CMS - Market Research

mathiaus

Hopefully you know of one of two Frihost community projects, FriMs, a powerful Content Management System (CMS). Being a community project, it is being built by the community mainly for Frihost but will be allowed to be used anywhere.

Onto the topic, we need to know what makes your CMS, why is it special and what problems does it have. CMS' have many features but which do you and your members use on a regular basis, whcih could be expanded and which arent used for reasons that could be solved?

If you aren't able to help with the coding or layouts/graphics, please help us know what to achieve; something you would choose to use because it does what you want in a simple way Smile

mariohs

Well, this is a very complicated question and I don't think there's a specific answer for this... but I'll list here what I should take into consideration... although I do not use any cms, but I'll list what is important to me...

1- Features: as many cms here, tons of features like blog, forum, polls, etc... but every cms has those features, it has to be something very good. Integration with third party applications such as wordpress, phpbb, smf, etc is also a good thing to think about (but oh well, it's pretty damn difficult to do this). Every cms has lot's of features, you'll have to make it better than others, and prove the public why your's is better than others...

2- Flexible: I'd like to configure my forum, blog, polls as most as I can, put the layout I want, and so on...

3- Easy Layout customization: CSS is very handy here... a very well structured main page is also important if I want to add some extra html tags for formatting. Modularity is very good when dealing with this...

4- Web Standards Compliant: I'd like my site to be semanticaly correct and W3C's compliant... tags such <div class="paragraph"> are not a good thing and Google won't index it very good. Being on the top of Google is an aim for everyone whos owns a website and webstandards help a lot in this case.

5- Good and objective tutorial / faq of how to use the features, how to customize them, and how to do your own site layout with your own css / index page.

6- Of course, you have to deal with newbies and experts, so it must be easy to deal with, but without lacking features.

Ok, I talked too much, hope i have helped. If you do not agree with something, let's discuss it Wink

photon

i would prefer if its pretty simple and modular. what i mean is, there are plent of cms that are heavy and can take care of a complete site like arcicles, forums, news, chat, gallery etc... but there arent many that just focus on the main template, and lets the user customize everything else.

for that reason, if its just a simple cms to create pages, and modify them using a backend, it would be very useful... this is just my thought.

iflash

I am new on CMS's, but very interested. I think that the most easy way to construct one, is trying the others. Can we install Drupal on Frihost?.
If I can help you, let me now. I am flash designer, but learning a lot, an fast about css.

chrisu

I'm a bit late with my opinions. Forgot to answer this thread when I saw it.

The most important for me is security. I wont my site to be as hard as possible to hack or any other attacks. It wouldn't be the first time a CMS is attacked. Every security risks that are found should be fixed and an update released.

Another thing is customization on the layout and the features. There are so many people out there with different taste and needs. Maybe a layout customize system inside the CMS would be a thing to think of.

I'm sure that the community will make many features to the CMS, but what then when the creator haven't got any more time to keep up the developement? Because of this there should be some rules how the features should be made so someone other can take over easily the developement.

The CMS should be made as SEO friendly as possible. Because we want many visitors. And a thing for the visitors to stay is that the system is easy to use. So userfriendly is also an important thing.