Don’t let Walter scare you about CMS. I came to freeway long ago for
the drag and drop wysiwyg freedom, mostly for family projects What I
know of coding came exclusively from working in freeway and iweb.
When the developer of our main website and a buggy custom cms dropped
off the planet, i did a lot of research and chose joomla to replace
it because the extensions I needed were ready “instantly”, either
free or very reasonable cost.
Now I administer 7 sites - 5 joomla (including booking, reservations,
and a shops), 1 freeway and 1 iweb. For the last 2 I’m designing the
joomla templates in freeway.
On Jul 3, 2011, at 9:12 AM, Walter Lee Davis wrote:
The thing to realize about Joomla!, Wordpress, or pretty much any
other CMS out there is that they are full-blown applications that
run on the server. As such, they expect to be in control. They
consume fragments of HTML which you might generate using Freeway or
Dreamweaver or any other application capable of creating HTML, but
they will generally not be second banana to any other application.
You have to live in THEIR world, and understand what they need and
provide it to them.
Freeway, in general, puts the designer in charge of How Things
Look. It abstracts away How Things Work to an amazing degree. But
when integrating with a server-side application, understanding How
Things Work is taken as a first basement step, and understanding
Why The Documentation Says [one thing or another] is also taken as
a given. All in all, most of the CMS systems I have seen expect you
to be a coder, more or less at the level of being able to code your
own CMS up from scratch, using nothing but bear skins and stone
knives.
Walter
On Jul 3, 2011, at 10:42 AM, Julie Maxwell Allen wrote:
with Joomla - can some of it be done in freeway or is it straight
up that program?
I am looking at modx and mojomotor and learning more about them and wordpress plug ins.
Thank you!
all suggestions are appreciated
On Jul 3, 2011, at 1:45 PM, Todd wrote:
There are no MojoMotor actions and while I’m not using Mojo with FW, there’s no reason it can’t be integrated. I’m sure the same could be said about using MODx with FW.
[Disclaimer: I sell an ExpressionEngine Action Suite.]
If the client knows WP well and isn’t afraid of it, you may want to take a look at ExpressionEngine. I had a client who had a WP site or two when she came to me for a new site. I suggested EE and she took to it pretty quickly.
As Walter describes, most CMSes want your HTML chopped up in little bits so they can spit it out at the appropriate times. I’ve heard WP is tricky to develop templates for. That’s why there are people who specialize in that, and why so many WP sites look the same (they’re using the same templates). This is what’s nice about EE. You can design template pages completely in your web design program of choice such as Freeway, and put them up on the server for EE to use.
I tried to design my actions to make this process much easier and manageable in Freeway. The one caveat is that you’d need to learn a bit about the tags EE requires in the templates. The tags tell EE, “put the title here, put the date here, put the body there, etc.” But like setting up the EE site itself, once you do it, you don’t have to mess with it again unless you need to change what’s shown or where it goes.
[Disclaimer: I sell an ExpressionEngine Action Suite.]
If the client knows WP well and isn’t afraid of it, you may want to take a look at ExpressionEngine. I had a client who had a WP site or two when she came to me for a new site. I suggested EE and she took to it pretty quickly.
As Walter describes, most CMSes want your HTML chopped up in little bits so they can spit it out at the appropriate times. I’ve heard WP is tricky to develop templates for. That’s why there are people who specialize in that, and why so many WP sites look the same (they’re using the same templates). This is what’s nice about EE. You can design template pages completely in your web design program of choice such as Freeway, and put them up on the server for EE to use.
I tried to design my actions to make this process much easier and manageable in Freeway. The one caveat is that you’d need to learn a bit about the tags EE requires in the templates. The tags tell EE, “put the title here, put the date here, put the body there, etc.” But like setting up the EE site itself, once you do it, you don’t have to mess with it again unless you need to change what’s shown or where it goes.
Not necessarily. I’m saying that a) if the client is comfortable with a CMS like WP, then EE is at a similar level and they may be able to adapt to that, and b) EE is relatively easy to develop templates for in Freeway.
If EE was really easy, the same company would not have developed MojoMotor. That is designed to make it really easy for people to maintain their site (I’ve never used it, I’m just basing that on what I’ve heard and seen on their site.)
Ok, which do think is the “easiest” for us to implement for the client
On Jul 4, 2011, at 9:28 AM, Joe Muscara wrote:
On 4 Jul 2011, 1:21 pm, swimmer35 wrote:
So besides your disclamer.
you are saying EE is one of the easier to grasp.
