Help me choose a CMS

User avatar
Thad
Posts: 13170
Joined: Tue Jan 21, 2014 10:05 am
Location: 1611 Uranus Avenue
Contact:

Help me choose a CMS

Postby Thad » Fri Jul 15, 2016 10:00 pm

SO. Work project. Need a CMS.

Requirements:

Needs to be able to output a static site. HTML, CSS, JS, nothing else. (This could be done in a pinch with wget, but that tends to break forms.) The idea is that the CMS itself will run on a development server on the LAN, and then deploy to a production server; we don't want any exposed server-side scripts or databases on the production server.

Needs to have a simple WYSIWYG editor for end users. (This rules out command-line kits like Jekyll.)

End users need to be able to preview their updates before deploying. (This rules out using a headless CMS. Because if I were, say, to use Drupal for the CMS on the dev server and have it send JSON data to a JS frontend on the production server, that means I would have to write two different versions of the same theme, one for Drupal and one for the frontend toolkit, in order for end users to see the same layout on both servers.)

Free (as in speech and beer).


Nice to have:

I'm going to build a theme for the thing, and I'm going to use Bootstrap. Something that's got already-available Bootstrap themes is a plus but not a requirement.

An easy-to-use, well-supported plugin architecture would be a good idea.


So far the only thing we've found that matches the requirements is OpenCMS. I do not like OpenCMS.

User avatar
Mongrel
Posts: 21290
Joined: Mon Jan 20, 2014 6:28 pm
Location: There's winners and there's losers // And I'm south of that line

Re: Help me choose a CMS

Postby Mongrel » Sat Jul 16, 2016 12:31 pm

Obviously I know fuck-all about this... BUT I post at a place where like half the membership are IT guys, so I asked around.

It's the weekend so replies are slow, but I did get this
Glocks wrote:preview is a little vague, pretty much every CMS has a preview function. what it sounds like he wants is something like a UAT environment where they can see the product with their change.

also it really depends on what he's doing with the CMS, how much stuff is there? is it mostly updatable content or new content?

as far as CMS options we're rolling out
https://github.com/perfectsense/brightspot-cms
which is terrible for our purposes but could be good for some

i wish we were rolling out
https://www.superdesk.org/
which would be perfect for our purposes but bad for others
Image

User avatar
Thad
Posts: 13170
Joined: Tue Jan 21, 2014 10:05 am
Location: 1611 Uranus Avenue
Contact:

Re: Help me choose a CMS

Postby Thad » Sat Jul 16, 2016 1:06 pm

Thanks.

Glocks wrote:preview is a little vague, pretty much every CMS has a preview function. what it sounds like he wants is something like a UAT environment where they can see the product with their change.


Right. They need to be able to see the previewed page, in an environment that looks the same as it will on deployment. (As opposed to, say, an editor that's got a "Preview" toggle that just shows you your formatted text on the same screen you edit it on. Or a headless CMS, where the design environment has no bearing on the deployment environment.)

Glocks wrote:also it really depends on what he's doing with the CMS, how much stuff is there? is it mostly updatable content or new content?


It's going to be used on multiple sites, mostly very simple sites: a homepage and a contact page, maybe a gallery.

Updates will be infrequent, and usually made by me or my boss, but we need the WYSIWYG editor and preview functionality for those rare occasions when someone else might need to edit a page (say, if the phones are down and we haven't gotten into work yet, somebody else in the department should be able to add a message saying the phones are down) and for future-proofing (in case somebody else is put in charge of updates at a later date).

Glocks wrote:as far as CMS options we're rolling out
https://github.com/perfectsense/brightspot-cms
which is terrible for our purposes but could be good for some

i wish we were rolling out
https://www.superdesk.org/
which would be perfect for our purposes but bad for others


I'll look into those. Thanks, Mongrel and Glocks.

User avatar
Mongrel
Posts: 21290
Joined: Mon Jan 20, 2014 6:28 pm
Location: There's winners and there's losers // And I'm south of that line

Re: Help me choose a CMS

Postby Mongrel » Sat Jul 16, 2016 7:35 pm

Another suggestion:
Mark wrote:
Glocks wrote:yeah i have a feeling those are both overkill for what he needs, they're both for publishing news. sounds like just wordpress or something should work?

Wordpress + a plugin that outputs static HTML.

eg: https://wordpress.org/plugins/static-ht ... ut-plugin/

This one outputs a zip file, so you'd need another step in the process that uploads that to your public-facing server.

You get a lot of nice extras with this, but you will need to find a good template to use, and probably disable a lot of things

EDIT: That particular plugin example looks dead though, you'd need to find an up to date one
Image

User avatar
Thad
Posts: 13170
Joined: Tue Jan 21, 2014 10:05 am
Location: 1611 Uranus Avenue
Contact:

Re: Help me choose a CMS

Postby Thad » Sun Jul 17, 2016 7:00 pm

Well yeah, that's the thing; if I could find a plugin to do this for WP (or, preferably, Drupal) that was up-to-date and didn't, say, link to a defunct Github page, I'd do that. If I'd been able to find such a thing, I wouldn't be asking for help.

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 21 guests