  Another difference is that whereas most SaaS CMS platforms are hosted solutions, Webaptive can be downloaded, installed and configured on your own server.

Availability and System Requirements

The Webaptive CMS is currently available in three versions: Community, Express and Enterprise editions.  In terms of functionality, the Community and Express versions are nearly identical.  However, the community version is free and therefore does not come included with reliable technical support.  The Enterprise edition is the most powerful version of the product as it is equipped with many advanced back-end versions and of course, paid support.  In order to run Webaptive, you will need the Windows Server 2003 operating system or higher and an SQL Server database.  These elements are needed to support your ASP.NET applications and web pages.

Primary Features

When looking at the list of features, you can tell that Day put a lot of sweat into the most recent version of CQ5.   While many CMS vendors are steering clear of Web 2.0, fearing it will soon be eclipsed by the Semantic Web 3.0, Day is one company that puts a huge emphasis on it.  Some of its key features enable blog, forum and calendering functionality to help users incorporate that community like feel into their sites.  The application also comes included with a number of pre-installed widgets for site enhancement.  Web forms, comments, tags, slideshows, RSS feeds and wikis are just a few of the elements that can be used to encourage visitor interaction on you website.

Media Management Tools

CQ5 has a nicely integrated facility that makes it easy to maintain a variety of digital media assets.  Some of the most notable features allow you to manage audio and video, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF file formats, watermarking and format transcoding.  One of CQ5’s best qualities from a user aspect is image editing.  The platform allows full image rendering and has some pretty nice editing features.  Unlike many other content management tools, CQ5 offers a browser-based cropping functionality for getting the most out of your photos as you can easily crop, rotate, map and flush images.

Backup and Recovery

CQ5 truly excels in terms of its backup and recovery functionality.  The newest version offers a hot backup utility that allows you to create backups of your entire file system.  This includes content, configuration files, modules and web scripts.  Restoring a complete CQ5 instance is a simple as extracting the backup from the zip file and restarting the system.  This could be a great benefit that saves a company a lot time, money and valuable resources.  All it takes a single click and all data is sent to Quickstart bundled file for disaster recovery purposes, allowing you to backup and restore your business environment in minutes.

Conclusion

While the new and improved GUI brings some user-friendliness to the product, CQ5 is a CMS best suited for advanced users.  Developers can truly benefit from this tool as it packages together a powerful set of web technologies.  It is the sophisticated and robust environment that takes away from its usability and makes this tool a little much for beginners.

]]> http://webhostinggeeks.com/blog/2009/08/05/cq5-cms-review/feed/ 1 http://webhostinggeeks.com/blog/2009/07/02/digitalus-cms-review/ http://webhostinggeeks.com/blog/2009/07/02/digitalus-cms-review/#comments Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:42:01 +0000 CommunicateBetter http://webhostinggeeks.com/blog/?p=402 Released in August of 2008, the Digitialus content management system is a relatively new player in the open-source CMS market.  Version 1.5 recently hit the scene and sparked developers’ attention with features such as a web-based installer, globalization capabilities and the 960 Grid system page layout management tool.  Some of these features are incredibly easy to use while others call for you to be somewhat of a technical geek.  And even though Digitalus is still in the early stages of development, it has made some notable improvements by adding functionality found in some of the more well known systems.  Here is a rundown on the latest version of the Digitalus CMS.

The 960 Grid

One of the major highlights of the new Digitalus CMS is its integration with a CSS framework known as the 960 Grid System.  This system strives to streamline website development by providing dimensions based on the common width of 960 pixels.  The built-in Grid 960 Helper builds the CSS grid that allows this method to work, ultimately making it easier to create cross-browser friendly template layouts and cater to various users.

The helper is essentially a PHP class in the Zend Framework.  According to Digitalus Media president Forrest Lyman, the Grid 960 Helper is now referred to as a component and a part of the core library.  The component creates an XHTML layout grid and all the appropriate classes to incorporate with the Grid 960 CSS framework.  While this feature is incredibly useful, it is not mandatory as you can also build standard PHP scripts to use for your layouts.

User Management

Another major draw to Digitalus CMS is the user management, which should be quite simple to grasp for most people.  The software allows you to create two types of users: a Site Administrator and Super Administrator.  The former has granular control while the latter has access to everything.  If you check out the Digitalus Wiki, you will see that adding multiple users can be a rather “tedious task.”   The good thing is that the software lets you clone user permissions with a featured called Copy User Permissions.   For the most part, the user and permissions management tools are simplistic but could use a little more in terms of functionality and user-friendliness.

Conclusion

All in all, Digitalus is a nice content management tool that still has some maturing to do.  In an open-source CMS market saturated with products that all seem to do the same thing, the choice usually boils down to what best suits your needs as well the drawbacks you can deal with.  Because Digitalus is a newcomer and therfore is not yet proven like other systems, it may not be the solution for all applications.  If you need a CMS or publishing tool that offers basic capabilities, try taking a look at some blogging platforms such as WordPress or b2Evolution because they are a bit more functional, user-friendly and able to cover a greater range of needs.

