Content Management
- Thread starter Maljonic
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Maljonic
Can't get enough of FH
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It looks nice, why have you used frames though by the way? Evil evil things.Frozensolid said:Good to c more ppl messing around with Mambo
Ive just finished a project in wich i made a site using mambo for a store that sells cigars and such.
We've (me and 2 other students) been busy for some months trying to figure it all out.
The website is almost finished now
Mambo site
Im sorry that the site is Dutch and ur probably cant read a word about it
But its just cigars this sigarets that ect
Content Management.
Redoing my site now totally. Want a personal site. Will also be making a site for my running club.
There was a posting for 'Content Management' but it appears to have disappeared. Tried nearly all the ones that were listed in there including Drupal and Word Express but finally found and been very impressed with this one:
Blog:CMS
Comes with punbb installed along with a gallery/calendar etc. Will take me a week or so to come to terms with the structure but I really like it a great deal so far. I like the fact that you don't reload the entire page when activating the links. Nearly all the portals do this but I notice the blogs are nearly all constructed using divs and are much smoother to navigate along with being easier on the eye.
Redoing my site now totally. Want a personal site. Will also be making a site for my running club.
There was a posting for 'Content Management' but it appears to have disappeared. Tried nearly all the ones that were listed in there including Drupal and Word Express but finally found and been very impressed with this one:
Blog:CMS
Comes with punbb installed along with a gallery/calendar etc. Will take me a week or so to come to terms with the structure but I really like it a great deal so far. I like the fact that you don't reload the entire page when activating the links. Nearly all the portals do this but I notice the blogs are nearly all constructed using divs and are much smoother to navigate along with being easier on the eye.
Shovel
Can't get enough of FH
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They key questions I'd ask before picking a CMS are as follows:
Users is important since some systems (such as Wordpress) is only really designed for sites run by an individual, whilst something like TextPattern is far more a publishing platform.
Question two is largely in response to the feature list your quoted that, from my view, have a rather limited relationship with running a personal site.
A gallery is understandable, but would you not be better off consider something like Flickr for photo management (which it does very well) and then linking that into your blog using Flickr's extensive API and/or RSS feeds?
I can sort-of see what use a calendar is, if you're a social kind of person with a lot to put it in, but give some thought to the format of it. A calendar is far more useful if you can subscribe to it in iCalendar format (from something like iCal or Mozilla Sunbird or Outlook). Does the calendar feature make use of the hCalendar microformat which will, once the developers come forward, start becoming useful in web browsers like Firefox quite soon. Failing that, what about something like Upcoming, which offers a dedicated service for managing events and has similar API and syndication hooks to Flickr for integrating it into your site.
It's also my humble opinion that forums are useless on personal sites unless you have a huge number of visitors already. Even when you reach that stage, having them integrated with the rest of your blog has no advantage (unless you're planning to force people to sign up to comment or something foolhardy like that, in which case you will never get anyone visiting your site to use the forums anyway).
The huge, huge problem with the plethora of CMS available right now is that most of them are grotesquely feature bloated and discourage people from producing well designed, focused sites. If you download a CMS with calendars, galleries and other such then you are immediately obliged to try and use them; they add pointless clutter to your navigation and design. If you start with something that doesn't try to be all things to all men, but has a decent plug-ins system, you can personalise the system to suit you based on your needs.
Just because a CMS has a calendar, gallery, message board and integrated chat room doesn't mean those are good features - it just means that someone had the inclination to code them and no-one else working on the CMS thought about whether it was relevant before including it in a release.
- How many users?
- What features do I actually want centralised?
Users is important since some systems (such as Wordpress) is only really designed for sites run by an individual, whilst something like TextPattern is far more a publishing platform.
Question two is largely in response to the feature list your quoted that, from my view, have a rather limited relationship with running a personal site.
A gallery is understandable, but would you not be better off consider something like Flickr for photo management (which it does very well) and then linking that into your blog using Flickr's extensive API and/or RSS feeds?
I can sort-of see what use a calendar is, if you're a social kind of person with a lot to put it in, but give some thought to the format of it. A calendar is far more useful if you can subscribe to it in iCalendar format (from something like iCal or Mozilla Sunbird or Outlook). Does the calendar feature make use of the hCalendar microformat which will, once the developers come forward, start becoming useful in web browsers like Firefox quite soon. Failing that, what about something like Upcoming, which offers a dedicated service for managing events and has similar API and syndication hooks to Flickr for integrating it into your site.
