Roundup of paid CMSs

Here is a large list of Australian CMS vendors. Guessing that means people that make custom commercial solutions and then help install and set them up custom for whoever buys them. http://www.steptwo.com.au/resources/australian-cms/

Stuff out there:

Traffik

http://www.playintraffik.com/Detailed_Features

Part of this new breed 'hosted application' type thingy.

A hosted website CMS / shopping cart / hosting / blog / customer database /community / email marketing / customer database / everything you can think of. Its about $30 per month minimum, goes up to $160 per month. You only pay month by month.

They offer a 30 day trial where you can build your own thing and see if its good. From brief looking at it it looks like pretty amazing and they have thought of everything. So if its a large site, and your going to be looking at paying $30 per month just for hosting anyway, then this could be good to look at because you get an all in one solution forall the things a business generally neeeds. But its a bit risky because its their own proprietry solution, so your wholebusiness is tied into them - and the web is meant to be FREE. It could get messy if you try and port over to someone else. Still, a neat looking solution.

Light CMS
http://www.speaklight.com/how-it-works
Another monthly paid CMS / hosting solution. Seductive because they also offer slicing services. You could pretty much hand them a psd and then soon enough client would have their own editable site - then they can make the million rounds of changes themselves then using the CMS. Fuck they could even design it themselves in microsoft paint and send it to these guys and i bet theyd be stoked with the result and if they wanted changes there'd just a buy addition paypal button or something on the support ticket I bet. Cant argue with that button. Future is now.

GOOD

• They can slice and CMS and host - all in one go. Quick and nasty and done yesterday.
• They let you brand the CMS and support.
• They reckon you should markup their monthly bill... (lets all get rich together sort of deal)
  
• Good for clients who dont have much capital to invest in a custom CMS right at the beginning. They can pay for it over a few years. By then they'll want a new site anyway. So when you look at it that way - it could actually turn out to be a decent option for microsites and whatever for startups, if they go bust, at least they havnt spent heaps on a custom CMS, just the easy to manage monthly bill - better for SMB cashflow.

BAD

• They dont do email hosting - they recommend gmail...
• Imagine having to chase a client up for their web hosting fees every month or even year - what a drag! Youd spend the money your making admining the payments (or getting overdraw fees for the company billing you monthly whether or not the client wants to pay). Think this only good if you have an accounts department. Or you get the clients credit card details.
• The internet is meant to be free. (but guess hosting isnt and they are providing hosting in a way. HTML is free, php is free.
  
• if the company disappears - you have to salvage the site and recode the cms yourself because its proprietary... what a drag. Thats if you even have a backup somewhere.
• imagine anything beyond basic youd want to add they would charge you for customisations...
  

Still - its a pretty seductive idea- i think it will catch on.

Roundup of design portals / blogs

http://www.designshard.com/

Roundup of Open Source CMS solutions

Looking for CMS solutions / templates. Want to try them all out and see which is better and what each one is for or best for. Also need to find out how many people use each solution, would want to use the one with the most support and the most new modules and biggest forums.

CMS Made Simple

http://opensourcecms.com/

Need to have a go at trying this out properly. It dosnt look like theres that many modules available compared to what I imagine drupal would have. Theres photogallery though, forums etc etc.

From the site...

"The idea behind creating opensourceCMS revolved around the need to have a place where one could completely test content management systems in one place, before taking the time to install one."

So it seems that its not one solution but it is a source for many solutions, and by searching through different ones maybe theres already one out there that is just what you need, this is interesting.

From what I can tell unlike drupal which you can edit the content on the actual page your looking at, this requires you to login to an admin section and edit lists of pages. OK for a small site, but I think for a client its easier for them to get their head around the CMS if they just navigate to the actual page they want to edit and edit it. (Although guess to add content they still need to go to a different area.

Plone

Plone is meant to be more powerful than Drupal and Joomla and better for massive organisations, but needs a specific setup (a specific server / hosting setup which will probably be more expensive) and has a steeper learning curve for the web designer implementing it. Also it is written in Python, so getting a programmer to make extentions and customisations will be more expensive or harder to find than a PHP programmer to work on Drupal / Joomla.

Joomla!

From a quick browse of reviews, Joomla (like Drupal), is good for non-profit organisation websites. It is considered very easy to set up and get going and to learn to use. However, it isnt considered as powerful as Drupal in some respects. And advantage of it is that it is built with PHP, so if you need a customisation done, this shouldnt be too expensive to get programmed.

Joomla has a large commercial development community. A shopping cart built in, better calendars and is easier to learn.

Drupal

Good for organisations that need a straightforward setup but a fair ammount of power. It sits in the middle of Plone and Joomla in regards to power and ease of use. Soa good compromise. Its written in PHP so again cheap for getting customisations made.

