CMS advice
As some of you might know Bartelme Design is based on a self made CMS — One the one hand because I really enjoy coding my own stuff and on the other hand because no CMS really fitted my needs — at least I thought they wouldn’t…
But then I started working on a project based on WordPress. And I must admit that I’m really impressed of its functionality and ease of use. So now I am playing with the thought to retire my old CMS and convert to another one.
However there is one major problem, which I currently don’t know how to deal with: How can I switch to WordPress or any other CMS without ending up in a mess of broken links? Any ideas? Your help is much appreciated :) By the way, what’s you favorite CMS?
73 comments
I think you could do it with som rewrite rules. My favorite Blog engine is Typo, which i also use at my blog. It’s an very simple to use system it fits perfectly in my needs. take a look at typo.leetsoft.com It’s a Ruby on Rails based application. If you need help i can help you.
My favorite is WordPress, definitely. To fix your broken Links you could convert your existing posts to WordPress posts giving them the same post ID, then you could write an apache modrewrite from “journaldetail?detail=123” to “index.php?p=123” …which still wouldnt stop you from using WordPress “nice URLs”.
Well Johannes, I was thinking about something similar. However is it possible to assign a specific ID to an entry in Wordpress?
I recommend Textpattern! It supports various “nice URLs” schemes, also “/section/ID”. Visit <a href="http://www.textpattern.org/">TXP Resources</a> to get some helpful information and useful plugins.
Roman
Hey Wolfgang your cms system is great. My favorite is Wordpress, i use it from about almost a year. Now a new Wordpress 2 version from today. As you wrote it is very simple and it has manyyyyyy plugins that works great, install is simple and if you know php (i don’t) you could change the plugins to fit yours needs. So i hopeyou will start using this wordpress system. Ooo and a good thing for wordpress users should be that maybe you will go public, create a plugin for wordpress that will show that “new” images in the new posts for a couple of days. About Sidenotes , there is a plugin for that too. Go check on my site, i have many plugins. www.guiStyles.com
I think the “new” image is done with css, and a specified class.
Personally, I just switched to WordPress after using a custom built CMS for many months. I’m very satisfied with the features and how easy and versatile it is.
I think the “new” image is done with css, and a specified class.
WordPress 2.0 can import from an RSS feed, if I recall correctly, which I guess is what you once. One of the more nifty features of yesterday’s 2.0 release…
TextPattern is by far the most versatile and flexible CMS around. If you just look at the variety of websites that use TextPattern, you see that it’s a CMS like no other. There’s no way you can recognise TextPattern by its looks or code, because you code almost all the XHTML and CSS yourself. TextPattern can also import from RSS Feeds by the way.
I’ve found Wordpress hard to beat for a free to use app. The plugins are great, and you can do some pretty neat stuff with a little home grown php once you’re familiar with ‘the loop’ and ‘the meta’ :D So long as your server uses apache, a simple if labourious solution would be multiple ‘redirect 301’ statements in your .htaccess file to redirect old posts to their new location — wouldn’t take that long to write 273 rules, but rather you than me!
Wow! I didn’t know that you made your own CMS. That sounds like a lot of work. Seeing what the people over at Wordpress have done, I decided just to go with that, On the other hand, it is nice when you are using a program or layout that you made on your own from scratch.
Maybe I overread something, but nobody mentioned this so far: WordPress comes with a lot of options to convert your old system. A few thoughts about that issue: - WordPress is able to import data from a newsfeed. So you may create a private feed with all your posts in it, that way it should be able to handle old and new entries. I’m not quite sure about that but I recall there’s a MT -> WordPress converter available as well (may be useful with some modification). - You can specify rewrite rules inside WordPress itself, meaning you can format the permalink structure just the way you want. As stated before by one of the readers WordPress has a broad pool of nice plugins that extend this functionality into unending depths. - Talking about plugins: There’s a heap of plugins that will handle external pages and enable you to create nifty things like asides (bad example since that doesn’t really need plugins).