It's also my humble opinion that forums are useless on personal sites unless you have a huge number of visitors already. Even when you reach that stage, having them integrated with the rest of your blog has no advantage (unless you're planning to force people to sign up to comment or something foolhardy like that, in which case you will never get anyone visiting your site to use the forums anyway).
The huge, huge problem with the plethora of CMS available right now is that most of them are grotesquely feature bloated and discourage people from producing well designed, focused sites. If you download a CMS with calendars, galleries and other such then you are immediately obliged to try and use them; they add pointless clutter to your navigation and design. If you start with something that doesn't try to be all things to all men, but has a decent plug-ins system, you can personalise the system to suit you based on your needs.
Just because a CMS has a calendar, gallery, message board and integrated chat room doesn't mean those are good features - it just means that someone had the inclination to code them and no-one else working on the CMS thought about whether it was relevant before including it in a release.
Maljonic
Can't get enough of FH
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Hoping that this thread will be merged with the other one, I'll carry on posting here so it all runs together:
One feature I would really like to see in a CMS is actual file names for the pages; you can "Googlify" phpnuke so the pages are called /article64.htm and such, which is a lot better than /modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=110&mode=&order=0&thold=0 - but you have to mess around a lot to get it to do that. Some like Mambo allow you to activate short urls to you get pages like: content/view/17/31/, which is again a lot better than the string of nonesense you get otherwise and, by the way, all the pages in my Mambo site are indexed in Google with a page rank, so it obviously works.
I would like to see the ability to program the file names yourself though, it can't be that hard; so you could have pages called art.htm and bollox.php or whatever, so that the titles are more memorable to visitors as well as being properly indexed by search engines, just as if it were a normal web site that isn't database driven.
One feature I would really like to see in a CMS is actual file names for the pages; you can "Googlify" phpnuke so the pages are called /article64.htm and such, which is a lot better than /modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=110&mode=&order=0&thold=0 - but you have to mess around a lot to get it to do that. Some like Mambo allow you to activate short urls to you get pages like: content/view/17/31/, which is again a lot better than the string of nonesense you get otherwise and, by the way, all the pages in my Mambo site are indexed in Google with a page rank, so it obviously works.
I would like to see the ability to program the file names yourself though, it can't be that hard; so you could have pages called art.htm and bollox.php or whatever, so that the titles are more memorable to visitors as well as being properly indexed by search engines, just as if it were a normal web site that isn't database driven.
I have been messing with all these blogs etc and really I have come to realize that they all tend to be cumbersome. Also you don't really learn much from using them as all the coding is already in place. I am going to make a simple site using css instead. Already started. Will still install various bits and pieces including a powerful forum. Been trying out the pre-modded phpBB forums but they send my providers server into a fit. Keep getting errors which I think is related to the number of executions taking place. The pre-modded boards do everything and more besides but I can't really see how they could carry on working well under pressure. Not on my providers server anyways.
Oh well back to work.
Oops - can see the other Content Management thread now .
Oh well back to work.
Oops - can see the other Content Management thread now
.
Shovel
Can't get enough of FH
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Maljonic - on most unix webhosts (running Apache) the 'friendly URLs' is done using an Apache module called mod_rewrite. It lets you set up a load of rules to translate "/archives/2005/A-Post-About-Nothing" into "index.php?year=2005&title=a-post-about-nothing".
You put a set of generic rules into the .htaccess file in your site root and presto, it works. Of course, the CMS may or may not use those links internally, which can be another matter. Wordpress does, and also provides an interface for creating the rules which could be worth exploring as a learning aid.
Personally, I think referring as it to 'Googlfication' or whatever is somewhat inaccurate since I'd argue that using friendly URIs is far more useful to people than to a machine (even if the machine can be aided as well).
You put a set of generic rules into the .htaccess file in your site root and presto, it works. Of course, the CMS may or may not use those links internally, which can be another matter. Wordpress does, and also provides an interface for creating the rules which could be worth exploring as a learning aid.
Personally, I think referring as it to 'Googlfication' or whatever is somewhat inaccurate since I'd argue that using friendly URIs is far more useful to people than to a machine (even if the machine can be aided as well).
Maljonic
Can't get enough of FH
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You're right, it isn't really about google; it's just there are two main mods that people use for phpnuke, one is Googlifier and the other is called Google Tap, so I was sort of referring to those even though it is all mainly the mod rewrite that's available on apache servers that is making the short urls.
