This week I’ve been looking for a flexible and easy-to-use Content Management System. My wife is starting her own business in interior design and I am helping her with the company website. Of course, being a ColdFusion lover, I started with checking out the available CF-based platforms. There are a few in http://www.riaforge.org (just type the keyword “CMS” in the project search page). Here are the ones I looked at, and why they are not suitable for what I need.
Bytespring CMS:looked nice and simple. You can check out a working demo on http://demo.bytespring.com. Two things though: bytespring does not seem to have very flexible templating capabilities, and it only works if you intstall it directly under the webroot (I’ve tried to change some paths and mappings but the thing is definitely not portable). For me, having to install a model-glue application directly under the webroot is a definite no-go: I refuse to have folders named “model”, “view”, “controller” directly in the webroot of my local development server, since most of my other applications have the same structure so things would get really confusing. So no local testing, which is the main reason I decided against this CMS.
CAM-II-CMS: seems to be just starting out. Nothing that can be installed and used yet, as far as I can tell.
ActiveCharity CMS: also seems to be unfinished, plus targeted at non-profit users (and we want to make some serious money, don’t we Franca 
)
CF-Nuke CMS: also no download link in riaforge. The “external project link” points to a page that does nog exist (an all-to-familiar blue CF error sits there straring at us). Stripping “index.cfm” from the url returns the correct page, where we can read that the project is in some kind of midlife crisis . I qoute : “With some reservation, I have decided it was appropriate to post the last known release of CFNuke for download. I say reservation, only because I think there is much room for improvement to this version. I have looked over most of the code but still have more to go. I am most concerned about the security of this application. It is my reccomendation that you download this software for learning purposes only. If you wish to use cfnuke it is highly recommended that you add your own parameter cleaning and queryprams to all queries.” Best of luck to Mark who seems like an enthousiastic guy who is going to work hard to improve on things, but I need to have the site up this month.
Katapult – CMS: I actually got this working just by unzipping some files into a subfolder under the webroot. Works like a breeze, but – like bytespring – not very flexible. I need multiple templates that I can choose from to create a new page. In the templates, I want to have control over the rendered HTML, not just a CSS template. Katapult just lets you customize the stylesheets, and the content is submitted as a single block through an FCKEditor. The editor is nice, but it also means that the user still has to worry about the layout within the page and that is precisely the thing a CMS user should not have to worry about, in my opinion.
Yet Another ColdFusion CMS:From the getting started page, I get the impression that this one could be pretty useful for me. Kept coming up with errors when I tried to install it though. Finally got impatient with it, so I never saw this one working. Could be my bad of course.
Farcry:Looked bloated to me: a lot of feautures but I got lost trying to figure out how everything worked. I need something to edit content on a website, not manage enterprise-level publishing workflow.
PHP – CMS Made Simple:So, I finally did it: I installed PHP on top of my laptop’s Apache server. It sits there next to ColdFusion and the two have not been fighting yet! (In fact, .php pages are extremely slow when CF is not running, probably because the Apache server keeps waiting for a response from CF on every request). After installing PHP, I installed CMS Made Simple, and that’s the one we are going to use. It has sohisticated templating abilities, giving designers and developers fine-grained control over both HTML and CSS in the rendered pages. Within pages templates, multiple named blocks of content can be defined, so that the content manager only has to fill the block with the appropiate text or image, without having to worry about the layout within the page. I supports two mechanisms for SES urls, and is easily extendible. Images can be resized, cropped and rotated from within the CMS. In short, I think it’s really good!
Makes me wonder, could this have been done in ColdFusion? I reckon the answer is yes, and probably it would even have been easier to develop something like this in CF. Problem is, far more people and companies are using PHP than CF and it seems – at least when it comes to CMS’s – that the availability of good developers is more important than the superiority of the technology they are using. In my opinion, this would be the main thing Adobe has to worry about when it comes to marketing ColdFusion.
I know what you mean! It’s really frustrating that we don’t have the abundance of really good open source CMS systems that PHP has (like typo3
The problem is that for a long time there were no open source Coldfusion enginges. That has just recently changed with openBD and we will have another engine Ralio3.1 this year as another open source alternative.
Why write a really good open source cms when the server engine it needs to run is closed source and not cheap. Maybe a few hard core CF programmers should port a few of the php cms’s to cfml and while porting make them even better.
One CF-based open source CMS that you missed is Sava CMS: http://www.gosava.com/go/sava/. You might want to take a look at it.
@Brian: Thanks for pointing this out. I looked at the website, and must say it looks very promising. I’m going to check it out.
I think the best PHP CMS is Joomla. Ton of free extensions. It’s all about the community developing the core code and the number of modules you can install (preferably for free).
@ E: That would be an important criterion indeed! That said, I think it matters a lot what kind of functionality the platform is providing, and if that suits the needs for your particular project.
For the project I was talking about, it was important to have an easy way to define multiple, named blocks of content within a page template, so that the content blocks can be edited seperately. In CMSMS you can just do {content block=”someBlockName”}, and the editor for the page would automatically get an extra area to edit the contents of that particular block, labeled with the appropriate “someBlockName”. Does Joomla provide something like this?
Martin,
Why not use WordPress? For a fairly small site it will work prefect plus provide the ability to add content regularly. I use it for several sites as the “CMS” and combined with the plugins available, it can do most things needed for a small, dynamic website.
@ Brian: I’ve looked at WordPress for this purpose and I agree with you that it is very useful for maintaining small, dynamic websites. I especially liked the extremely easy installation.
The site I am working on for my wife is – however small – a little bit more complicated than a regular company website. From what I’ve seen wordpress is less flexible than CMSMS when it comes to creating templates that contain many different blocks of editable content on one page. Of course I could be mistaken because I haven’t taken a close enough look at WordPress to be very definite on this. But from reading the docs it appeared to me that I could already have written the template in CMSMS by the time I had figured out how to do it in WordPress.
By the way, how nice to have a comment from you on my blog. I read your blog regulary, your post on JSON formatting with Coldspring remote proxy was awesome!
And what about BlogCFC or Mango? Both very good CF-alternatives that provide many plugins and options for any sized website.
I found your blog by chance . but i have to say that it’s great blog very useful information and very interesting subjects just greetings and good luck
i’m not going i will be always checking for updates.I’m very interested in CMS and all its related subjects.