WebsiteBaker Community Forum
General Community => Global WebsiteBaker 2.8.x discussion => Topic started by: mark99 on September 15, 2010, 10:49:03 AM
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I must be testing about 10 different CMS solutions now, it's taking hours of my life up each day trying to find one that fits the bill. Currently I'm using a fork of CuteNews PHP that has been abandoned and really need something more modern to replace it with.
WB is one of the top solutions in my list but rather than spend another 10-20 hours trying to figure out how to do what I want, I thought it might be simpler to just ask the community. Here are my key requirements, sorry the list is a little long but.. well we content devs are a fussy lot :-D.
1. Automatic 'Related News Links' generation, for linking similar news articles to a news item that has been posted (i.e. find similar news titles, perhaps based on matching 'tag' categories or something like that).
2. News Comments with reasonably strong Anti-Spam (i.e. recaptcha support).
3. Social networking integration (i.e. allowing twitter users to login and make comments). Perhaps asking too much with that one.
4. Ability to add keyword "Tag" categories to news items, which are a bit like categories.. oh everybody knows what tags are by now hehe.
5. Fast, low amount of queries and good cache management.
6. Ability to show number of article views (i.e. pageviews per individual "news item" to help gauge popularity and perform no.7 below).
7. Ability to display special summary news headlines (e.g. Top 4 news items from the past week, month or all time (based on pageviews and date range sorting)).
8. Link glossary, allowing pre-set words to be automatically linked in a news item (i.e. a name like "Joeblogs" and URL "joe.com" would be added to a database and then any matching words are auto-linked in the posted article/news item). I consider this service to be critical for my site as it saves a colossal amount of editing.
9. Ideally possible to interface with or just read the basic membership database from vBulletin instead of the CMS, although I recognise that this might require a separate commercial development.
10. Ability to output both Google Newsfeeds and RSS feeds for the site, ideally just for news content but the option to have additional feeds for other content would be a bonus. Also critical.
11. Ability to put an article into more than one category (multiple category selection).
12. Ability to split specific articles you write over multiple pages and output a simple index link for each page (e.g. Page 1, Page 2 etc.). Critical feature.
13. Ability to preview a news article before its posted to test that my styling works correctly; doesn't need to be a full preview. An effective WYSIWYG editor that displays exactly as you type it would do as well, albeit less reliable for preview purposes.
14. Easy access to templates, ideally through either or both the UI and direct file editing. I prefer to work with files and dislike CMS systems that put templates into the database. It's so much faster to edit and learn files by hand than have a UI get in the way.
15. Able to handle thousands of articles and news items (obviously, not all on one page at the same time hehe).
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1 ) no ... you'd need manually link or create a module for that or try topics (WebsiteBaker.at) which has that kind of feature
2 ) Captcha can be activated in Options of WB
3 ) There are some SocialMedia Droplets for "Liking" and stuff
4 ) No Tagging ...
5 ) no oob chache implemented
6 ) I think Topics is again you best bet
7 ) should be possible with a custom script (Droplet or snippet)
8 ) not automatically but with dbGlossary possible
9 ) a bridge would need to be developed
10) RSS Feeds are possible, not 100% sure about the Topics RSS though
11) nope ...
12) I think there was a outputfilter for that feature
13) no preview implemented
14) Templates are basic HTML files with some custom tags, UInterface not available, but direct file editing
15) should be no issue at all
cheers
Klaus
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for 4) you can try "more like this" droplet
[admin note: this only works for pages, not individual news items]
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Thanks for the helpful reply, some useful information there.
Shame that some of those critical features I need don't appear to have made it into WB yet, but I can't have everything on my wish list :-P . I took a look at WebsiteBaker.at but it's not in English and I couldn't understand it. My quest for the ideal CMS continues hehe.
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I dont think that you will find a cms that will suit all your needs.. They are made for most common things, and if you need something extra, you would need to hire a coder to develop extra features you need..
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Well my existing one already does all of that but it's no longer supported so I have to move on. It's annoying because most of the features I have requested are common place on sites I visit but don't appear to be available, out of the box, with a lot of CMS's.
Sure Drupal, MODx2, Joomla and so forth can but they're all quite a bit more bloated than I would want and require more development time for the learning curve. So far 'CMS Made Simple' is the front runner but it's modding community is the biggest weakness, too fractured and not enough detail/structure.