Not necessarily. I’m saying that a) if the client is comfortable with a CMS like WP, then EE is at a similar level and they may be able to adapt to that, and b) EE is relatively easy to develop templates for in Freeway.
If EE was really easy, the same company would not have developed MojoMotor. That is designed to make it really easy for people to maintain their site (I’ve never used it, I’m just basing that on what I’ve heard and seen on their site.)
Ok, which do think is the “easiest” for us to implement for the client
It would not be fair for me to say since I have not tried them all. I will say that based on what you wrote previously in this thread, EE is a good possibility. It integrates well with FW, and gives the client a lot of control.
Regarding your questions about Wordpress, I was recently hired to takeover this Wordpress site http://www.michaelrookeronline.com/ and I can tell you that modifying templates requires a fair bit of work (and I’m comfortable coding) although I have very little experience with Wordpress. If you’re not familiar or comfortable with code you may want to reconsider before committing to a WP-powered site for a client. As Walter mentioned previously, you could very quickly find yourself over your head.
By all means, learn WP if you want to but establish a solid understanding of HTML and CSS first, otherwise, without Freeway to depend on for the heavy-lifting, you may find yourself floundering more than you need to. Just my opinion.
Thank you I appreciate it. I have been using the program artisteer and I do like it. THat and the free templates are the only way I stumble through wordpress at this moment
I really should start learning code. any suggestions?
code for dummies?
Thanks
J
On Aug 6, 2011, at 8:48 PM, Todd wrote:
Hi Julie,
Regarding your questions about Wordpress, I was recently hired to takeover this Wordpress site http://www.michaelrookeronline.com/ and I can tell you that modifying templates requires a fair bit of work (and I’m comfortable coding) although I have very little experience with Wordpress. If you’re not familiar or comfortable with code you may want to reconsider before committing to a WP-powered site for a client. As Walter mentioned previously, you could very quickly find yourself over your head.
By all means, learn WP if you want to but establish a solid understanding of HTML and CSS first, otherwise, without Freeway to depend on for the heavy-lifting, you may find yourself floundering more than you need to. Just my opinion.
I’ve never looked at the code versions of the “Dummies” books so I can’t say. Dan Cedarholm does write some excellent CSS-related books, definitely look at his. As for HTML I can’t say, I don’t think I’ve ever researched it.
I’ve never heard of Artisteer…interesting.
Todd
On Aug 8, 2011, at 8:42 AM, Julie Maxwell wrote:
I really should start learning code. any suggestions? code for dummies?
I can understand why someone would choose WP for a small site and it’s probably a little easier to administrate than Joomla. But I’ve always preferred Joomla to WP or other CMS, mostly because I’ve used it more. Joomla is very good, there’s a lot of great free and commercial extensions available, pretty steap learning curve for an administrator though. Drupal is also a great platform to create complex sites, but I’m not a fan of it just because I don’t wanna learn another system. Joomla meets all my current requirements. I don’t think there’s a “best one” of them… it depends on your goal and technical expertise. There are some useful resources which can help you have a right choice when choosing your needed CMS. I recommend two pages providing a comparison chart of WordPress, Joomla and Drupal: WordPress vs Joomla vs Drupal 2021 and http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/cms-comparison-drupal-joomla-and-wordpress. Both present the information in an easy-to-understand format. Besides the three mentioned programs and before making your final decision I also recommend to consider other content manageent systems. A full list of them is available at List of content management systems - Wikipedia. But the most popular ones are presented on http://www.simplescripts.com/script_list. Platforms on SimpleScripts are categorized and this helps you make your decision more easily.
If ever you want to try EE (and thanks to the Action of Joe Muscara, and some very much needed Actions from Walther Davies it is possible to build a site driven by EE with FW) than I recommend this for you to read and watch. It is some basic information how to build a structure for a dynamic site with EE.
See, the most important thing with a dynamic site is not the design nor the tools you build the site with. But the architecture. How to structure the flow of information. The content. This is important for the visitors as well as the back-end users.
I do hope this helps, and good luck with your decision.
On May 7, 2014, at 4:25 PM, atelier email@hidden wrote:
Hi Julie
If ever you want to try EE (and thanks to the Action of Joe Muscara, and some very much needed Actions from Walther Davies it is possible to build a site driven by EE with FW) than I recommend this for you to read and watch. It is some basic information how to build a structure for a dynamic site with EE.
See, the most important thing with a dynamic site is not the design nor the tools you build the site with. But the architecture. How to structure the flow of information. The content. This is important for the visitors as well as the back-end users.
I do hope this helps, and good luck with your decision.