Sage
Has anyone tried out the new Expression Engine Core? It’s a full CMS app (not just for blogging), and they’ve just released a free version. I have just a little EE experience, but it’s definitely robust. It feels a lot more like a commercial application than Wordpress or Textpattern. It has more features than most people will ever use and is very stable with clean output. I’ve been impressed with the personal license and am looking forward to putting more time into learning it and using it for my own site. It would be great if more people from “the community” began showing off its ability.
Another vote for Textpattern. It also can import from other blogging systems and converting properly. Definately the most versatile, you can create anything from a blog to this: winatpoker.com
Wow, nice Ajax-y comment form. Cool face-lift from the last time I commented. I just wanted to chime in and suggest you try out Textpattern before going WordPress. Both are very good CMS’s. I have used both for client work, but my own site runs on TXP.
I like you, use a home grown system. I have several times tried to move over to TextPattern, WordPress, Lucid and many others. The one problem I seem to have with all of them is the lack of customisable URL’s. Also they are too setup for blogging and only blogging. I would also recomend trying some of them out on opensourcecms.com before you commit to one system.
Well about wordpress it is so simple, co cute, i use it for 7 months on guistyles and zero problems. It is simple but you have many plugins, and you could easy change the php look, theme. Many themes….
Hey and sorry for double post but what is the hosting of your site, it is very fast and stable ??
Could you not write a new journal_detail.php file that forwards the user onto the new page in wordpress? You can import all your entries into the wordpress by writing a fairly simple script… that way you can keep the same article ID numbers — making the forwarding a simple process: <code> Location("index.php?p=" . $_GET['detail']); </code> I wrote an import script for PHP Nuke to Wordpress not so long ago, it took only about 30 mins, I just had to map the fields in each of the databases. -Andy.
Hey, Wolfgang. Your problem could be solved by a sort of wrapper code or a rewrite rule. However, I like to be exotic. So, consider using Java. :-) My sites are driven by Tomcat and one of the great benefits there is the total independence of the URI from the physical file (servlet/jsp). Beside the strength of OOP and inheritance, Java driven web apps sports such a nice thing like a filter. It’s worth to get in touch with it.
Lately I’ve been loving Textpattern since it’s much more versatile than Wordpress. But Wordpress is still a good choice. As for URLs, just use mod_rewrite specifying R=301 which will let search engines know the move is permanent.
Wordpress is definately a very solid and flexible system. I don’t know if you know Link A very easy tool with which you can check all links in your site. In a few seconds it gives you a list of all internal and external links. Could be usefull if you decide to convert to wp (or something else) and want to rewrite the urls. Wp is really easy with that. From within the control panel you choose a url style, like /category/year/month/day/title and hit update and voila your htaccess rules are written. The most difficult part will be to import your data. Guess that will be a matter of matching datafields of both db tables and writing a script to import them.
Matthijs
Hi Wolfgang, if you’re looking for a real CMS I’d like to recommend using TYPO3. I’ve also written a TYPO3 blog extension — still beta I have to admit. Whatever you’re going to use, have fun! Ingo
I used to use my own CMS but I switched to Wordpress on my last site re-design. However I am planning to move back to my own CMS again next time. Wordpress is ok but it will be never be as perfect as your own work. I know my programs like the back of my hand. Wordpress is another thing. Plus I have a REALLY bad comment spam problem with Wordpress :(
Jordan
I recommend using Typo too — it has really nice features and is so easy to extend. Link
Ferdinand Svehla
That’s curious. I worked on a CMS built from scratch since… well, more than one year ago: phpGolem. And just in the past weeks I was wondering about what I could do with this piece of code (piece… 25k lines). WordPress is surely the right choice… but as one of your readers, now this makes also my doubts stronger. Maybe it’s time to clear everything and start a new project. …even if I thought that phpGolem was really good. If anyone noticed sigh
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Wordpress 2.0 has been released and is very stable I recommend it. Plus you can also implement mod_rewrites for your links….
Concerning import options: is it also possible to import comments that are related to the several articles?
