Website + CMS help

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#470570 18-May-2011 15:37

Some of the advice jbard has given isn't the best in my opinion. You don't need to make a custom CMS, your design is pretty standard and there would be 10s of perfectly fine CMSs out there, look at Silverstripe, Wordpress or just Google for something basic that is regularly updated etc.

It won't take long to integrate your design into any decent CMS, probably a couple of hours, since you will need to learn bits of the templating engine.

Also if you do decide to make a custom CMS as a learning experience then don't assign each paragraph as a field on the database, create a table called "page" or something and then have fields like id, slug, title, content etc. Then for each page create a new row.

dpw

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#470631 18-May-2011 16:48

The "keep up with security patches" advice cannot be overstressed in this case - I missed one patch for 3 sites and they all got hacked overnight. This was Joomla a few years ago now. The other thing to watch out for are 3rd party plugins - they can be source for security holes too.

I've given up on PHP these days and gone with .NET - Umbraco being my choice at the moment.

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#470635 18-May-2011 16:50

Another option might be SilverStripe. It gets a lot of good press and is backed/written by a Wellington company.

A less well-known CMS also has less chance of being the target of a mass hack script.

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#470640 18-May-2011 16:53

That was why i made my point in the first place.

Personally for a site that is not earning me any revenue i would not want to be updating my CMS every few months and having to deal with restoring it back if it did get hacked.

These things are hacked so quickly and easily these days.

I would much prefer to spend a little extra time making a custom CMS, especially for a simple site like this - than have to deal with a free CMS.

Plus for a 3rd year project i had assumed a custom CMS would be able to be up a running within a couple of hours anyway - more than likely quicker than wordpress integration.

Plus it is far funner coding something like that, and far less liekly that something will go wrong in terms of hacking.

dpw

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#470648 18-May-2011 17:03

jbard: That was why i made my point in the first place.

Personally for a site that is not earning me any revenue i would not want to be updating my CMS every few months and having to deal with restoring it back if it did get hacked.

These things are hacked so quickly and easily these days.

I would much prefer to spend a little extra time making a custom CMS, especially for a simple site like this - than have to deal with a free CMS.

Plus for a 3rd year project i had assumed a custom CMS would be able to be up a running within a couple of hours anyway - more than likely quicker than wordpress integration.

Plus it is far funner coding something like that, and far less liekly that something will go wrong in terms of hacking.

Yikes!! A custom CMS up and running in a couple of hours? From scratch? I'm not sure that's something I would want to deploy that as a commercial solution - without careful forethought it may well end up being nigh on unmaintainable! Then again, he may be a coding guru with amazingly fantastic up-front design and architectural skills... which I'm not...

Looking at his prototype that can be fitted into an Umbraco installation in a couple of hours easy. It's free, open source, and so far (touch silicon) my Umbraco site has not been hacked at all, and I am a few versions behind. However, .NET hostings do tend to cost a wee bit more - not huge though.

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#470652 18-May-2011 17:06

jbard: I would much prefer to spend a little extra time making a custom CMS, especially for a simple site like this - than have to deal with a free CMS.

Plus for a 3rd year project i had assumed a custom CMS would be able to be up a running within a couple of hours anyway - more than likely quicker than wordpress integration.

A custom CMS? With database behind it? In a couple of hours? I'm sorry but I disagree. An off the shelf CMS would be far quicker to deploy. Maintaining is not his problem after the customer accepts it, while a custom CMS is - forever.

And if he's not a developer then you can bet there will be security holes there. More than anything else. And performance issues.

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#470653 18-May-2011 17:09

Or even the free Google Pages...

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#470673 18-May-2011 17:32

freitasm:
jbard: I would much prefer to spend a little extra time making a custom CMS, especially for a simple site like this - than have to deal with a free CMS.

Plus for a 3rd year project i had assumed a custom CMS would be able to be up a running within a couple of hours anyway - more than likely quicker than wordpress integration.

A custom CMS? With database behind it? In a couple of hours? I'm sorry but I disagree. An off the shelf CMS would be far quicker to deploy. Maintaining is not his problem after the customer accepts it, while a custom CMS is - forever.

