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My great doomed CMS search continues...
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.
-Carol Haynes (May 11, 2009, 07:05 PM)
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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 (May 11, 2009, 07:28 PM)
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I think you are missing some things in Joomla:
1) Install JCE Editor for your editor - it is much better than TinyMCE and you can use HTML (and advanced HTML). You can even embed objects and include PHP etc if you want to. You can download it from the extensions website.
2) Rename htaccess.txt to .htacess and then go to Global Configuration and all the SEO settings to YES and hey presto you get meaningful URLs complete with .html extensions!
3) You don't need to enter any internal links. In JCE Editor select your text and then click the link with the green star - you can then navigate via a section/category tree to the content you want to create the link (which is then automatically updated if you edit pages and change their IDs).
4) There are a number of ways to use Category and Section views on the website - when you create a menu entry choose artcile and experiment with options other than Article Layout.
Re. standard layouts for articles - you can really do what you like - you can even use overlays in JCE to build layers of content, you can insert and style div tags, use tables - you can even import content from Word documents.
Why not just decide on your the layouts you want and then copy the HTML to a text editor and simply paste it in to each new document. To be honest I have looked at a lot of CMS systems and haven't seen any that provide a way of applying standard layouts to each article other than by coding the layout yourself as I have suggested here.
The only thing I would warn about is that if you allow 'front-end' submission and editing of articles Joomla seems to prohibit some HTML and code based content (presumably to avoid potential security issues). This is not the case if you submit new articles and content from the backend.
Also I mentioned Artisteer before to you - it really is a fantastically easy application to generate templates for Joomla/Drupal/Wordpress etc. without having to do anything really by way of design - just choose a few fonts and change a few pictures and dimensions until you like what you see.
If you want a hand just send me a PM and maybe we could arrange to be online at the same time and use a messenger client to chat (I am no expert but I will try) .
mouser:
Then I read this and remember Mouser's recent wail and I think maybe I'd better leave it alone
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make sure you read the later pages of posts where i start to waiver and decide to use drupal again as a programming platform.
however, i still say it's a truly evil nightmare from an end-user perspective.
rgdot:
I would say CMSMS, I mentioned in the Joomla thread, could be worth a look. No tagging but pages can be assigned to a hierarchy like www.example.com/category1/hello.php. It uses Smarty so you should be able to get most things you have listed.
tranglos:
Then I read this and remember Mouser's recent wail and I think maybe I'd better leave it alone
--- End quote ---
make sure you read the later pages of posts where i start to waiver and decide to use drupal again as a programming platform.
-mouser (May 11, 2009, 07:57 PM)
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I admit I dropped out of that thread :) Will revisit.
I think the keyword is "programming" though. The time you spend coaxing Drupal to do what you need isn't wasted, as long as you get where you want. To me, any time spent tweaking the platform is nothing but waste, since I'd rather be working on more apps to publish.
Since Drupal is notoriously reviewed as hard to create themes for, and since all I ultimately want is to adapt a template I like to a platform I choose, going with Drupal seems counterproductive.
tranglos:
1) Install JCE Editor for your editor - it is much better than TinyMCE and you can use HTML (and advanced HTML). You can even embed objects and include PHP etc if you want to. You can download it from the extensions website.
2) Rename htaccess.txt to .htacess and then go to Global Configuration and all the SEO settings to YES and hey presto you get meaningful URLs complete with .html extensions!
3) You don't need to enter any internal links. In JCE Editor select your text and then click the link with the green star - you can then navigate via a section/category tree to the content you want to create the link (which is then automatically updated if you edit pages and change their IDs).
4) There are a number of ways to use Category and Section views on the website - when you create a menu entry choose artcile and experiment with options other than Article Layout.
-Carol Haynes (May 11, 2009, 07:54 PM)
--- End quote ---
1. I had tried JCE before I posted. Granted, the html view is better. There's something wrong with the build or the way it installs though, both on my XP test machine, and on my hosting provider's server. The administration interface is completely messed up, and the wysiwyg part of the editor is missing critical buttons - I can't even add a link. In other words, it looks nothing like the author's screenshots. Perhaps it's because there seems to be a version mismatch between its two components: plg_jce_152.zip and com_jce_155.zip. These are the only downloads listed for Joomla 1.5. I wrote to the author and hope to hear from him.
2 and 3. I have clean URLs enabled, but that's not what I mean. Having to manualy enter even clean urls like http://www.example.com/somesection/somecategory/somearticle is still wrong, since (a) the links will go bad if you later change the article categorization; and (b) it's almost impossible to type such links from memory; (c) this is exactly the job for the computer. In Joomla each article has an alias, so I hoped the CMS would force those aliases to be unique and use them for linking, something like {link:my-alias}, but that doesn't seem possible. Joomla basically wants you to create menu items for every article, but they seem to have neglected the need to have easy inline links to content within the same site.
Picking a link from a dialog box is fun the first three times, but not when you're migrating content from a static site and will be creating / updating hundreds of links between articles.
4. I still hope to get somewhere with layouts, but the docs don't sound optimistic on this, and neither is the Joomla forum. See this, for example - you can only assign a template after you've created a page *and* a menu link for it.
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