Decisions decisions Oct 13. 0516
Taking the plunge and deciding on the right CMS for a new project can be a hard choice to make. I’ve had a ton of experience using Textpattern the last couple of years but now I need to find a solution which is going to be more suited to ‘general’ content management on a corporate website of a much larger scale, we’re talking version control, user management etc.
I’ve just been taking a look at ExpressionEngine and although there’s a price tag ($249) it looks like it might be just right for my requirements.
Obviously there are other contenders, Mambo and Drupal to mention a few and I’ll be taking a look at both over the next few days.
My experience in the past has always been with bespoke content management solutions for such projects, but I’m not convinved that’s the right path to tread when I’m most likely going to be doing all the work myself, and to be brutal I’d rather pay for something that’s had all the bugs shaken out already so I can concentrate on design and development upon a stable base.
Joomla does look pretty interesting, the admin interface isn’t as clean and easy to understand as EE but it does seem to offer a ton of features.
Don’t go with the current version of Mambo.. there’s been a big split in the community lately, and the entire development team moved away to http://www.joomla.com, which is a better, repackaged version of mambo
You’re lucky you can go for it. In Mambo there are limited options with the RSS and even putting in a good newsfeed onto a selected page is more work than it should be.
The way that you can change it from blogs to sections is helpful though. It can be used for two things, the duplicity of it seems great!
One of my concerns with EE was that it refers to ‘sections’ as ‘blogs’ but this apparently just the default and changable via admin to ‘sections’. Neat. Apparently there’s also a ‘tagging’ module in the works, Flickr inspired. Mmm… I think I’m in love…
ExpressionEngine looks really good actually. It wouldn’t work for what my Mambo does, as I use it for a content based website, not as a blogish website. However, for a large blog, small website it looks great.
You could give http://drupal.org/ a try, I’ve heard good things but not had any experience myself.
Now I’m even more convinced that ExpressionEngine is the right option. I just popped back and had another look over the features list, if you haven’t already, try the online demo.
Thanks for telling me. I have no idea why. I just checked it and it’s fine. I’ve contacted my host.
On topic side, Mambo itself is easy to use, once you get used to the fact that everything is in categories and sections. The organisation is incredibly odd.
There are some rather annoying features as well, for instance, when you’ve created your Section (which is the container for your content) you’ve got to be put a category within the section, then once you’ve done that you can create your content; however, you aren’t able to have a link to an external site within the area of the category. It’s a rather odd, and incredibly annoying feature.
I found Drupal to lack the features that Mambo had, but it was easier to use for someone who was new to that package. Although, I’ve not played with Drupal for a long time.
I’ve used Mambo before. Although it was powerful, it had some marks that hit me wrong.
* dirty URLs
* not very web-standards friendly
* templates are difficult
* menu system is very cluttered
Drupal solves a couple of these, but still doesn’t make it easy for whoever you expect to take over management of content.
Thanks Ian. :)
BTW as of 16:52 GMT looks like your site is down… :?
I’ve used Mambo a lot, and it takes a lot of time and effort. It’s very resource heavey also.
Perhaps I’ll drop him a line and quiz hime some.
The other option was to resurect ‘gubbins’ in some form but that gives me the shudders. ;)
Boy I really need to format my comment form so that this dialog is a little easier to write in!
Colly uses ExpressionEngine for lots of commercial projects and is constantly singing its praises. I’ve never used it myself, but I value Colly’s recommendation.
I spent a little more time looking at ExpressionEngine this morning and it really does look very impressive. It has bags of features that come installed by default; Version control, spell checking, image cropping and resizing… the list goes on.
There’s a live demo of the control panel available to play with, it’s certainly worth a look.
Great article.. Thank you bro.
Scalability and User Interfaces.
A friend of mine was showing me the brand new web based ERP system that was developed for his medium sized company.
He was very happy with its usability and ease of use.
He showed me how you can drag and drop employees on the organization chart to change their positions.
It was really easy to use.
But it had one flow, it was not scalable. Usually when we talk about scalability in our business we mean how an application can be able to take a larger number of users without changing it.
If that org chart was fully populated with hundreds of people drag and drop would be much harder since you will need to scroll.
Now imagine that you have a thousand employees, not only will you need to scroll a lot but you will also need to filter or search to find the correct person.
At El Motaheda Web we are well aware of these issues and we choose the systems that we offer you with care. Most systems we use will work equally well for a small company as for a large company with thousands of users.
Let us take a small example from WebGUI which is the content management system we use to power all our web sites and the web sites of our clients.
Although WebGUI has drag and drop within a content page, where you can re-arrange parts of a page by dragging and dropping, you have a different interface for rearranging the pages withing a web site.
Why, simply because if generally you will not have more than 10 elements in a web page, so drag and drop is perfect, but you can have thousands of pages in a web site and here drag and drop is not really suitable. WebGUI can handle thousands of pages easily, our site mashy.com has over 50,000 pages and the official portal of the Ahly club ahlyegypt.com nearly as many pages as mashy.com.
I share your pain, Nathan. I recently started using Textpattern for projects at work (having used it as a blogging tool for a while and really getting to grips with it). We knocked out our first couple of sites using it very successfully, but now we’re on a project that is just on the limit of what I think Textpattern is appropriate for.
I’ve been looking round for other solutions but I really don’t know if I want to introduce yet another CMS into the business, and if I do, which one.