Comments on: Design for your CMS

By: Furry

Furry — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 10:46:52 +0000

Hi, I am a aged designer using dreamweaver. I am considering using a cms. Can someone suggest a good one that's easy to use! Thanks.

By: suresh kumar

suresh kumar — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 16:10:01 +0000

a cms can be customized to all our needs and can be made a search engine optimised very easy ,
here is a good example for that u can custom a wordpress form into a custom code and can bring good results
the site is here
Seo tips and tricks

By: suresh

suresh — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 12:13:03 +0000

hi
i have a cms .
i used flash but there is a problem .
in internet explorer it displays a border.
can any help me out of the cms designing .
i use a software called Designing CMS

By: Tim

Tim — Mon, 22 May 2006 13:13:49 +0000

This is sooo true.
I often assume these kind of things and after a couple month I get clients calling me back telling me that the layout is broken because of a 50 words headline.
I can’t blame them for that, but some clients lack common sense. And don’t get me started on the aesthetic changes they made…

By: Antony Slater

Antony Slater — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 15:53:23 +0000

What about DotNetNuke (www.dotnetnuke.com)? Its open source using the .NET framework and has quite an active community surrounding it. I have used it for a few years now and have found it to be quite extensible.

By: Richard Conyard

Richard Conyard — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 14:46:28 +0000

Interesting article, but I guess I would say that having a vested interest in the subject matter.
How people tackle CMS development is probably one of the more varied areas of web development. For our part we’ve attempted to get around the problems mentioned by two rules:
Content Management Systems manage content, not design
Spliting structure from content
With those two rules in place most other problems melt away.

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 08:40:16 +0000

Paul/readers,
There’s quite an interesting paper ‘Content Management Problems and Open Source Solutions’ – which was published recently in January you might want to check out:
http://www.optaros.com/wp/wp_5_cms_report.shtml
It reviews 15 open source CMS solutions:
* Alfresco
* Bricolage
* Drupal
* eZ publish
* Lenya
* Mambo/Joomla
* MediaWiki
* Midgard
* OpenCMS
* phpBB
* Plone
* Roller
* Twiki
* TYPO3
* Zope CMF
Matt

By: Jeff Owens

Jeff Owens — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 23:05:11 +0000

We’ve had several clients that have requested pages not be within the IA. Reasons varied:
1. Landing pages for Media
2. Coupons
3. Example Pages
etc.

By: Paul Boag

Paul Boag — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 22:49:16 +0000

Hmm... not sure that I like the idea of pages not existing within the IA. This is something I generally strongly discourage. Of course unsuprisingly I would be first to agree with your comments about seperating content from style :)

By: Jeff Owens

Jeff Owens — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 20:54:52 +0000

I’ve created several CMS websites for different clients and had to figure out many of the issues you mention in your post.
I use a self-referencing database table to create the parent-child relationships for my pages. I then can easily create an xml file that has the nested parent-child relationships built in, using .NET’s DataAdapter on a DataSet. Then I apply a XSLT stylesheet to turn it into an unordered list, with the selected page tagged with an id for the CSS to style.
I lock down the top level pages and only allow sub-level pages to be created. I use XStandard for content input, and utilize the .NET Web Services, and HTML/CSS code generator abilities through their custom drop-downs.
The real trouble I had was getting into localization, and that was more of an ASP.NET issue. I added a tblCulture to the Database and each page is assigned a culture id. That way I can query for all the pages by culture id. I include the standard database columns such as sort order and active/inactive. Another gotcha is to make sure you allow for pages that are not in the navigation at all (floating pages). So the system knows what processing/template page to use, each page record has a template column. I also store each pages MetaTags in the database. Each page is allowed to have as many page data areas as is necessary for each template.
So far so good. All clients have been happy with the flexibility. To create an entirely different look for the site, we just need to code some new CSS files and create new images. Separating content from layout works great.