[LRUG] Though on CMSs

[Graham Ashton]

On 3 Nov 2014, at 20:40, Ed Lepedus <ed.lepedus at googlemail.com> wrote:

> However, if you have a site, you must have some system for managing its content, so it becomes a debate about using existing solutions vs rolling your own. The main things I'd like to know are:
> 
> 	• Do you use a CMS? 

Yes

> 	• Is it custom built or off-the-shelf?

A bit of both really. I use Nesta, but I also wrote it. ;-)

> 	• Do you use the same CMS for many projects, or are they project-specific?

For the last few years I’ve been lucky enough to work with people who are comfortable saving their changes in a git repository, so I’ve only used Nesta.

It’s possible to sync file-based systems like Nesta up to Dropbox so that your editors can just save Markdown files and have Dropbox publish them in real time for you. It’s a great workflow if you like writing on an iPad.

Nesta’s no good to you if you need to give people a web page that they can use to edit pages and manage the site. The last time I had this problem was in 2009 and I used Radiant. I wouldn’t do it again, as it was too much hassle to keep it up to date. I’d choose a CMS that works along side Rails (or my framework of choice), rather than one that bundles Rails within it.

> 	• If you do use publicly-available CMSs, which ones, and would you recommend them?
> 	• Any other comments/experiences etc

I spent some time trying to get used to CMS’s that could only be styled by copying and pasting CSS and HTML into admin screens. It was horrific enough that I wrote Nesta, so if choosing a CMS with editing support for editors I’d only be looking at those that let me share templates and CSS with the rest of my code base (e.g. in Rails, I’d want it to be able to re-use the contents of app/views and app/assets). Maybe they all do that nowadays...

One last comment on Nesta - it’s a Sinatra app, but if you want to use it on a Rails site there’s a nesta-rails gem that provides a generator that lets you run Nesta as a simple Rails controller instead.

Cheers,
Graham



-- 
Graham Ashton
Founder, Agile Planner
https://www.agileplannerapp.com | @agileplanner | @grahamashton