1031

Developer's Corner / Re: Content management solution for a small software site?

« on: February 17, 2007, 12:37 PM »

Thanks for all the replies! I spent last night checking out the various CMSs and playing with WordPress and Drupal locally. They're nice, with a really impressive range of themes and plugins, but in the end they really get in the way of what I need. The same with TextPattern, really - it provides none of the automation I'd like to have, and I would end up copying and pasting code to get a number of identically structured sections, while at the same time it won't even do download stats. I need to spend so much time on KeyNote that I can't devote any to coding php on top of that.

I've checked out a number of sharware vendors, small and large, and while I've seen a couple that use heavily customized CMS, most of them fall into one of two groups: professionally designed corporate websites on the one hand, and simple, handmade HTML on the other. And I guess there's no disgrace in the latter - you can have a pretty unimpressive site and still a fantastically successful product (Total Commander, TextPad, EditPad Pro). But I could't find anything in between the two extremes.

Perhaps I should be looking for php templating systems instead, just so that I could do $appname = 'this'; $version= 2 and then refer to $appname and $version throughout the site. That by itself would be a great time saver. I have seven freeware downloads on my site, and making sure all the pages are updated and consistent is really tedious. And in the end, they're not even very functional, e.g. there's no search in the FAQ pages. As mouser very nearly predicted last night, I'll postpone the decision :)

1032

Developer's Corner / Re: Content management solution for a small software site?

« on: February 16, 2007, 09:16 PM »

The best way to go insane is to go looking for the best CMS.  Everytime I've tried it I've lost a day and felt more confused at the end then at the begining.  There are just so many different CMS out there.

-mouser (February 16, 2007, 08:19 PM)

Exactly. One thing I didn't mention is WordPress, because it's primarily a blog, but it's quite elegant and may be good enough for a start. I'm in no hurry to decide, but even before my current project is ready, I would like to move the old stuff to a new site design, to see how it fares. So I took this sage advice and went looking for a domain first. Now I want to put something there...

There may be some commercial solutions written with ISVs in mind, but I haven't seen any yet, and from what I *have* seen  CMS systems are either open-source or pretty expensive.

Ideally, for an ISV site CMS, you'd just enter the core information (app description, release date, download links, etc) on one config screen, and a default site would be generated for you.

It's a niche, I guess, but the needs are very different from those of an individual blogger or a community. Download statistics are a must, and I'd love to have a way to centralize application info: enter the version number only once and refer to it via some tag everywhere. This is easy to add to any php-based system, but then you'd have to re-apply the changes when upgrading, and the system must allow for php code in posts, which not all systems may support.

I'll probably give TextPattern another try, because it really is an excellent design, very elegant and extensible. It's just that you have to go some extra length to get static pages, so the site becomes one big workaround.

By the way: did you tweak Simple Machines a lot? DC has an awesome set of features; the forum itself is much better than phpBB. *Every* DC feature I've tried is more convenient to use than anything else I've seen.

1033

Developer's Corner / Re: Content management solution for a small software site?

« on: February 16, 2007, 09:00 PM »

Its too bad mine isn't ready for prime time.  Your needs are exactly why I created a CMS system...

-Veign (February 16, 2007, 08:44 PM)

You may well be ready ahead of me :)

1034

Developer's Corner / Content management solution for a small software site?

« on: February 16, 2007, 06:27 PM »

I've hand-crafted my HTML ever since I put up my first website in 1998-ish. I've had enough :) Does anyone know of a content management system that would be suitable for a small ISV shop?

Most CMS packages are geared for collaboration, with to-do lists, calendars, wikis, chat features, blogs and such, I don't need any of those. I don't need a built-in forum or bug tracker, since I can plug in phpBB and mantis. What I need is something that will give me a not-too-complex layout to put the content in. I just no longer want to spend time on designing HTML, because I suck at visual design, and my pages always end up with the late 90's look.

I need to have identically-structured sections, one per application, where each section has subsections for the program description, license, download page, FAQ, screenshots, testimonials, etc. So it's mostly static content. This also means the system should tend towards a "read-only" thing for users, unlike wikis, which are writeable by default. I need a nice, clean look to start with, that I can gradually convert to a custom design later on.

Ideally, when releasing a new version of a program, I would like to specify the release date and version number just once, and have it displayed wherever necessary, rather than updating a dozen of pages manually - because right now I always forget about some. I don't know if any CMSs have such a feature.

As for the looks and simplicity of tweaking, I love DokuWiki, but it *is* a wiki and is not really suitable. I've created a very nice blog design with TextPattern, which has a pretty steep learning curve, but is nicely consistent and malleable. However, while TextPattern shines as a blog, it has poor support for static pages, like most of mine are going to be - you practically have to fight against its design and purpose to get a static page. And with TextPattern, you are really designing the visuals of your site from scratch, which is what I am trying to avoid.

I liked Plone a lot, unfortunately my host doesn't support Zope and whatever else it needs at the backend.

It needs to be free, and ideally php/mysql, because I can work with php. Oh, there's also Simple Machines, which DC is using, but it seems too complex for my needs. I really want to spend as little time on the design as possible, so that I can start without learning all the intricacies of the architecture if I need to add a block here or remove one there. Would Drupal or Mambo be worth w try? Anything else? Maybe I shouldn't be looking among CMS packages at all, but elsewhere?

marek

1035

Living Room / Re: How Google Killed Search

« on: February 16, 2007, 05:24 PM »

Yeah, that helps :)

(And linkfarms *are* a pain, I do realize that.)