On Apr 8, 2011, at 11:02 AM, Joe Sporleder wrote:
Take a look at www.kvsvradio.com. This is the website for our radio
station that my publishing company happens to own. A regional
newspaper’s website division designed this for us. Cost us $1500 to
design and then $25/mo. for hosting and basic maintenance. I want to
do a similar design with similar functionality for a 6 times a year
senior magazine and another one for a 3 times a year outdoor guide
magazine. Which CMS would work the best with what I’m trying to
accomplish?
This is a very nice and very custom Joomla! home page. Somebody really
knew how to kick out the standard theme look and put something truly
custom together. Most Joomla! sites, even those that have been
templated in Freeway, tend to look similar or the same, following a
header, n columns, footer model. This is enforced by the internal
structure of Joomla! and its model of building the site and its pages.
As a designer or developer, I would say that you will find a lot more
layout freedom in WebYep, although I haven’t used Tim Plumb’s newest
Actions yet. I have used Joomla! since it was called Mambo (early
2000s).
In terms of the day-to-day functioning of adding, editing, and
updating content, that’s kind of a toss-up.
Joomla! has very nice multi-user tools, and pre-production staging
where editors can review and approve articles written by authors (who
have the permissions to create, but not publish, their stories).
There’s a somewhat confusing hierarchy of content, with Subjects and
Categories that you must populate with values, but then that hierarchy
builds a menu structure for you that remains up-to-date at all times.
There is also an enormous universe of plug-ins for just about anything
you want to accomplish on the Web. That little weather widget? It’s a
plug-in or module; you tell it the Zip code and it runs off and
scrapes a weather service site for you, and caches the result, and
updates on a schedule. As a designer and site administrator, there is
a lot of detail about Joomla! that will require a lot of reading to
parse through. I own two big books on the subject, neither of which I
recommend all that highly, and I still have to google for things. Like
many other Open Source publishing projects, it suffers from the Yes,
And syndrome. It can do anything you ask it to, and quite a few things
you wouldn’t imagine a Web site would need to do. And it has fine-
grained controls for ALL of them.
WebYep has a very transparent “through the web” editing interface,
similar to ModX or Plone, where you edit the site directly while
viewing it as a visitor would. It’s very suited to a site where there
isn’t a lot of hierarchy required with respect to authoring and
publishing, and you just want to get something done NOW. WY, through
the fine Actions written by Max, also has a very Freeway-like
operating model. You draw a box, apply an Action to it, and it becomes
an updateable area with its own editing interface. If you want to do a
news story archive, there are tools for that sort of structure, too.
And automatic navigation if you want that.
Which one you choose will depend a lot on the workflow you need, and
the degree to which customization of the layout is more important than
the richness of the back-end systems and so forth.
Walter
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