[CALUG] Recommendations for a CMS

[Michael Orlitzky]

On 05/09/2011 11:24 AM, Joe Tseng wrote:
> I recently took over management of a website for a youth
> sports/activities league/nonprofit from the original maintainer.  There
> are a number of activities for boys and girls and sometimes both;
> currently I am the one who takes updates from the league's commissioners
> and post them on the site.
> 
> I have been looking at various possibilities of rolling out a
> PHP/MySQL-based CMS and all of them seem to have some kind of
> shortcoming.  I had considered Drupal but it looked way too complicated
> and was completely unintuitive.  Right now I'm considering Joomla
> because it can allow for contextual viewing/editing of content (e.g. a
> football parent can look at public and football-related content, but
> they can't see anything else; a football commissioner can see public and
> football-related content but can only edit football content).  It
> doesn't seem like it can create a contextual scheduling calendar.  I was
> also considering phpBB, not only as a forum, but also to have it drive
> the user management authentication and management.
> 
> Has anyone done anything like this before and do you have any
> recommendations?  Is there a CMS that can do alot of what I'm looking
> for; if not, is there one that's easily extensible so I can make my own
> features?  Or am I simply better off designing my own portal from the
> ground up?

We use two: Drupal[1], which you've already met, and CMS Made Simple[2].

CMS Made Simple is perfect for small sites where there's a bunch of
content, and you just want to edit it. It's easy to edit pages --
there's a place called "Pages," and there's an edit button that does
what you'd expect. You can also create new users and set up permissions
pretty easily. Forms can be installed even by non-technical users, and
news, themes etc. can all be configured through the CMS with a little work.

Drupal on the other hand doesn't do a goddamn thing out-of-the-box, and
the things it does do are unintuitive. But, it's easy to extend, and the
idea of content/views is really useful once you figure out what they
actually do.

With content/views, you can e.g. create a content type called
"newsletter" that has fields for title, date, file, and so on. When the
user goes to create a newsletter, he's presented with a form that has
fields for title, date, file, etc. This turns out to be *much* easier
than having him edit the "newsletters" page, add a new bullet item in
the correct chronological order, put in the title, upload a file, and
link the title to that file.

In essense, CMS:MS will do most of what you want simply and
out-of-the-box. But the things it doesn't do are harder to implement.
Drupal is the exact opposite. CMS:MS sites take us two or three days to
develop, Drupal sites take about a week but require less maintenance in
the long run.

Both have decent core dev teams.

For what it's worth, we had to do exactly the same thing a few years ago
and wound up going with Drupal for the tac_lite module[3] which limits
access exactly how you described.


[1] http://drupal.org/
[2] http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/
[3] http://drupal.org/project/tac_lite