And if he's not a developer then you can bet there will be security holes there. More than anything else. And performance issues.

Performance issues would often be a hosting issue, as a CMS out of the box like wordpress should perform fairly well without any work being done to it. Especially on a small low traffic website. If it is on a cheap shared server there could be performance issues, as they can be overloaded with websites

dpw

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#470677 18-May-2011 17:37

robbyp:
freitasm:
jbard: I would much prefer to spend a little extra time making a custom CMS, especially for a simple site like this - than have to deal with a free CMS.

Plus for a 3rd year project i had assumed a custom CMS would be able to be up a running within a couple of hours anyway - more than likely quicker than wordpress integration.

A custom CMS? With database behind it? In a couple of hours? I'm sorry but I disagree. An off the shelf CMS would be far quicker to deploy. Maintaining is not his problem after the customer accepts it, while a custom CMS is - forever.

And if he's not a developer then you can bet there will be security holes there. More than anything else. And performance issues.

Performance issues would often be a hosting issue, as a CMS out of the box like wordpress should perform fairly well without any work being done to it. Especially on a small low traffic website. If it is on a cheap shared server there could be performance issues, as they can be overloaded with websites

I think you missed the point entirely - I imagine MF was referring to performance issues due to bad design and rush job.

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#470686 18-May-2011 18:03

Exactly.

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robbyp

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#470710 18-May-2011 18:52

dpw:

I think you missed the point entirely - I imagine MF was referring to performance issues due to bad design and rush job.

That is what I meant too. This template is unlikely to lead to performance issues, related to the website loading slowly. Not unless they weren't compressing their images, or errors or unnecessary html, css java etc. etc. But as there static website shows, there isn't any issue as it is already loading well, and they are just converting it into a wordpress template. SEO performance, as well as usability performance are other matters. But I have seen many websites using CMSs perform really badly on slow overloaded shared hosting, solely due to the servers, and nothing to do with the design. Static websites on the same servers however load fine.

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dpw

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#470713 18-May-2011 18:58

robbyp:
dpw:

I think you missed the point entirely - I imagine MF was referring to performance issues due to bad design and rush job.

That is what I meant too. This template is unlikely to lead to performance issues, related to the website loading slowly. Not unless they weren't compressing their images, or errors or unnecessary html, css java etc. etc. But as there static website shows, there isn't any issue as it is already loading well, and they are just converting it into a wordpress template. SEO performance, as well as usability performance are other matters. But I have seen many websites using CMSs perform really badly on slow overloaded shared hosting, solely due to the servers, and nothing to do with the design. Static websites on the same servers however load fine.

Nope - still no cigar. Website design definitely contributes towards performance but in this case we were referring to application and database design. It goes beyond "the template" leading to performance issues. When it comes to CMS there's the "n-tier" design to consider where each tier adds a layer of complexity and potentially add performance hits and broadens attack surface.

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#470715 18-May-2011 19:07

As said. It's not the design. It's hardly possible that a static website with five pages and half a dozen image will have performance issues.

My point was that if he goes down the route of writing his own CMS - and for that using databases and what not, he will

1) introduce unnecessary complexity to a simple project
2) stretch development time by having to
a) decide on a platform/language
b) decide on a database
c) learn how to code on said language
d) design a database that actually works
e) worry about implementing security

All this is taken care of already by using off the self CMS tools. Unless you are a wizard in development/coding/design you can't pull of a functional CMS/publishing platform in a couple of hours, sorry.

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#471050 19-May-2011 12:26

For a small site like that I would use a publishing platform like Moveable Type that can publish to static html.

No issues with Wordpress exploits that way.

eljefe

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#471257 19-May-2011 19:05

I have been using blogger as a CMS since 1999, and its waaay more editible now than it was then.

Ive used all sorts of CMSes, and trialled heaps more, and yeah, you do NOT want to be arsed with keeping something like Joomla safe. Especially for the sake of 5 pages. Blogger is ideal for such a small site.

You can get the best of both worlds with blogger, hack the templates, get rid of the banner, point a domain at it and the client will find it easy to update (if they ever do - most don't).

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