CMSs - again
A short post this time.
Anyone who has had experience with content management systems has also had the experience of frustration in all its manifold disguises. The fact that there are more than one thousand CMSs doesn’t help.
I have developed a couple of Joomla websites and while Joomla is well supported it is incredibly slow to develop. Edits take absolutely forever - whether on Windows or on Linux. The one site had to have a cron job to flush the cache every two hours or the site would constipate terminally.
The most irritating thing for a web developer looking for a CMS is that they all claim to be user friendly, intuitive, up & running in 5 minutes. The smaller CMSs like Toko are fairly easy to set up but limited in functionality. I was looking for something that could be employed on every site if necessary so I took a swing through the Net Tuts article on ‘ten top CMSs for Usability’.
The article itself is very illuminating even though every man and his dog knows that ranking CMSs is impossible. Its like saying - ‘We choose the best car for the average man’ - impossible.
What is really good about the article is the response it generated. All sorts of opinions - WP, Drupal and Joomla all had their adherents and evangelists. But, there were a whole bunch more that dropped through the ceiling - Expression Engine, Concrete 5, Chyrp and a bunch of others.
The CMS that got the most widespread support was MODx so I wandered in and took a look. And again - the ‘CMS for designers’, ‘just pop any webpage into the template’, ‘ if it works on its own, it will work in MODx’.
Now, having played with it for a day, getting a basic site up, even with an accordion menu, I wanted to explore a login system that’s sure to be asked for. This is where the problems with open source manifest themselves and the real beast is revealed.
The forums are the first place to go and one sees - with other CMSs too - a continual complaint from designers about the CMS being a CMS built by Geeks for Geeks. The help pages confirm this. There are wide assumptions made that you know something about PHP. I understand the ’snippets’ that call functions and I understand ‘chunks’ which are really ‘includes’ but I am a website designer trying to use a cobbled-together collection of PHP scripts that you should at least be able to hack.
The latest problem came with a one-size-fits-all login system. It looks fantastic - WebloginPE - and I followed the instructions and got a bunch of parse errors. Followed them again with the same result. So, now I go looking for help, and look, and look. All I see confirms that I must be the thickest bloke on the planet.
I will persevere because once I get past around three hurdles I will be able to drive the beast. Stay tuned for more.