I wonder if anyone has made a CMS that actually make pages though, a sort of halfway system that uses a database and makes actually pages as you go along. The link script I use on my sites now is database driven in the same way, making actual pages on the server as you go along with the pages being called whatever you call the category with .htm, .php after it, like here: http://www.maljonicsdreams.com/resources/index.html
I think it would be pretty cool for people who know nothing about web design, but can write a lot, if there was a system where they could make their pages and give them a file name that appears as part of the url for that page. I haven't seen a CMS that does that yet, perhaps one of those £3000 jobbies does stuff like that, I don't know?
I wonder if anyone has made a CMS that actually make pages though, a sort of halfway system that uses a database and makes actually pages as you go along. The link script I use on my sites now is database driven in the same way, making actual pages on the server as you go along with the pages being called whatever you call the category with .htm, .php after it, like here: http://www.maljonicsdreams.com/resources/index.html
I think it would be pretty cool for people who know nothing about web design, but can write a lot, if there was a system where they could make their pages and give them a file name that appears as part of the url for that page. I haven't seen a CMS that does that yet, perhaps one of those £3000 jobbies does stuff like that, I don't know?
Shovel
Can't get enough of FH
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If I remember correctly, Movable Type generates static pages rather than dynamically generating them. Effectively it moves the server load from ‘view-time’ to ‘creation time’. If you're on a server short on resources then it can be useful (since the number of times you create/modify the page is less than the number of times the page is viewed). Blogger use this method, for example.
The downside is that by statically generating pages, any template changes you make require every single page in your site to be regenerated sequentially which can be rather tedious. Additionally, dynamic page generation is pretty nippy anyway, to the point that in most hobbyist cases there is very little benefit to creating static files.
To be honest, I don't see the advantage to generating physical HTML files over generating the content. Nor do I see how it benefits newbies? They can still hit view source on the generated page to see how it all works. There's no benefit to editing those generated files by hand since that detaches them from the CMS itself and any changes would be overwritten the next time you altered your central template.
The point of a content management system is to handle all these tasks for you. Any kind of compromise that sits between producing pages by hand and having a CMS manage them for you would be really rather ineffective, I think.
The downside is that by statically generating pages, any template changes you make require every single page in your site to be regenerated sequentially which can be rather tedious. Additionally, dynamic page generation is pretty nippy anyway, to the point that in most hobbyist cases there is very little benefit to creating static files.
To be honest, I don't see the advantage to generating physical HTML files over generating the content. Nor do I see how it benefits newbies? They can still hit view source on the generated page to see how it all works. There's no benefit to editing those generated files by hand since that detaches them from the CMS itself and any changes would be overwritten the next time you altered your central template.
The point of a content management system is to handle all these tasks for you. Any kind of compromise that sits between producing pages by hand and having a CMS manage them for you would be really rather ineffective, I think.
Not a bad night's work. New website with emailing & guest book & forum & calendar. Managed to incorporate the emailer, guest book and forum into the site design by altering a number of files. The calendar is a bit of a monster so will leave that have full width. Will install a blog system for my mates to post stuff themselves. Infact I will make a mirror of this site for myself to use.
Running Site Development.
What you think? I will have to check on code etc but for a days work it looks ok to me so far.
By the way there is a picture of me on the site - Mark .
Running Site Development.
What you think? I will have to check on code etc but for a days work it looks ok to me so far.
By the way there is a picture of me on the site - Mark
.Not sure what you mean by that? Just did a load of work on everything to make it appear a lot smoother in both Firefox and Opera.
The text is the same on some pages as I haven't altered them yet. Do you mean that?
Race calendar is installed now too - wow .
My Running Club Site (under development)
The text is the same on some pages as I haven't altered them yet. Do you mean that?
Race calendar is installed now too - wow
.My Running Club Site (under development)
Think I could see what you meant. Looks like there was a delay before the file was reading the style.css. Think it was the way I had used the link in the header. Altered it now to be as it should have been - at least I think I have. Can't see any delay now in any browser. Is there?
New Running Club Site
Going to attempt to run this site and another off a home server. Apparently the minibb forum will run on it quite nicely. Steering well clear of the modified phpbb forums as they are so damn ponderous.
New Running Club Site
Going to attempt to run this site and another off a home server. Apparently the minibb forum will run on it quite nicely. Steering well clear of the modified phpbb forums as they are so damn ponderous.
Great. As for content well the site is for all the runners and lets face it everyone likes to see themselves and read about themselves etc. Also there is so much content about. Going to look at constructing online training diaries or locating something that can do the job. I should have made such a site as this a long time ago for myself. Anyways the site is constructed in such a manner I can 'mirror' it in about 10 minutes. So I am killing 2 birds with one stone so to speak.
Glad that nasty delay has gone though - cheers on checking the site.
