PHP Content Management

[Plotloss]

Have been looking into these recently.

I am utterly amazed to be honest.

The quality of some of the completely free open source systems available for download and easy install is just phenomenal.

After discounting Xoops for having a bad forum and N/X for being amazing but a bit too complicated I have come down to either Subdreamer or Mambo.

Anyone with experience of either?

Bespoke web development for simple portals is surely a thing of the past now?

Amazing.

[LaurenceFrost]

Also have you looked at PHP Nuke?

www.phpnuke.org/

[Plotloss]

Yeah, dont much like the look and feel to be honest.

I appreciate that its changable (within reason) but the structure of how it sits together doesnt quite fit my needs.

[SlidingSideways]

I've been playing with Mambo for a site for a friend.
The amount of plug-in's for it is quite astonishing and I was able to get something fairly close to what he wanted in about 3 hours work.
Development seems quite active as well, which is a good sign.

[Plotloss]

I'm just looking at MamboForge now.

Its astounding this, I cant see why anyone would ever bother developing anything from scratch anymore.

IT is surely set to become software house and integrators moving forward. The days of the in house IT deparment must be numbered.

What an invention the internet was...

[Bodo]

We decided for www.typo3.com for our faculty's pages, because it is good for working with typography. Did you you have a look into that too?

[Plotloss]

Am now, thanks mate!

I have truly seen the Open Source light...

[brumster]

Aye, Mambo is impressive....

[wildeep]

Been playing around with mambo for a while, pretty awesome although the only thing i didnt like was that it seems pretty hard to create your own templates. Has anyone created their own?

[ATG]

Plotloss said:

Am now, thanks mate! I have truly seen the Open Source light...

Hallelujah!

The variety and quality of the stuff that is available now open source is astonishing. I'm perfectly happy uing Msft apps, languages and components if that is what the customer wants. But given that you can get Apache, MySQL, Python, Open Office, Firefox and host of other stuff for free, I'd certainly think long and hard before I'd be prepared to pay for Msft licenses.

[slinky]

brumster said:

Aye, Mambo is impressive....

Just installed Mambo and am having a good look around it at the mo... looks v. impressive!

Has anyone got any example mambo sites that I could have a look at and get a feel for?

The recently built www.587racing.com just doesn't cut the mustard as far as I'm concerned... I want it to look a LOT more slick and dynamic, so having already installed b2evolution for blogging (the latest news page) I'm getting into the idea of content management...

Now I just need to have a good sit down and get my head around all of Mambo's inner workings!

slinky
587racing.com

[ErnestM]

Mate,

You want PostNuke:
www.postnuke.com/

MySQL backend, phpbb fits right in for forum, easy to use, easy to set up, modules and blocks available hither and yon...

...and it's only in 0.750 release state!

(works with IIS like a dream as well)


ErnestM

[LaurenceFrost]

brumster said:

The recently built www.587racing.com just doesn't cut the mustard as far as I'm concerned... I want it to look a LOT more slick and dynamic, so having already installed b2evolution for blogging (the latest news page) I'm getting into the idea of content management...

You need to play around with style sheets. Change the page font to ariel or verdana at 11px and the site instantly looks better.

[jimbro1000]

ErnestM said:

Mate, You want PostNuke: www.postnuke.com/ MySQL backend, phpbb fits right in for forum, easy to use, easy to set up, modules and blocks available hither and yon... ...and it's only in 0.750 release state! (works with IIS like a dream as well) ErnestM

While I do like postnuke I found it wasn't as well composed as phpnuke. Both however have a major hacking problem. Scripts for doing so are available usually within hours of any new release that supposedly fixes security bugs making both systems a hackers wet dream.

Postnuke is better than phpnuke on this subject though.

Personally I wouldn't use either for anything more than a private intranet.

[SlidingSideways]

wildeep said:

Been playing around with mambo for a while, pretty awesome although the only thing i didnt like was that it seems pretty hard to create your own templates. Has anyone created their own?

Copy one of the existing ones, edit the values in the xml file to make it your own. Then start modifying the CSS and PHP files to move it about how you want it.
I know very little PHP, but it all seems fairly simple to pick up.

[ATG]

Have got mambo up and running and it looks pretty cool. It's documentation seems weak, unless I've missed it. Seems you have to learn it by trial and error and by being able to guess what it is trying to achieve and how its going to do it. That makes a steep learning curve for anyone, and I would fear a virtual barrier to anyone completely new to building sites. Seems a shame as it mus be putting a fair few people off unecessarily.

[slinky]

Just rebuilt http://587racing.com using mambo...

Really easy to use once you get the hang of it...

slinky
587racing.com <-- new and improved!

[ErnestM]

For anyone considering PostNuke:

www.samspublishing.com/title/0672326868
(open source is starting to attract mainstream publishers)


ErnestM