content management systems

[chico]

i think Content Management Systems are good and they help me to manage a lot of stuff.i manage one of the biggest websites in my country Ghana and the CMS we designed has helped a lot.

With search engines finding our publications and indexing has been great,actually since we started using CMS our rankings on the search engines have greatly improved.

CMS are supposed to improve productivity,so if your CMS is not working as it is supposed to then i guess the developer who put it together has to modify it.

[matt_j]

We use a java-based CMS called nucontent that seems to work well with search engines and everything else. It publishes the title and URL in a way that Google seems OK with. It's also very easy to use. We had another cms prior to nucontent and it was a nightmare. I think the Web address is http://www.nucontent.com.[/url]

[jasper]

We (I) here at www.npowerin.org developed our own home grown CMS for our Non-Profit customers using ASP with Access.
So far I have developed calendars/events, dynamic menus, email forms, and some specialty pages (like the "Resource Guide" section of my latest: www.dvngi.org
With a quick change of the site template and CSS I can create a new looking site rather easily. With the WYSIWYG editor, I can control how much my customer can change, depending on how savy they feel about making changes.
My goal is to get website creation down to 3 days, and helping our local non-profits save money, but still have a functioning, manageable website, without having to call me (spending dollars) to make changes.

[MattRobertson]

Interesting topic. More so because I develop and wholesale a cms to other developers.

Personally, being a hard-liner insofar as coding by hand is concerned I'm afraid I've given my soul completely over to the devil: a wysiwyg web-based editor. The benefits of managing a site within a cms framework are just too great. Now, that doesn't mean you can't be standards-compliant, nor does it mean you have to give up SE-friendliness. The developer just has to build the capabilities into the system.

For example, the cms can give you entry spaces for all the meta stuff, and a custom title, but default to using the page title in absence of a special title, and take the first 255 chars of text -- stripped of html -- for a meta descr. It just depends on the product in question, and I'm sure there are many out there that take this into account.

While you can use mod_rewrite to make SE-friendly urls, you can also do this in the cms system code. In CF, this will work on Apache:

[cfparam name="attributes.VarScope" default="url." type="string"]
[cfparam name="attributes.delimiter" default="/" type="string"]
[cfset variables.query_string_length=Len(cgi.Request_Uri)-Len(cgi.Script_Name)]
[cfif Len(variables.query_string_length)]
[cfset variables.query_string=Right(cgi.Request_Uri, variables.query_string_length)]
[cfset variables.items=ListLen(variables.query_string, attributes.delimiter)]
[cfif variables.items mod 2 is 0]
[cfloop
from="1"
to="#variables.items#"
step="2"
index="i"]
[cfset variables.i1=ListGetAt(variables.query_string, i, attributes.delimiter)]
[cfset variables.i2=ListGetAt(variables.query_string, i+1, attributes.delimiter)]
[cfset "#attributes.VarScope##variables.i1#"=variable s.i2]
[/cfloop]
[/cfif]
[/cfif]

Then you build your links and code to use slashes in its query string.

To use this in-code technique in IIS requires an alteration to its default settings otherwise it will throw a 404 whenever it finds a 'page' like http://foo.com/bar.cfm/id/123 doesn't exist. You can shut this selectively and safely off in IIS for specific page extension types.

There are also free Win2k/IIS isapi filters out there. Look at the free tools at http://cfdev.com for one of many.

Lastly I haven't seen mention of using a cms to administer the pages, but for it to publish physically discrete, static versions of same so that the SE issues y'all are discussing don't exist. Some pages of course require application processing of some sort (a page whose menu alters itself depending on the user's access level, for example). Those pages can be served dynamically but given SE-friendly urls.

This technique not only removes the issue of SE-friendliness, but it takes a colossal load off the application and database servers. Naturally there are issues with taking pages in and out of service, but those can all be dealt with via the cms if its thoughtfully laid out.

And by the way, please don't take my own site -- built in an older ver of the cms I sell -- as a shining example of what I'm talking about. I sorely wish I had the time to refit a good design onto it, and install all of the nice keywords and such. Never enough time in the day.

Cheers,

--Matt Robertson--
MSB Designs, Inc.
http://mysecretbase.com

[scoob]

Some people were talking about their system being on windows while others were recommending using mod_rewrite.

I have come across the following website which
might interest you:

http://www.isapirewrite.com/

Disclaimer: I have never used the product.

Good luck!
- Scoob

[germonc]

I've read the whole of this CMS forum avidly - however there is no mention of CMS' being accessible to the disabled (meeting RNIB, WIA and Section 508 Standards).

As a Government Organisation we have have an obligation to create our site to be accessible. We will be looking into implementing a CMS to maintain our FOIA section, therefore it needs to be accessible.

Has anyone got any suggestions?

[ed.quinn]

We are currently in the process of developing a new Content Management System which we intend to sell to small businesses and individuals who don't necessarily want to create websites from scratch, spend a fortune on the software or have their own dedicated server to run it from!

If you would like to see a complete version online, visit http://www.e-centrixonline.com

You may notice as you navigate through the site that the URLs for a lot of the pages do not contain the dreaded question mark! The system is designed from the ground up to be as search engine friendly as possible in so far as that you can set individual sections with different metatags and descriptions as well as setting them globally for the entire site. We also have the ability for you to easily enable comments and ratings for individual articles and set up your own discussion pages that work in a similar way to a forum.

You can also set up different themes for your website which can be changed either globally or on a per-section basis and with some packages we will be offering your own theme creation section, where you will be able to create your own page skins from scratch if you so desire.

If you are interested in any more information about our product (e-centrix.net), please feel free to e-mail me for more information (ed.quinn@e-centrix.com). We are looking to do a roll-out over the next couple of weeks for version 1.0 and we will be continually developing the product from then on with the aid of user feedback to drive the development process.

Ed Quinn
Web Development Team Leader