Help
1- Easy to use (of course)
2- Superadmin could edit all content
3- Contributor admins of lower permission level couldn't add, but could edit posts assigned to them
4- Admin didn't look like a control panel, but looked like the actual page that was being edited. They wanted low-tech worker bees to be able to edit without much brain power.
I wanted one that was as low cost as possible because any cost came out of my successful bid. Obviously I'm thinking opensource.
I tested out what I considered to be my three best possiblities. Here are the three and what I had heard about them prior to the test:
1- WordPress - yeah... it's blog software, but can work as a simple to use CMS. Easy to setup. Works great out of the box, and very,very, very low learning curve.
2- Drupal - powerful but high learning curve.
3- Nucleus CMS - I found this one on opensourcecms.org Even though it's listed as a cms at opensourcecms.org (Wordpress is listed as a blog), and it's name says cms, it's built for blogging first. I had no expectations going in. But their online demo looked promising and they got high ratings on opensourcecms.org (take it with a grain of salt)
As a side note, I didn't really consider Mambo for several reasons: security issues, past experience with it, and a recent comment at opensourcecms.org that indicated tables were STILL hardcoded into the core of the system even after years of requests from the Mambo community to change this.
WordPress looked promising, and still might be chosen by the client, although I doubt it. They really want something that you can edit without going to anything that resembles a control panel. Hey, that's their choice. My job is to make it happen.
Drupal... I can't remember if I've b*tched about this before but, in a nutshell, this thing is way too complicated. All this jargon about nodes, stories... etc. I spent many hours reading the poorly organized documentation online and still can't tell you the difference between a page and story, why an FAQ section should be built with a 'collaborative book', and what in the world a node is.
The deal killer for Drupal on this project was that their permission based system was confusing and didn't give people permission to edit but not post. I'll admit that this is a strange request... but again, my job to make the magic happen. I say the permission based system was confusing because you'd check a column of boxes indicating what they could and couldn't do and upon testing realize that what you had chosen wasn't being peformed in the background. Things my new user should be able to do they couldn't, and vice versa. A few trips to the online forum indicated that lots of people had this problem and the developers had the issue on their list of things to do.
On the bright side, Drupal (with the addition of a template plugin called phptemplate) gets templating 'right' in my opinion. I feel qualified to give my opinion on this templating issue because I have built my own cms for my clients and anyone with even a small degree of html experience can 'skin' my system in ten minutes and with uploading one file. (I'm not using my cms for this project for several reasons, but the biggest one is that mine does not have several levels of permission for different admins and probably never will. My client base doesn't need it.)
Finally, went to Nucleus CMS. Install was easy (as it was with all three). Documentation was horrible, horrible, horrible. Did I mention horrible? Outdated, scarce, poorly organized. The online forum was almost impossible to search and find relevant content.
If you're looking for 'fire and forget' this isn't it. You're gonna have to put in some sweat to learn how to 'skin' this sucker. Also, the admin isn't very intuitive. If you start getting into some of the advanced features of the system you have to really hunt around for the right page, because it's not on the side navigation. Once you figure it out, it's easy... but again, not clearly explained anywhere in the documentation (and I searched just about everywhere on the site).
But... once you figure out how to create a new 'skin'... and you figure out the difference between a skin and template, and why you can't find any template files anywhere in the directory structure, the system is very useful for the end user, my client.
When a lower level person (not admin or superadmin) logs in, they can go right to the live website, and if they created the post, they see a link at the top of the page/post to edit the page. Clicking the link pops open a nice editor (which can be upgraded to a WYSIWYG editor with an easy plugin). So, my client will be able to have their folks edit the content and see the changes right away.
I have to hack some code to assign ownership to people that didn't actually write the post/page so that they can edit it, but that's not a problem for me. So, this should turn out to be a great solution, and really easy for them to use.
One more thing I'll mention about Nuclueus CMS is that I have mixed feelings about their templating. On the one hand, it's very easy to make changes to a skin and to do something very nifty, called cloning. But the skins and templates are broken into fragments that you have to hunt down and change in the control panel.
I guess if you are uncomfortable with php and you just want a nice looking site, you would find it pretty easy to write your code, edit the default css, and you're off to the races. If you're like me and you want to write a template that's an html/php hybrid that you ftp to your site, then it's a bit of a letdown.
In truth, the abysmal documentation on their site is the biggest drawback to using Nucleus CMS. But now that I know how to use it, I'm glad to have this cms as another tool in the toolchest.
This post has been edited by surefire: 26 July 2005 - 10:14 PM