Core Technologies

Umbraco is a content management solution that thrives off Microsoft web technologies, running on the Windows Server platform and SQL Server or VistaDB database system.  Built on the NET 2.0 framework, ASP.NET 2.0 and C#, it supports both NET User Controls and .NET Customer Controls without having to do much at all as they can easily be added using macros.  The CMS also provides you with full access to the Umbraco API, which has more than 15,000 lines of code.

Presentation

Unlike other open-source systems, Umbraco doesn’t have a template engine, yet a single template system, which can be viewed as both an advantage and disadvantage.  The good aspect is that you do not have to learn a brand new programming language in order to create your website.  With Umbraco, you can design your site with a popular tool such as Abode DreamWeaver or FrontPage, cut and paste the HTML code into the template editor and save.  When you render a page using the template system, the content can be automatically displayed in dynamic fashion.

The Umbraco CMS gives you complete control over your website design.  There is no need to scan the web for themes as the design can be anything you desire.

Umbraco Content

In the Umbraco environment, the core foundation of your site is the Document Type.  The Document Type refers to the type of content that can be incorporated into your website.  Prime examples include Articles, News Items, your HomePage and SearchPage.   Determining how Document types work is key to grasping the Umbraco application itself.  While this isn’t the easiest part to decipher, once you get a solid understanding of these concepts, the rest of system will become much easier to comprehend.

Administrative Functions

The Umbraco Back Office is where you can perform a variety of administrative tasks.  The number of tasks others can perform all depends on their roles and permissions.  Some of the management options you have are dealing with scripts, custom templates, media and document types, style sheets and programming languages.  There is also a section made for developers, allowing you to perform actions such as adjusting browser cache settings, manage data types, create macros, Python files and more.

Conclusion

The Umbraco CMS makes an ideal solution for the Microsoft .NET savvy developer.  It has become very popular over the last few years, now averaging approximately 7,000 downloads per month.  Though not an out-of-box, user-friendly content management tool like Joomla or Mambo, Umbraco’s power and straightforwardness makes it a winner.  If you’re looking for a .NET-driven system to create a content-rich, dynamic website, the Umbraco CMS is worth checking out.

Distinguishing the Two

A good way to compare the two systems would be to look at the fundamental differences.  With Joomla, you can place ten different menus on a web page in any position or style you like.  Much of this can be done from scratch in a few easy clicks.  Its functionality is ideal for multiple users who have their own roles on the site as well as the administrator who needs to control the whole operation with ease.

If it has to be a user-friendly publishing tool for simple content that only requires one administrator, WordPress is the way to go.  This platform covers the blog scene with more efficiency, which is exactly what is designed to do.  It is very useful for attracting search engine bots with features such as ping and tracks, tag capabilities, and optimized URLs.  Though Joomla can be configured to produce clean URLs, it does take a little more work.  The overall theory is that blogs are search engine friendly and WordPress makes up a good portion of the argument.

WordPress as a CMS

WordPress has many beneficial uses but the results aren’t always that good when using it for larger jobs.  When the page count starts to add up in different categories, you may start to experience management issues  Joomla on the other hand, is made to handle such jobs and does it with relative ease.  If you’re looking to use WordPress for something that was created with a true content management system, you could be in for a rude awakening.  This platform will support a couple of hundred pages and basic content but don’t expect more than that.  Try to over do it and you could find yourself spending time on things that wouldn’t have been an issue with the proper software.

The Last Word

If your goals call for a blog or even a more interactive website, WordPress could be a viable option.  This platform is highly regarded as the most streamlined publishing tool available, allowing you to get online fast with little to no technical knowledge.  Joomla is better for managing a larger amount of more complex content.  In the end, an expert user should be able to make the most of both solutions.  With all the available plugins, WordPress can be extended to the point where you wouldn’t know the site was power by a blogging tool.  If this platform can’t deliver the functionality you need, a genuine CMS such as Joomla makes a great choice.  The key is knowing what you need to get the job done and making the right choice from the start.

In order to determine whether WordPress is a CMS or not, you should first become acquainted with the three main types of content management systems, as outlined below.

Open-source Systems – Software packages like Drupal and Joomla that are becoming more popular for small to medium sized ventures.

Enterprise Systems - Proprietary solutions like Microsoft Content Server.  This type of CMS is geared towards corporate users that require powerful business applications and frequent database interaction.

Home Grown Systems – These systems are developed in-house by webmasters who have specific requirements for content management.

When comparing the WordPress platform to the software in these classifications, it falls short as merely an over-hyped content delivery system.  Though it has a tremendous following and a number of benefits, WordPress doesn’t have what it takes to be called a real CMS.   In fact, it lacks several of the necessary protocols the average CMS provides as standard.  This includes update features, security tools, user permissions and more complex content management functionality.  When considering the all the capabilities it is missing, calling WordPress a CMS may be like unfairly moving it up in weight class.

Should WordPress be a CMS?

Perhaps the real issue should be whether or not WordPress needs to be more like a genuine CMS.  While this software gives you a lot, there are limitations and thus disadvantages.  Ask a fan of Mambo or PHP-Nuke and they will probably tell you that WordPress is highly inferior.