Hi there. If you wanted extreme individual-document-control, another solution would be to create subfolders with actual index.php documents. So /journal/273/ would load the directory’s index.php, which would use PHP’s header() function to not only output a 301, but anything else you might want the reader to see before completing the redirect. So you would still have your 301, which works transparently, but also the option to display whatever else you want before the actual redirect takes place. Whew… that was a mouthful. SERIOUS CONSIDERATION: Wordpress (especially WP 2) likes to create non-contiguous ID numbers. It does this because some file uploads and other items will use the same table as your entries, and thus receive the next available entry ID. These items will not show up as entries in the Wordpress admin; they are filtered out. But once you get your entries imported and ID’s matched, your future post ID’s will be more like 274,279,288,292… rather than 274,275,276, etc. So every time you do an inline image upload or the like, a gap happens. So that’s something to think about. For this reason, it may be preferable to switch to a permalink structure based on entry title and date, rather than ID numbers. ID’s are great for databases (primary keys good), but they can be application-specific. Everytime you make a major upgrade like the one you are considering, you will be faced with this problem if you continue to rely on the ID. If this wasn’t the case, I would tell you to keep your current scheme. I like it because it’s simple. Perhaps these numerical gaps do not bother you. In which case, just import your entries and use something like PHPMyAdmin to make sure the ID’s match up. Set your permalink structure to /journal/%theIDvariable*/ and be done. Just not as permanent, and you will probably face this again if you make another switch down the road. Heh, did any of that make sense?
Why don’t you open source your CMS and let others build on it. You certainly know who to build great looking site. And from the looks of the small screen shots: Link The admin visually looks very nice. Let others contribute code to your CMS
Bill R.
I defiantely agree, open source your CMS. For larger screen shots of the admin interface, I found a link below that contains 3 images (zipped). Link
Jason
hi wolfgang, actually i’m using wordpress 2.0 rc 2 but i’m switching to the final wordpress 2.0 tonight. Wordpress is my favorite CMS-like tool. i think it’s not a complete CMS but a blogging software with some CMS features… i would like to build a website similar to yours (not the content but structure) and that’s a bit complicated using wordpress. maybe typo 3 is better for your website. i try to get the things done with wordpress, if i fail by doing that i have to switch to a ‘real’ CMS like typo are your CMS ;) greetz
As for a suggestion: Personally I use REDAXO (Link It is an open source CMS with ease of use, clear arrangement and a very committed developer/user base and excellent forum. It is developed by a small German internet development company in Frankfurt/Main personally known to me.
I use Pivot (Link mainly because it doen’t need a MySQL database so it’s really n00b-proof :) Also it is easily editted, expanded etc. So what it lacks in database related features (advanced sorting of posts, advanced searching etc.), it covers with easy editting and maintainance.
Guess you got your tips about mod_rewrite. I was just wondering why noone here seems to use C# instead of PHP? What about a blog engine for .Net?
I would recommend ExpressionEngine (www.pmachine.com). I’ve been using it since early alpha stage on many clients’ sites as well as my own, and it is hands down the most flexible and powerful of the blog tools out there. With the latest release of 1.4 and features like relational fields and entry versioning, it’s become a powerful CMS for a fraction of the cost of other choices. They now have a free Core system to try out. It has most of the features of the personal and commercial versions and should give you a good idea of what can be done with EE. The support community is top-notch and there are plenty of plugins, modules and extensions to completely customize EE to fit your needs.
++$open_source;
Jordan
I’m once again writing a homegrown system — this time I’m going to relaunch my website Link I like to build it myself — it’s work, but it’s fun and it’s a greater satisfaction to do it. There’s another project — not mine — where I use wordpress. It’s easy to use and ready for start-up, I’ll have to code a new template or change one. Cheers, Julian
Wow, what a surprise… No one ever heard of Link ? Drupal is not just a CMS, but much more than that! Some even prefer to call it a CMS Construction Kit: with Drupal one can (a) manage the content of websites and blogs, but also (b) build a complete CMS for multiple(!) users that will manage these websites or blogs (including passwords, rights, etc). This makes it ideal for building websites including CMS for companies! Drupal is an open source, php based system which uses a mysql database. The core system can be downloaded from the Drupal website, where tons of additional modules can be found — so all your needs will be fullfilled. A few months ago I wanted to start my own blog, and did quite a lot of research before choosing a CMS. At the end of the day I found a very interesting comparative report Link that made me choose for Drupal. And till today, I didn’t regret for even a split second :D My site uses Drupal core, and some additional modules: sections (different layouts for different parts of the site), i18n (multilingual site), node words (meta tags), flexinodes (custom content and custom layouts for certain page types), dba (administer the mysql database), gsitemap (automatically upload google sitemaps), googleanalytics (insert google analytics code), and some custom modules I made myself. All in all, I would say: take a look and see it yourself ;-)
Oops… Wolfgang, how should I create correct links here?