Heres an excellent table of comparison features between Drupal and Joomla. http://www.alledia.com/blog/general-cms-issues/joomla-and-drupal-%11-which-one-is-right-for-you?/

Drupal dosnt have a shopping cart built in, it is getting one soon (Ubercart). Drupal is more standards compliant. Drupal dosnt have great event calendars or Templates / Themes (which isnt an issue Id want to design it anyway). Also Drupal has unlimited subcategory levels and cross categorisation. Overall looks like Drupal is the right choice at the moment.

Pligg

http://www.pligg.com/

Open Source: Looks like especially for large community sites, with rating systems. Utilises smarty templating system. Allows multiple authors, private user messaging, user profile pages etc.

The Secretary

http://secretary.nivr.net/index.php

"The Secretary is a different kind of content management system. It is simple, lightweight, easy-to-use and meant for designers and artists. It aims to be transparent by removing itself entirely from the front-end - forget the restrictive themed layouts of other systems and create truly unique websites again."

Looks really neato for artists portfolios - nice plugins with support for lightbox and cycle galleries. Good for little portfolio sites it seems, and made by a designer so looks really nice.
It is a content management system not a page management system. ie you just design your static site how you want it, then where you want the dynamic pieces you put in the database calls, just like a custom CMS would have. Anyway going to try it out ASAP.

Need still to find or see if its got
- ability to have video objects in portfolio / database
- ditto music player
- newer lightbox modules like smoothbox etc
- text formatting features - like blogger has
- its just been released - so community and modules are lacking...

Though - Drupal is still looking good for extendability down the track to adding say a blog, recent news, shopping cart - shit like that with no fuss....

Drawback with Drupal being templates not designed for primarily portfolios...

Gallery
http://gallery.menalto.com/
Looks like just a gallery feature that integrates into your cms. looks a bit complex...

eZ Publish
http://ez.no/ezpublish/
Used by EMI to manage their artists websites - so handles video and music well. Looks likeits good for large organisations.
features video, photo galleries, blogs etc. imports from office documents (yuk) has translations. Multiple upload files at once (good for large galleries). And ---- has a permissions workflow thing and you can cross publish content. They also have some sort of paid premium service which gives you extra goodies...

Plone4Artists
http://plone4artists.org/products
hmmmm.....
does video, audio, photos etc. plus a e-commerce module for selling cds/ artwork etc. theyve really thought about it. good if youve already got a plone site, but not out of the box if you dont...

Im still sold on secretary at the mo...

Photo Galleries - Not lightbox style popups

Heres some galleries Ive recently looked at and will consider using in the future. They are not popups like lightbox.

http://malsup.com/jquery/cycle/
A gallery slideshow with multiple possible effects for transitions. (auto cycling through images)

http://devkick.com/lab/galleria/
A gallery maker with fade transitions and auto thumnail navigation. Good for a proper gallery but dosnt have choice of transitions as far as I can tell.

http://benjaminsterling.com/jquery-jqgalscroll-photo-gallery/
Photogallery with slide transition auto pagination for navigation. No back link on photo clicking photo only goes forwards.

http://smoothgallery.jondesign.net/
I used Smoothgallery today for a project. It was pretty good and is working in IE6 fine, took a bit longer than lightbox to set up. Spent a bit of time in forums getting around little issues. The great thing about it though is that if the user has javascript switched off the images just list themselves neatly down the page like a blog. Use the downloaded example demoslide.html, and customised it. Basically the problems were:
• showArrows: false, - this breaks the gallery. To get rid of the arrows do it in the css by making the arrow links css opacity levels be 0 everywhere.
• Deleting the 'open image' href will break the gallery unless you have added the option embedLinks: false, that has the added benefit of removing the lightbulb from the middle of the picture.
• Delecting the thumbnail image links breaks the gallery unless you specify the option showCarousel: false,
• You can easily remove the image title/ caption with the declaration showInfopane: false,

Tripoli - HTML CSS resetter and layout generator

Tripoli - HTML resetter. Simply is a base stylesheet that makes pretty CSS styling by default of all the elements from the get go. Blockquotes look great. So do lists, tables, forms. etc. Also has plugins for special typographic goodness/correctness and extra visual formatting...
Going to try this on the next project - its gives you a great clean place to start with everything looking nice and with browser consistency tested already.
http://devkick.com/lab/tripoli/sample.php?base=base&visual=visual&type=type

For extra rapidness - use in conjunction with...
Tripoli CSS layout tool - great little layout generator for making common web layouts that have already been browser tested. Just add your nav!
http://devkick.com/lab/tripoli/layout.php?lay=l1&width=wide&style=equal

CSS typography - Using Helvetica Neue

Good looking styling I saw today using special fonts for hs. But what is Calibri??

h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 {
font-family: "HelveticaNeue-Light","Helvetica Neue Light","Helvetica Neue",Calibri,sans-serif;
font-weight: 300;
}

A fix for the min-width problem?

Test this out it might be a good solution for the problem of not being able to set min-width in IE6. Look into what !important does...

#id {
min-height: 100px;
height:auto !important;
height:100px;
}