[thelist] The quagmire of CMS

Ben Glassman bglassman at gmail.com
Tue Apr 24 22:36:10 CDT 2007


Up until recently the company I work for was using Contribute as a solution
for clients to edit their static web pages. We recently made the switch to a
full CMS (we are using a modified version of MODx[1], which I highly
recommend).

Contribute was fine if you want to have the user simply edit the content
area of pages using a WYSIWYG application with an integrated FTP client.
However, it has limitations in terms of adding navigation, as others have
mentioned.

My primary complaint against Contribute was that it was another browser that
you had to support, and one with very little in the way of documentation for
CSS rendering issues. Therefore it could be time consuming to get pages to
render correctly. Pages would also render correctly in browsing mode, but
once Contribute switched to Edit mode they would break, sometimes in ways
that made the content invisible (and hence unable to be edited). It also
(perhaps they have fixed this now) does not parse PHP/ASP includes (but
seemed to work with SSI), which meant that I had to structure my code
differently, leaving the main divs in each page rather than in the include,
or the framework would always break in edit mode.

In my eyes, Contribute is a simplfied version of a program like Dreamweaver
which is fine for small static sites but if you are building larger sites
with more dynamic content (calendars, photo galleries, databases, forums,
etc.) a full featured CMS can be much more flexible.

Ben

[1] http://www.modxcms.com



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