Glad that nasty delay has gone though - cheers on checking the site.
I have transfered the new running site to my home server. The domain name will redirect any visitor. Trouble is I can never tell this end if the site is running as it will run on my own computer fine. Need an external visitor to check it is running. Majonic if you are about try and log onto my site and see if everything is working. Oh and if the forum - calendar is slow. I am still using the old site for emailing as I haven't got a email server on my home setup yet.
Home Server Site?
Going to look into transfering my domain names now to my home server. Fed up of dodgy databases or faulty ftp transfers etc. Having a home server is so much easier.
Home Server Site?
Going to look into transfering my domain names now to my home server. Fed up of dodgy databases or faulty ftp transfers etc. Having a home server is so much easier.
Think my site is starting to show promise now. This css stuff is quite nice to use for sure once you get the hang of it. Like the fact so many files can share one header, footer and style sheet. And I like the way the site loads, seems fast and smooth. Just redid the UK Shopping but eventually had to use tables from the old design full of nasty coding which I will have to work through to tidy up. Still I am quite surprised how well the sections eventually settled in. Huge bonus is now all the pages can be crawled whereas before they were shown inside an iframe so I had to stop the crawlers from spidering the contents of certain folders. The site is more or less an exact copy of my first one that I have made for my running club that is residing on my computer. Amazingly simple to set up the whole lot. I could in theory create a new site with a minibb forum - guestbook - emailer - chatroom - in about 15 mins.
My CSS site.
My CSS site.
You know I just redid my site using CSS. Likes working with it a lot. Think my site looks ok now cept the colours are a bit iffy. Trouble is though what to actually put on the site? I mean I have quite an extensive computer background but I am not sure I want to keep chatting about that. I would much rather talk about website developing but I don't think I know enough about that subject. In other words what on earth do you make your website actually do and show to be interesting? Any ideas
Me funny coloured CSS site.
The name belongs to my old site design. S**** load of Software companies and products need to go on yet!
Me funny coloured CSS site.
The name belongs to my old site design. S**** load of Software companies and products need to go on yet!
Maljonic
Can't get enough of FH
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I think I said this somewhere else, but I think it has to be something you're interested in, that way you don't get sick of it too quickly and your visitors can kind of tell that you know what you're talking about.
If you can think of something you you are interested in but know little about, you could read up on the subject - get books from libraries, charity shops and read magazine articles - then write your own version or take on that particular subject. The best subjects though are the ones you already know about, ones where you don't have to read anyone else's work and just enter the content straight from your brain to the website.
Sorry it's a bit vague, but that's all I can think of to help without knowing much about your interests.
If you can think of something you you are interested in but know little about, you could read up on the subject - get books from libraries, charity shops and read magazine articles - then write your own version or take on that particular subject. The best subjects though are the ones you already know about, ones where you don't have to read anyone else's work and just enter the content straight from your brain to the website.
Sorry it's a bit vague, but that's all I can think of to help without knowing much about your interests.
Done a load of thinking about this. Come to the conclusion that I am going to continue to develop the site for UK Shopping and Trial Software because I have tried quite a few company products from my site and been astonished how good the companies are. Both on the shopping side and the software side. The companies should really be advertised I reckon - especially the software stuff cos there is some amazing stuff on there for download. But I am going to make the site cater for my interests as well - reading, running, guitar playing etc. Thought that I had to make the site kind of anonymous and 'professional' initially but nah my neices and nephews like to go on the site and play games etc. Site just has to be fun for me and for anyone visiting. Incredible amount of work is need to implement all the products and sites for the UK Shopping and Software but I think it is worthwhile. I know enough now about website designing (I think) to cope. Well I hope so anyways . I think the site is looking both friendly yet functional now (lot of work carried out for both Firefox/Opera users last few days) and I really like this CSS stuff. Tis a pleasure to work with to be honest.
Me Site
. I think the site is looking both friendly yet functional now (lot of work carried out for both Firefox/Opera users last few days) and I really like this CSS stuff. Tis a pleasure to work with to be honest.Me Site
Well I been messing with my site and the running club site I am now in charge of - Running club site . I intend to make my Main Site concentrate on UK Shopping and Trial Software but the main page frustrates me. What on earth do I add as content? What should the first page be? The Software side is a great deal of work to setup but I am slowly working through it and infact the content is available as it is related to a subject matter I am fairly knowledgeable about but shopping? I find blatent shopping sites crude and offputting so I can't see me following their examples. On the other hand there are plenty of attractive advertising pictures and links I could use. Looks like I will end up with 3 sites - main site - my own personal site and the running club site.
