Administration System for website

[RedWombat]

Hi Availor. That's great you're going to start your own business. Especially when you're younger - No children (I'm guessing from your being in school and your photo in drag )and plenty of energy to burn the midnight oil!

There are some very good points about CMS from everyone. I would point out a few things. From my experience and knowing my clients, most CMS apps go way over the top on trying to provide to much and often overwhelm the client with how to use the darn thing. They're way to confusing for the lay person. I ended up building my own simpler CMS for my clients. It was very easy to use for them.

I do need to point out one thing though. Most of your clients won't know jack about optimizing images and such. In essence they'll be more than happy to upload a photo say for example that will be over a 1 meg in size not knowing they created an issue for the visitors to the website. I've had all kinds of issues with my clients and CMS apps.

In essence, be prepared to do a lot of hand holding and customer support.

Best of luck!

[Egg Bramhill]

I agree with Red 100%. It sounds an excellent selling point that the site your supplying is dynamic and is client editable but can/do/will they want to do this?

How much is this option going to cost the client (+ your additional workload)?

Will the client use it/be able to use it/be bothered to learn it?

Are you cutting off your nose to spite your face by offering this? After all you're restricting future work via updates if you allow the client to do it themselves.

As red also points out, if the client uploads a 50 x 50 pixel image of 5Mbs does this reflect on your business capabilities?

Don't get me wrong. I invariably offer the client dynamic content updating but I find it's often beyond the clients wishes / ability / drive to use this feature.

[juergen]

Besides mastering the complexity of a CMS you have to well be aware that you might be responsible for a lot of things if you offer your customers more than layout and graphics ...

If you offer a complete package, will you offer the hosting too or will your customers do that. Will you be the one who installs and maintains the CMS ?

Let me just point out a few things to consider:
- who is responsible for keeping the whole system running?
- who takes care of backup (and can do restores)?
- who takes care of security?
- how is data between authoring and live system being transfered?
- who is responsible that the complete site complies with according laws?

When you run a CMS, there is no way around getting strong knowledge about the underlying architecture. Otherwise you wont be able to take care of vital parts like performance or security.

Egg:
After several projects where companies spent a fortune to get a CMS where every employee is able to create their own pages easily, I can safely say:
Only 1 out of 100 authors really likes to create a web page. Most of them start liking the idea but quickly find out that there is no CMS where you can produce good looking results without knowing what you do and without knowledge about graphics and writing for the internet.
That and the fact that it is easy to destroy any corporate identity with a couple of clicks lets most of the authors hand back the work to the specialists.

With workflows, they can easily enter a text they want to publish, then route the result to a web pro that can produce a good looking page out of it.

In the end, a CMS produces MORE work for you than the other way round.

The exception might be very small customers or single persons with high web affinity..

I personally did the step Availor is considering a long time ago and didnt ever regret.
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As Remi already mentioned Typo3, I will add a free CMS that scales pretty well and runs on the platform of the evil empire .
AxCMS from Axinom (www.axinom.com) is a CMS based on the dotnet framework 3.

Juergen

[Availor]

Thanks for the help guys. The cms is meant for people who know their way in web developing. My purpose is to provide a better website building solutions with better graphics and such. Once we make the website it's up to the client if he wants to pay a small monthly fee for it's update, or he is capable of doing it himself (maybe he has a friend who knows a little about this). In this way I give my client another option.

Besides, in these businesses it's essential to be able to do these things even if there is no actual demand. I am aware that most of my potential clients know nothing of this but some have kids who do and they prefer to take the responsibility of it. I explain the client "it's up to you now" or "you can pay a monthly fee". It's just another way of marketing.

For example - updating/deleting a list of workers in a company can be a tideous work I prefer the client will do himself. It does not require images and almost anyone with little knowledge in the English language can deal with it.

[Availor]

I have searched the web for more information and installed some of the cms there are. I found the easiest to use was e107 http://e107.org/news.php

There are also
http://mamboserver.com/ , http://www.joomla.org/ , http://www.xoops.org/ and http://www.phpnuke.org/

The problem with all these systems is that they let me choose from very basic and standart templates.

Does anyone know of a different cms that will enable me to build my website on my own and then connect it to the management system?

[RedWombat]

I made my own using FCKEditor and Coldfusion. I can put any design I want around it and I kept it simple for the client to use.

FCKEditor is an open source editor project that comes in many flavors. PHP, ASP, Javascript, Coldfusion etc. Here's a link to it: http://www.fckeditor.net/

[Availor]

Thanks, you gave me a different way of thinking now... will see how it goes and if I can cope with this (I guess it requires php/asp programming).

[remi]

The problem with all these systems is that they let me choose from very basic and standart templates.

Does anyone know of a different cms that will enable me to build my website on my own and then connect it to the management system?

The simple templates, the Content Management Systems uses in their tutorials are only for learning. For example the Typo 3 tutorials: The used examples in the beginners tutorials are really ugly. But it's only for learning purposes. If you know the principles of Typo 3, you'll create your own template together with TemplaVoila and you're able to create the best websites. The only problem is, to investigate the time to learn and understand the fundamentals of Typo 3.

Remi

[Availor]

Thank you remi, I will give it a try.

By the way, this is the website I've made and I want them to have control over it.

[Egg Bramhill]

Very good site Availor. You need to upload the AC_RunActiveContent.js to your server, it's creating an error.


Why have you got white jaggies around your header logo?