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Content management solution for a small software site?

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tranglos:
as you can see, the user/developer/owner/admin of the site can make it be whatever it wants it to be. be it a blog, user community, or other.-jammo (February 23, 2007, 01:17 PM)
--- End quote ---

I apologize if I sounded harsh, didn't mean to. I've come to realize I asked the wrong question originally. Instead of looking for a content management system, I should have asked if anyone knows of a great but perpetually unemployed web designer, as I couldn't afford any other kind :)

marek

iphigenie:
I don't think anyone was criticising EE outright, but I wouldn't say it's the best fit for the kind of site discussed, and my private toysite runs on EE.

EE is a quite bit more flexible than many blog systems because it supports custom fields, multiple content types/weblogs etc. It's better than many other "blog" systems that try to call themselves CMSes but it quickly can get frustrating if you try to extend it too far out of the blog form.

The companies which you list and which rely on EE a lot typically don't do e-commerce and tend to even stay away from sites that do the page model. They will mostly be news oriented sites or campaign oriented sites, where the multiple items per page, community-centric features of EE work pretty well to start with. There are a few exceptions which have found a way to make EE work as a catalogue or presentation website but that is because they knew it very well already. I wouldnt recommend starting a first project in EE which already requires bending EE out of shape, it will be a frustrating path.

It's simply the golden rule - don't plan a project in a new tool which will require you to bend the product backwards - it's a recipe for trouble. (I learned that the hard way with zope/plone)

For example in a tool like ezpublish I can create a "content type" of, say, "software product" with custom fields and subcontent (description, file to download, contact form, screenshots, history lines) and have the system automatically create a default "view" page with all the fields. Which you then can customise, extend etc. And having multiple lines of update history and multiple screenshots or related video demos etc. is very straightforward - adding a "related content" type block to the the page is a 2 minute job. Making a software object a "product" which can be used in the shopping cart is also a few minutes configuration etc. Now ezpublish is overkill for the site in question, but I just chose it as an example simply because the usage they had in mind designing it is the kind of thing that you will want to do and therefore it just happens to make your job easy.

In Expression Engine I could create a new "blog" and set custom fields to at least some of the options above. I then have to go and create new templates via the admin tool, then edit them to put those fields I created in the pages (else it just looks for the standard blog fields). And if I look in the database the data in in "generic" tables with fields called field11, field12 - makes it very cryptic if you want to pull the data to do something else like generate an order form etc. And if i wanted, say, multiple screenshots or multiple history lines I almost have to create yet another blog for screenshots and history updates and create a cross-link which is quite a bit of work. All this because the usage they had in mind when creating it was very far aways from "software sales site".

I know cause I moved my site from a bunch of 5 year old perl scripts to use pmachine with less perl scripts, then expression engine. EE promised cross linking between "blogs" so I imported all the list of games and related news into two blogs but it couldnt reproduce easily the functions I had on my old perl scripts which was all the cross linking between games and news. Of course that's because it needs a lot of fiddling and trial and error and some custom php in your pages and I havent yet spent the time to do it. (I want my private website time to be spent on content and ideas, not things that I do at work all the time)

For a blog type site, EE is great. To try to extend it into a software site is something that could be done but will be much more frustrating than using a system that is built from the grounds up to be a website engine. On the other hand using a full blown CMS to do a blog type site is a frustrating thing, you need to spend so much time configuring lots of details when a blog tool like EE or wordpress comes beautifully preconfigured from the start.

Lets not start being all defensive of our favorite platforms. I have tried more than 100 in the last 4-5 years, built sites on at least 20 different ones, modified/extended at least a dozen, written or led a team writing a CMS from scratch on 5 separate occasions  in 4 different programming languages. None is perfect and none will cover all situations. Most CMS and blog systems out there are really good at doing certain things for a certain type of people - the trick is to figure out which one will better work with your type of project and your type of user.

In this case I think we are looking at a website with "documents", some of which is structured "catalog like" data (software product sheets), probably one or two sections of which will be blog-like (what we used to call news-like, i.e. chronological with tagging) for news and developer diary, which needs to integrate with a forum section and probably an ordering system, as well as possibly a private "registered members" area. The best for this is one of the full blown "portal" system (eg drupal, xoops) or a website content management system (typo3, ezpublish). Of the blog tools I know, Expression engine is easy to get started with and could be cooerced to fit in the mode although making a "traditional" website with sections/single page documents and structured product sheets is a bit of a struggle with EE if you don't know it quite well already.

Jammo the OrganizedFellow:
My apologies to everyone for being crass the rude in regards to EE.
I hope no one was offended or put off by me. It is true that once a 'developer' finds his/her favorite application, toolset, method, etc. they stick by it.
Some might criticize someone for using Fireworks and not Photoshop for web graphics, or for using the default MS Notepad and not Dreamweaver or EditPlus or some other editor for web development.

Everyone is entitle to make their own choices. Modern technologies have granted us the free ability to source the best tools for our trade: Google, Usenet, community forums, P2P, IRC, etc.
So to the originating author of this thread (tranglos), hey buddy, I say just try some of the available choices on http://www.opensourcecms.com/
Or try installing XAMPP (http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html XAMPP is an easy to install Apache Distribution for Linux and Windows. The package includes the Apache web server, MySQL, SQLite, PHP, Perl, a FTP-Server ...) and do some off-line home testing.
I wish you well, and keep your questions coming.

:)

As for me ... one of my favorite ways of 'starting' a site, is to generate everything in regular XHTML + PHP + jQuery + CSS documents, following through with timely updates, etc etc. hand generating everything & when I understand where precisely the site is headed (usually a few months), then I determine which Blog system or CMS to use that I determine is the best fitting system.

CMS Made Simple http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/ and Website Baker http://start.websitebaker.org/en/introduction.html are my first choices simply cause they are SO easy to set up and use, PLUS so easy to train others to update their own content. :)
WordPress http://wordpress.org/ is my top choice for blogs cause there are SOO many template choices, and your blog can be made to do ALMOST anything with the countless plugins available.
ExpressionEngine http://www.pmachine.com/ee/ is my choice for my own personal projects and sites. I wouldn't choose EE for a client unless it couldn't be done by one of the models above. :)

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