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Need to add those little tax/loan/energy type calculators that use tables/forms/ with javascript formulae, within the body of an article
Need to have articles that include several images, and quote boxes, and be able to lay them out like newspaper stories on bbc/guardian.
Need to add audio clips and/or video to the articles?
Any CMS reccomendations for this ?
Thanks.
- Multiple images. Again, a basic feature.
- Javascript calculators. The only thing here is whether you can call external files on a per page basis. You should be able to work that into most CMS. At worst, if you have perms, you can put the JS code right on the page.
Are there any CMS you like or are considering?
If you're going for Drupal, you can get pretty good integration by using
- drupal forums which can be styled to look like PHPbb (google for it, there are some tutorials out there)
- the ecommerce module for drupal has gotten quite sophisticated and *may* do what you need without OSCommerce.
I can't speak to how good the drupal e-commerce module is, but running everything off one code base has a lot of advantages (maintenance, one login, etc).
DotNetNuke may have equivalent features too for all I know.
I like the idea of articles, forum and ecom using a single system. I was previously advised against this and told to go for best-of-breed in each area but I can see the advantage of management of user access being in one system.
To get the flexibility in the aricles we need (layout, images etc) needs html, but once deployed the client will need to be trained to add content. Will we need to teach them basic html or are there wizards for this ?
The project focus is good web/graphic design, not CMS, CMS is just for maintenance. The designer is used to doing photoshop slices, do you think this is this going to difficult to transfer to a CMS template ? Do you know any urls that have used CMS in this way?
Thanks
Where the designer might have trouble is figuring out where to put all the slices if s/he isn't a bit savvy (not a lot, just a bit) about backend stuff. Lots of people who profess to know nothing about PHP, for example, design templates/themes/whatever you call them. On the other hand, some find it daunting.
As for using best of breed, there's some truth in that. I find that if you want to do a lot with images, the built-in gallery functions for drupal are just not quite what I want, so I run drupal and gallery side by side on one site (and have a couple others with lower requirements for images where I do not use Gallery). Integrating and maintaining two apps is, in my opinion, *more* than twice the hassle of maintaining it all on one code base. You have the two apps plus the bridges between them to set up and maintain. That's like 3x work and hassle. It also makes workflow harder.
So if you find what you want in one package, I'd go with it. If it doesn't meet your requirements, though, you have to suck it up and maintain several different components. The one I would really want to take care with, of course, is ecommerce because of liability issues with credit cards, but if you are using a processing gateway and thus not storing CC nums (yikes!) the main thing [disclaimer: non-expert opinion follows!] is to make sure you have your SSL connection set up right and are encrypting data as you send it to the processor.
So I'm not saying you *should* stick with just a CMS, I'm only saying that if you can, it will reduce the hassle and long-term investment (time and money).
That's just my opinion based on my limited experience, of course, and I bet someone could give you ten arguments on the other side.