Going to add a javascript style changer now and ask for peeps opinion on various colour schemes .
Going to add a javascript style changer now and ask for peeps opinion on various colour schemes
.
Maljonic
Can't get enough of FH
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I'm just starting a new site with Mambo again; I'm really impressed with a lot of the way it works once you've managed to figure it all out, all the pages in the last mambo site I did are fully indexed in Google etc without me having to do any mad code stuff, unlike all the other CMSs I've had a go at so far - I also like that it lets you put inidividual meta tags for every single page, which is how it should be.
The more I work on my site the more it resembles a portal .
Bit offa mad design this and crap for google indexing but I don't really care about that. Just having a lotta fun messing about with it though I am going to get it neat and tidy soon and then just maintain it cos I want a personal site for myself as well.
The design I have now is this:
CSS menu encased in a div positioned left.
A Bookmark box with an iframe pulling in a 'Site Visitor' script that auto refreshes every 30 seconds or so - silently!)
Main section comprising of the rest of the site has a main div with an iframe.
The iframe pulls in another 2 iframes. Infact the chain of iframes doesn't stop there as one of the 2 iframes pulls in another page with an iframe embedded in it!
The CSS menu (and some other links) fires into the main large iframe so that I can pull in loads of other pages or whatever I want be they on my site or someone elses. Infact the Arcade link pulls in a Mambo games module (I stript the theme totally and link directly to the module) and the Comics is an Xoops module!
The guestbook/forum/contact us requires a different approach whereby the left menu has been copied with links this time going to full page views of each of the menu links on the index screen. I simply copied the index file replacing the iframe source such as the one for software and renaming the file to software.php. The guestbook/forum/contact menu then links directly to these copied files.
Overall I think it is starting to work really well. It certainly works fast and smooth on all the browsers I have tested it with - Opera/Firefox and Explorer.
Going to work like mad on the Software and get it looking nice and then consider making another personal site for myself to mess about with.
Colour scheme? Orange for now until I get fed up of it though I might see if I can build in a site colour changer. Have done once but to get it work on every page was a bit awkward. Still who knows.
MKJ
Me orange site!
.Bit offa mad design this and crap for google indexing but I don't really care about that. Just having a lotta fun messing about with it though I am going to get it neat and tidy soon and then just maintain it cos I want a personal site for myself as well.
The design I have now is this:
CSS menu encased in a div positioned left.
A Bookmark box with an iframe pulling in a 'Site Visitor' script that auto refreshes every 30 seconds or so - silently!)
Main section comprising of the rest of the site has a main div with an iframe.
The iframe pulls in another 2 iframes. Infact the chain of iframes doesn't stop there as one of the 2 iframes pulls in another page with an iframe embedded in it!
The CSS menu (and some other links) fires into the main large iframe so that I can pull in loads of other pages or whatever I want be they on my site or someone elses. Infact the Arcade link pulls in a Mambo games module (I stript the theme totally and link directly to the module) and the Comics is an Xoops module!
The guestbook/forum/contact us requires a different approach whereby the left menu has been copied with links this time going to full page views of each of the menu links on the index screen. I simply copied the index file replacing the iframe source such as the one for software and renaming the file to software.php. The guestbook/forum/contact menu then links directly to these copied files.
Overall I think it is starting to work really well. It certainly works fast and smooth on all the browsers I have tested it with - Opera/Firefox and Explorer.
Going to work like mad on the Software and get it looking nice and then consider making another personal site for myself to mess about with.
Colour scheme? Orange for now until I get fed up of it though I might see if I can build in a site colour changer. Have done once but to get it work on every page was a bit awkward. Still who knows.
MKJ
Me orange site!
I just did another adjustment for the hell of it. Using a very long jpg background image (very skinny one and made to repeat for speed) and made most of the site transparent so the site appears darker on the bottom. I think it looks better for it. Trying to avoid white splashes as pages load but on Firefox and Opera there are none at all. CSS is great for these adjustments cos all the site is controlled through one style.css. Makes alterations a breeze. I also run the site on my homeserver first to see if it works or not.
Oh well gone for a complete overhaul. Using a background image now and a lot of transparency. Forum colours are all to hell now but I sort that out later, along with various adjustments! Am thinking of copying the top part of the background and turning it upside down to make a footer for the site. Might look good. I need a break . Looks a bit naff in Firefox though cos the lack of scroll bar colouration - pity.
Me now dark dark city site.
. Looks a bit naff in Firefox though cos the lack of scroll bar colouration - pity.Me now dark dark city site.