Well, just paste the url including “http” and it will be converted to a link. By the way let me thank you once again for all of your feedback. I think I’ll definitely have a look at drupal. Looks intersting :)
yeah drupal sounds great. i had a look at its website and now i’ve found something that’s perfect. <strong>thanks marc</strong> drupal would be good for you wolfgang, because you can edit almost everything :D
Few additional notes regarding Drupal: First things first: Drupal requires quite some PHP knowledge. One of the main reasons people often feel disappointed when they start using Drupal, and therefore say that Wordpress or other blogtools are much easier. Indeed, those tools might be friendlier. But don’t forget: Drupal is much more than just a blogtool. When I started with Drupal, I did not have any PHP knowledge, so I felt disappointed too. But with a little bit persistence, a good pair of brains :) and a lot of curiosity, I felt in love with Drupal more and more… Drupal’s latest stable version is 4.6.5. Pretty much all the modules are up-to-date with this version. The newest beta is 4.7.0 beta 2. Within a month or so, 4.7.0 final will be released, with many great improvements. Not too many modules up-to-date with this version yet, but that’s just a matter of time. Drupal also has a huge community, with 44346 members right at the moment. They all share knowledge in the forum and in the development area. Yes, I have to say, it’s sometimes hard to find the right posts by using the search function at the forum, but that should become better with 4.7.0. In the meantime I use Google this way: <searchterm> site:drupal.org Hope these additional notes may help in making a good decision.
I am an amazed xuser of e107. This CMS is the far easiest to use I ever see (and I tested many many CMS like mambo, typo3 etc). Themeing engine is very simple (with some knowledge of xhtml of course) and there are many themes for free use. Good community around this project and daily nightbuilds since in the final stage of version 7 :-] For more informations or demos: Link Link
so, my favorite cms is <a href="http://wiki.bitflux.org/Main_Page">flux from bitflux. it’s very usefull and it’s used webstandards like xml and xslt.
pascal
Nice discussion here. I don’t even know that there is so much cms, blogging systems out there. I have seen e107 and well about half a year ago it was a little bit hard to setup it for good. I am still learning php with wordpress.
ooo and Mark your site looks amazing i love to see that great blog,cms themes
There has been great input here from many people, to me however the question is, why fix it if it ain’t broken? I mean why change your CMS and go through that paintful process when your own system seems to be working just fine. Why not keep running on it for now. And if you think that you need to make som adjustments it will probably take you less time than to change to a new system and move everything. I’m sure it will turn out just fine, this was just a thought that came to mind :) Good luck making your descision!
Stefan
My vote is for Textpattern. Tried them all for a while but none can beat Textpattern. The flexabilty is really outstanding! For me it’s the first CMS that gives me full control.
Ok! my turn now :) if you can wait just a little bit more, maybe you will fall in love with textthing Link it,s going to be a ROR aplicattion, i’m waitin for it for beta testing i thing that this is what you need.
Hi Wolfgang, so, I worked and followed different systems like Typo, Contenido, Mambo, Dedi, PHPWCMS, Textpattern and Wordpress some years now (in case of Typo and Contenido more than 4) and as an experienced PHP Coder I can say: USE YOUR OWN CMS SYSTEM !!! As an admin you have to know what, when and why your system is doing things. Each CMS seems to be a religion and the coder are our prayers. Unfortunately religion sometimes makes blind. Most of the systems I know (there are a lot) are going bigger, heavier, slower and the source is far away from what we call “easy to understand”. So, keep your system running, try to use the things “YOU” need and if you need some coding help let us know…
Boxmaxx
Hey but the best themes are for WordPress. No system has better and more themes that wordpress.
