joomla, fuzzylime or other CMS?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Anyone care to share opinions about different content management systems for a small website that has catalog pages?

fuzzylime was mentioned in another thread where I was asking about this.

joomla was mentioned to me by someone IRL.

Any other ones? I’m looking for something simple, easy to update, etc.

Now, we actually already have a copy of dreamweaver. I’ve always primarily thought of it as a WYSIWIG html editor, but can it be used as a CMS?

ALSO, I’m reading the joomla page and I came across this

What exactly do they mean by “for localhost installations on non-public servers”?

Our website is hosted at godaddy. That almost sounds to me like they’re requiring that I am running my own server, or am I misinterpreting that?

Thanks.

(I should know more of this stuff, but we had someone else design the website originally, and all we’ve ever really done is updates to existing pages, so I’m not that knowledgeable about these things).

2

Pretty much, or that you have a dedicated server at your ISP.

In reality, many of these things will run OK on a virtual server or subdomain too (just not by using the easy-install option), although not if you have to tweak the general configuration of the web server itself to make them work.

I think it was probably me that mentioned fuzzylime - I’ve tried several of the others and given up in despair, even when trying to run them on my own test server - if you’re not a Linux admin, it’s very much an uphill struggle.

Fuzzylime was different - there were still a few glitches and problems to overcome, but there’s no MySQL database to configure, and very little to do on the web server configuration.

Atomic Shrimp is powered by fuzzylime - updating it is pretty painless now. My server IS a virtual one, and the web-based self-installer worked OK.

3

First of all, my ISP (verizon) has nothing to do with my domain host (godaddy), so I’m not sure how my ISP comes into it.

But anyway, I think I’m missing some “big picture” here. I was imagining that these CMSs run on my local machine, and then I can upload everything to my domain using ftp like I do with Dreamweaver.

Now, I’m starting to think that I actually run the CMS software ON THE SERVER. Is that correct?

I assume that my web page is hosted on a virtual server at godaddy. In that case, I’d need to make sure that godaddy allows me to upload something like that, I guess.

4

The entire CMS would need to be uploaded and run from the server, so once its set up you’d log into, for example, trunk.com/admin/. Then you could change pictures, upload photos, manage your entire site.

GoDaddy will work for you as a host… most of the CMS’s you mention will run using PHP and mySQL (or no database at all) which GoDaddy does support for most, if not all, of their hosting packages.

Using a CMS is basically a replacement for Dreamweaver. You’ll create a general template and then fill in the content using the CMS, so in theory, the only time you’ll ever need to FTP in will be to upload and install the CMS software. All other management will take place on the web.

5

Oops, that’s just me being dumb with my terminology - sorry.

That is substantially correct, and it’s the reason CMS is such a good thing - you can maintain your site from any internet-connected computer without needing to carry around the source files.

A CMS is a collection of scripts or programs that interprets a database of content, flowed into a page template, on the server, and serves this up to the visitor as HTML (or similar) - the casual visitor to your site cannot easily tell that your pages aren’t just all pure HTML
It also lets you create and modify items within the database of content, through its own admin interface in your browser.

I still upload my images to the server by FTP, because I find that more convenient (and because I will already have prepared them by cropping, adjusting colours, renaming, etc), but some CMS programs have quite sophisticated image manipulation built into the upload too.

6

OK. Interesting.

I was figuring we still had to do all of the image uploads.

I’m going to try one of these out soon. It seems like I should be able to work it all out behind the scenes before going live with it.

Thanks. Also, still looking for anyone with opinions on the different versions of CMS.

7

That’s what I did - I installed it into a subdirectory on my site and ran it from there while I got all the content transferred into it, then I copied it to the root (after moving the old site out of the way).

8

I recently redesigned our website using a CMS. I started out with Joomla but I found it needlessly complicated and over-featured for my needs. Now I use CMS Made Simple and it’s exactly what I needed - PM me for more info.

9

Are there any of these that would be able to just allow editing of the text on an existing html-based site, rather than redesigning everything off templates? As in - read the content as a flat file, extract everything between say some custom tags, and then display that in a WYSIWYG editor for a total dummy to edit?
I usually work in LAMP for sites, but there’s this legacy site that I’d like to give the owner rudimentary edit ability without all the image/blog/newsfeed/menus/modules bloat crap you get with joomla! (the only CMS I know well).
Just a simple HTML editor (so bolding, fonts, sizes, that stuff) that reads HTML files. Anything like that out there?

10

You definitely should look into this. We use Joomla at my workplace and there’s about 50 ways it drives me batshit insane. If you don’t have a large complicated site to maintain, keep it as simple as you can.