Forum Moderators: not2easy
I'm interested in using CMS to generate templated pages for a Special Interest web site. Any recommendations?
What experience have you had with CMS? What do you recommend? What do you NOT recommend?
Thanks for your input!
(I have no affiliation with CityDesk.)
Each of these sections can be given completely different templates and there is a lot of control over which variables are used where (GM's strong point in my opinion). For example the main page could be reduced to a simple table of contents by the use of the "extended entry" option ie where part of the text is only seen on the individual entry page. Or you could put the archive list on the main page giving a site map/table of contents that way
Most blogs just use the entry pages for comments and some don't even add formatting. However I can imagine a site where these are actually the important part, templated content pages rather than just sequential entries. They are already spidered and indexed by search engines as seperate pages.
It's possible to add users who can post and edit their own entries but don't have access to anything else (so the templates, config etc are safe). GM is installed on your server and uses perl.
There are some downsides, not surprising considering it's free. Greymatter does have the occasional odd bug from looking at their support forum and the forum is the only support available. However it's been around for ages so many of the bugs are known along with workarounds for them.
GM isn't as powerful as other CMS, particularly the professional ones, because it's not designed to be. For example MT has many features greymatter doesn't, eg the use of mysql and php, built in rss feeds, trackback. However GM does it's intended job well.
I have yet to find a pre made CMS site that will fit needs of everyone. I find its easy to work towards building your own.
I agree wholeheartedly. If you can do it on your own, or find someone to do it for you, creating your own content management system is best. Not only will it be faster because the database system will be customized to what your site alone needs (rather than adding extra fields and tables to accomodate the largest breadth of sites possible as an out-of-the-box CMS would) but it would run exactly how you want it to and you would know it in-and-out.
I envision the content being managed by the CMS and the advertisements being coded in sitewide into the main template and/or rotating some banners with JavaScript, although I'd prefer to stay away from banners.
Darn, I've got some research to do...
[webmasterworld.com...]
GreyMatter seems interesting because what I want to do is have a templated page where I can drop the content and pics within the designated table cells and drop advertisements in their own TD's.
You could definitely do this with greymatter. It would take a bit of lateral thought about how to get the different sections to work together, ie remove the emphasis from the main page to the entry pages, but that's probably a given anyway.
I envision the content being managed by the CMS and the advertisements being coded in sitewide into the main template and/or rotating some banners with JavaScript, although I'd prefer to stay away from banners.
You can use custom viables to add the same peice of code to various pages, meaning you only need to edit it in one place and it updates on all the pages where that variable is. This would make it easy to include advertising or whatever on lots of pages and be able to update it easily. It makes more sense when you see how the variables work.
I would definitely suggest a bit of time reading the support firums though because as I said before, some people have found some weird problems with it. Personally I've found it very stable but I only have about 120 pages so far.
120 pages is a lot of pages, that's sounds pretty stable.
120 pages is a lot of pages, that's sounds pretty stable.
It's not a lot actually, only about three months worth. Of course I always was talkative ;)
There are people in the forum who advocate archiving the old pages and reinstalling at least once a year because GM gets slower to rebuild all the files the more pages you have. Also many people use SSI to lower the size of each page and thus the load on their server. This is important for two reasons:
a) some people have problems with using lots of server resources while rebuilding when their page count gets high (although that is often more to do with the server set up than GM).
b) if something stops GM while it's rebuilding (ie a server timeout) it can corrupt the files again causing server problems. This happened to me when I was installing GM for the first time but is apparently pretty rare.
I think the slow down starts when you get to 500+ pages but I can't remember exact numbers. My entry pages are fairly small with only one graphic so 120 only takes about 20 seconds to rebuild even with my slow dialup connection. Also my entire site is still less than 2MB so far, GM files and all.
But then I guess when you think what it's built for, ie websites which are added to every day, what GM considers a normal page count others might find high :)
Shelley
