This is another of my "first impressions" from my testing binge of various open source CMS.
Previously on this program:
- ModX Revolution, [
webmasterworld.com...]
- Silverstripe, [
webmasterworld.com...]
Once again, I need to stress that I approach this as a newcomer to CMS Made Simple with certain encrusted habits and expectations. And what I'm looking for is a CMS that will be a Drupal or Wordpress killer for at least one situation that interests me. In this case, given the name, I was looking for something that would be a full-featured CMS, but simpler than Drupal for the end user (not so much the developer), but a little more powerful than Wordpress.
CMS Made Simple was not a Drupal or Wordpress killer, but it is a viable addition to the toolkit.
CMS Made Simple has perhaps the
smoothest install sequence. It requires you to manually create a config.php (but just an empty file), but it does a lot of system checks and then tells you whether you fail or meet the min or recommended requirements. Nice.
Extensive help files are built right in as sample content and the user interface is very easy to understand, as you would expect given the name. In contrast to my ModX experience, I found almost everything on the first click.
The user permission system is simple and reminiscent of Drupal. You're given three pre-defined user groups (Admin, Editor, Designer) and can add others. The permissions screen is just a series of check boxes ("Add Stylesheets", "Clear Admin Log") and you can turn those on and off for any user group.
Installing modules is easy. As in Wordpress, you can find and install new modules right from the admin area without having to download them and use FTP.
The templating system looks pretty simple too.
The one annoyance I found is that, like ModX and Silverstripe, you can't add an image from your edit screen and you also can't edit a page from the page itself.
I think for someone looking for a first CMS, it's a pretty straightforward system with lots of help. For end users, I'm not sure it's *that* simple and for me, already used to other systems, there's again no killer feature. Still, this is one to remember and it's one I would recommend to someone who wants to get into a CMS without too much hassle, but yet wants something powerful with relatively granular permissions (way beyond Wordpress, for example).
