A good CMS Software for Review Site

Cms

[Shetty]

Hi
If anyone has used open source CMS software for developing a review site can you please let me know about it. Am trying mambo but does not seem to fulfill the purpose.

Thanks in advance
shetty

[bill]

Have you gone over to opensourceCMS.com and tried a few out? They have demos of a bunch of open source CMS packages already installed and waiting for you to test drive.

[rotfil]

I am looking for a decent CMS for a site, some of the prices are crazy!

ADX Studio, they want to charge $20,000 ...

[choster]

Another comparison site is cmsmatrix.org .

At the corporate level, $20,000 is nothing. There are enterprise CMS companies where the per-processor license costs in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

[GOTseo]

dot net nuke is great big pile of crap, but might be a great solution if you know how to manage / edit it.

[johnquest]

I've been using Xaraya now for about 2 years. I love it but you have to know what you're doing to use it. The documentation is scattered all over the place to learn and keep up with it, but it's awesom once you understand how to use it.

[Shetty]

have u used Xaraya on a review site?

I am using mambo on my other sites other then the security issues and the fact that it take too long to backup the site I am happy with it.

But mambo does not seem suited for a review site

[rominosj]

I use cmsmadesimple a lot. Very easy to install, use, and seo compliant.

[ronburk]

Can you specify what unique problems a review site has that are not addressed by the CMS products you're looking at?

[shri]

>> Can you specify what unique problems a review site
>> has that are not addressed by the CMS products you're
>> looking at?

A frequent problem of mine has been polling / rating.

An object being reviewed needs to have certain ratable values. These can change depending on the widget. For example hotels have different review chacteristics than say GPS devices.

An ideal review cms can some how allow you to create multiple ratings criteria for a widget type and then associate those correctly.

To use the above example, I'd create an object type hotel and have ratings types like "Room size, service quality, location, view" etc associated with them. A GPS would have stuff like "battery life, accuracy, reliability" associated with it.

This is one thing that I've not seen in any CMS around... unless I've been walking around with my eyes shut.

We ended up doing a fair bit of custom work with LinksSql from gossamer threads to get the above functionality done and its still not perfect to the level where I'm happy with it.

[jtara]

I think you are going to have to look to plug-ins for what you want. I doubt that you are going to find this in the base set of capabilities of any CMS.

But I doubt you are going to find much of anything you are looking for to create ANY useful site in the base set of capabilities of any CMS. Most CMSs have a very basic set of capabilities. The good stuff is in the plugins.

I need to do something similar myself. But the site I am creating is not using a CMS, but being built in Ruby on Rails. The various Rails acts_as_ratable plugins (there are 3 different ones) all assume there is only one thing that is being rated. (That is, they a rating column to a widget table.)

But at least in Rails I can fake it by creating a seperate database table for each aspect of a widget that might be rated. This actually seems more appropriate to me, because I'm not sure that every user will want to (or should) rate every aspect. I don't want people rating things just because there is a slot there for them to rate it. If they don't really care one way or the other about "atmosphere", for example, I'd rather they just not rate it. Better for the database that you just omit non-ratings rather than have to record them as "no response".

This would seem to be a common problem, and I'd be surprised if there isn't a plugin for Drupal, etc. to do this. Search for plugins with names like multi-rating, etc.