Despite the shortcomings, it still is a very efficient tool and rightly embraced by millions of users around the world.  It can also be a nice alternative to some of the more complex and intimidating content management systems.  For the most part, the user community is happy with the functionality and would probably prefer to keep things as they are.  After all, turning the platform into a true CMS would tamper with a relatively clean code and possibly cause the software to lose some of its natural appeal.  Besides, simplicity and ease of use are two of WordPress’ biggest advantages.

Conclusion

There is no denying the capabilities of WordPress.  The overwhelming enthusiasm the community shares for this platform is certainly warranted.   It is very cost effective and makes and ideal tool for small to medium sized operations and can even move up to a larger scale as well.   Be that as it may, tagging WordPress as a content management system is not inherantly accurate.   In order to earn that title, the software would require a major overhaul which would in turn, cause it to lose so much of the qualities that has made it so popular.

Common Usage

The phpWebSite application is mainly used by community groups and for educational purposes.  While it is available to the public for other uses, the software’s primary focus is serving staff at Appalachian State University.  In fact, phpWebSite was initially designed to make it easier for university staff to create and manage their websites.  Over the years, the system has been greatly enhanced with features you will commonly find in other popular content management systems.

phpWebSite Features and Capabilities

PHP is a fully modular, customizable software package, allowing you to install, modify and update numerous components.  Its customization is extended through a wide variety of themes and HTML templates.  Although phpWebSite extensions typically consist of common features like photo galleries, blogs and bulletin boards, these elements don’t offer the functionality of standalone applications like Coppermine, WordPress and phpBB.  Because many of phpWebSite modules are intended for university users, they tend to lack the features you would find in applications such as Joomla or Drupal.

By default, the phpWebSite CMS offers functionality that makes it useful in many situations.  Some of its major capabilities include:

Content Creation and Management – phpWebSite’s built-in tools allows administrators and users to create, display and manage content on the system.  This includes text, files, images links and other forms of content.

Content Organization and Navigation - With phpWebsite, you can easily organize and present your content in a way that is simple to access and mange.

Communication – phpWebSite is ideal for running a community-based side as the software enables communication through various mediums.  This includes email, internal messaging and data interchange among other methods.

Configuration and Administration – As the website administrator, you have the ability to assign administrative privileges to staff and assign other permissions to users.  phpWebSite allows you to effectively manage every member within the community.

Development – Because phpWebSite is open-source, anyone can write extensions to enhance the software.  The integrated development tools allow you to set permissions for your internal developers to custom build modules for the system.

Presentation – phpWebSite offers a nice mix of pre-designed themes but there are many options for customization.  If you are familiar with CSS stylesheets, you can design and incorporate your own templates.  If not, there are several themes available on the web, ranging from free to premium.

phpWebSite Requirements

The features and user-friendliness of phpWebSite makes it a good choice for an open-source CMS.   In order to get the best out of this software, you will need a server equipped with the Apache web server and PHP programming language.  Though the PostgreSQL is supported, MySQL is recommended.

What is Xoops?

Short for eXtensible Object Orientated Portal System, Xoops is an open-source content management system that is free to use, modify and redistribute.  Power and ease of use makes it an ideal tool for creating data-driven community sites of all sizes.  Many developers use Xoops to create blogs, corporate intranet sites and content-rich information portals.  The major draw of this software is that it enables fast, simple management for whatever task is required.  The Xoops CMS is largely supported on the web hosting market.  All you need is a provider equipped with the Apache web server, PHP and an SQL database, preferably MySQL.  .

Xoops Features

Xoops is integrated with a number of features to simplify content management and enhance functionality.  Some of the most common features include:

Advance Access Control – As an administrator, Xoops give you the ability to grant access rights to certain groups of users.  You can allow them to access specific content and features such as publishing their own content and uploading files.

Module Administration – Like many open-source content management systems, Xoops can be greatly enhanced through a wide variety of add-on modules.  These add-ons can be installed, uninstalled, enabled and disabled directly from the intuitive module administrative system.

Xoops modules offer the following capabilities:

Personalization – Xoops gives you the ability to set permissions for specific users, providing you with control of all the individual elements they are able to access on your website.

User Management – Through user management, you can search for your users by a multitude of criteria, allow them to send email and private messages to other users via a template-based messaging system.

International language support – Xoops is supported by a large group of developers and users.  The project has numerous support sites all over the web for users who speak various languages.  The software itself offers support for multiple languages.  Some include Chinese, Korean and Japanese to name a few.

Customizable interface – Xoops uses a theme-based template systems that allows you to instantly enhance the presentation of your site.  What is so unique about this CMS is that it lets both you and your users change the look of web pages by choosing from a wide range of available themes.

Optimization – Xoops supports many add-ons to help make your site more search engine-friendly.  These modules better the chances of your meta tags, title tags and URLs being recognized and indexed by the search engine spiders.

Xoops has won several awards for its power, straightforwardness and support for multiple languages.  This CMS is easy to find and incorporate as it can typically be installed directly from your control panel software.