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My great doomed CMS search continues...

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tranglos:
When I started on this road over two years ago, Mouser told me I would go insane, but would I listen? Nah...

And now my wife needs a nice, clean business site too, so as the purpose of my pursuit doubled, so did the pace of my head-first launch into cuckoo-land.  Now, a sadder and a wiser idiot, at least I've begun to know what it is that I'm looking for. Here;s my WANTED notice, plastered to a telephone pole along the electronic highway (excuse the platitudes). The musts are what I cannot live without; the shoulds are highly desirable:

- MUST be Php/MySQL, because this is what my host supports best, and this is where I have some experience. Though given a compelling reason, I'd trade php for python. It's OK if it uses local files instead of a database, though this is quite rare (DokuWiki).

- MUST be clean, valid xhtml/css, also when using custom themes.

- MUST have an easy way to maintain static pages (it's OK if they are called something else or aren't distinguished from dynamic content, as in Joomla).

- MUST support tags (keywords) for articles. Ideally, out of the box (like WordPress) - or through a plugin. MUST be able to show tag catalogs (as clouds or otherwise) and tags MUST be links.

- MUST have a flexible categorization system. SHOULD support assigning multiple taxonomies to individual articles (e.g. more than 1 category/section/etc)

- MUST provide some method to predefine templates (layout, not css stylings) for articles. SHOULD be able to associate templates with taxonomies (e.g. assign a different predefined article layout with each category. TextPattern can do this; too bad it's about the only thing it does).

- MUST support clean ("nice") URLs.

- MUST have an easy way of linking to articles internal to the site. This could be in the form of wikified links, or some other human-readable form. Allowing only for full URLs such as  http://www.example.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=26&Itemid=40 is unacceptable. Fully-formed clean URLs (http://www.example.com/foo/bar/this-article) are also unacceptable, because it's still tedious, error-prone, and the link will become stale if the article is later reassigned to a different category.

- MUST have a code (non-WYSIWYG) editor: using Textile, BBCode or similar approach, or just plain html. (Though some of those are quite evil too. Using six apostrophes to get bold as in MediaWiki is a bit on the absurd side, but I could live with it.)

- MUST allow raw html in articles. SHOULD allow raw php in articles.

- MUST allow inlining images. (TextPattern allows only 1 image per article - now try to make a page of screenshots).

- MUST generate RSS feeds for internal content.

- MUST have a reasonably good search engine built in.

- MUST have a systematized method of uploading files of all types and linking to them in articles. (WordPress does well here.) SHOULD be able to display download counts.

- MUST be translatable and able to switch languages on the fly; it it's not, I'll just rip it apart and make it.

- Creating themes (styles, templates) MUST be relatively painless. I don't expect to find a template better than this for my personal site, or one that my wife will prefer to this for her company. Joomla templates both, so I'll likely be buying those and adapting them for our sites. That will not be a pleasant process, but at least it SHOULD not be torture :)

- SHOULD have a basic versioning system that is at least able to retain old versions of articles. Diffing is not required.

- SHOULD be able to syntax highlight code (via a plugin or otherwise).

- SHOULD really have some smarts! When I add an inline image (and *especially* if there is a WYSIWYG editor with a UI dedicated to that purpose), then it SHOULD generate the width and height parameters for the img tag. Putting a big dialog box in my face with an Upload button *and* empty text fields to fill out the image dimensions is just lame. Every HTML editor since HomeSite 1.0 would do this automatically.

Hello cmsmatrix!

Carol Haynes:
You said in another thread you were about to give up on Joomla - can I ask why? I have started to use it and as far as I can tell from your list it supports most of the things you wanted above - and anything that isn't there as standard is almost certainly available via an extension.

housetier:
except for the easy theming, I would recommend Drupal. Mind you, however, such a rich feature set comes at a price: complexity.

To get started quickly you could try the package from acquia which bundles drupal and load of modules.

Drupal will not be perfect. I can help a little if need be.

tranglos:
You said in another thread you were about to give up on Joomla - can I ask why? I have started to use it and as far as I can tell from your list it supports most of the things you wanted above - and anything that isn't there as standard is almost certainly available via an extension.
-Carol Haynes (May 11, 2009, 07:05 PM)
--- End quote ---

Hi Carol, thanks for being so patient with me :)

In that other thread I listed some of the deal-breakers. The wysiwyg editor is horrid if you ever hope to maintain consistent layout of pages, and when you switch to html mode, it's unusable (try it), so much so the only viable option is cutting and pasting between the browser and a desktop html editor. Strike one.

Then the issue of linking. I didn't realize before it was going to be such a big deal, but use internal linking a lot in whatever I write. having to use links like this http://eee.example.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=26&Itemid=40 is another dealbreaker; even clean URls aren't too good because you still have to look them up every time and they can go stale easily. Strike two.

Strike three is that the sections and categories just seem to be empty vessels. They have no structural meaning and no functionality. And there seems to be no way to predefine page layouts for specific sections and categories. Basically, every time you go to create an article, it's a blank page. I need to be able to associate - automatically or even manually - layouts to sections (or individual articles, at least) to keep the page layout consistent. (It's completely impossible to achieve with a wysiwyg editor).

I haven't given up completely on Joomla, because I've invested much time in it already, and because I really love the templates I mentioned. I can't believe that last third point is a no-go. But the first two definitely are. Installing Joomla is a breeze, configuring it likewise, but adding articles, structuring them, formatting and linking between them is a surprisingly fragile process. Then I saw that all editor add-ons for Joomla are wysiwyg (except one that hasn't been updated for 1.5), and that was where my knees went weak :)

tranglos:
except for the easy theming, I would recommend Drupal. Mind you, however, such a rich feature set comes at a price: complexity.
-housetier (May 11, 2009, 07:24 PM)
--- End quote ---

I've been looking at Drupal again since it's supposed to be strong on taxonomy. Then I read this and remember Mouser's recent wail and I think maybe I'd better leave it alone :)

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