Going back to your original post, I am hoping to answer the question: “However there is one major problem, which I currently don’t know how to deal with: How can I switch to WordPress or any other CMS without ending up in a mess of broken links? Any ideas?” Although WordPress 2 and TextPattern and Typo3 are all cool, they won’t solve your issue entirely. (Plus I personally think <a href="http://binarybonsai.com/wordpress/k2/">K2</a> and <a href="http://drupal.org">Drupal</a> take the cake =P) If it is worthwhile to put some time and effort into writing a script to merge your current content AND links over to a CMS, I think looking to the Drupal source code would benefit you the most. Last time I used drupal you could manually define the url of your content, and putting that to use could work nicely. Hope that helps! I’m also working on a SJT template dubbed “Bartelme” after some famous web-guy got his <a href="http://www.returnofdesign.com/showcolors.php?scheme=58">colorscheme</a> featured on the <a href="http://www.returnofdesign.com/">return of design site</a>.
Hope wolfgang forgive me for this off topic question but there´s so much people around here that knows alot about blogging and CMS.. so here´s: I´m thinking starting my FIRST blog. I don´t know how to code in php (and don´t want to for now) but i would like to be able to fully customize the look of it. In fact i already have a site designed in fireworks that i would like to recreate in that blog but, only know XHTML and CSS. There´s anything out there that are really easy to use (for a beginner) but powerfull enought to let me completely change the look of it only knowing XHTML and CSS? Or something that let me use some special tags to insert the content where i want it in my current design? Again please note that it will be my FIRST blog type site!!! Thank you all (and sorry the OT Wolfgang).
Mike
Hope wolfgang forgive me for this off topic question but there´s so much people around here that knows alot about blogging and CMS.. so here´s: I´m thinking starting my FIRST blog. I don´t know how to code in php (and don´t want to for now) but i would like to be able to fully customize the look of it. In fact i already have a site designed in fireworks that i would like to recreate in that blog but, only know XHTML and CSS. There´s anything out there that are really easy to use (for a beginner) but powerfull enought to let me completely change the look of it only knowing XHTML and CSS? Or something that let me use some special tags to insert the content where i want it in my current design? Again please note that it will be my FIRST blog type site!!! Thank you all (and sorry the OT Wolfgang).
Mike
Wordpress is best script on web, but it’s not CMS it’s blogging tool. I am not php programmer but if I were I would definetly modify Wordpress to be CMS becouse it’s the best.
Yet another vote for Textpattern. I have been using it for the last 2+ years and am totally blown away by the ease and simplicty. Not to mention an incredible community and tons of plug-ins. Plus, the niceURL’s are an easy way to transition things.
Check out etomite.org or modxcms.com . Very extensible and easy to configure.
I moved my Mac news site OS X Factor from it’s own home rolled CMS to Wordpress a few months back. Why did I do it? Because Wordpress has so much to offer in the way of plugins, most of the needs I had were met without having to do any heavy coding. I’m glad I created my own CMS, but the sheer size of the Wordpress community means I can focus on content, and leave the coding to others.
asafsfdsf
I am currently using Wordpress. I think that this is the best blog platform. Additionaly Wordpress has a very wide configuration connected with simplicity.
I’m telling you… ExpressionEngine is the way to go. I’ve tried MT, TextPattern, Wordpress (including the latest and greatest 2.0), Mambo and a few other unknowns. EE beats them all in terms of power and flexibility. I’ve used it to make sites from simple blogs to newspapers to large portals. Install it. Compare it with whatever else you want to. In my opinion and experience, EE is the standard to beat.
My simple treat is Java “Riot V6”. By far the coolest thing that I know around. Sadly there is i little documentation, but if you get it working it really cool. Link
3 days ago, I switched from Joomla CMS zu WordPress “CMS”. Since I did not have that much content, I have decided to migrate the data manually. Though, the import routine in WordPress is quite powerful, see for example this <a href="http://www.pixelgraphix.de/log/2006-01/umstieg-von-movable-type-nach-wordpress-so-gehts.php">Pixelgraphix</a> article (in German). Anyhow, WordPress is not yet a real CMS, I have described some issues and my solutions in the article <a href="http://www.sw-guide.de/online-anwendungen/wordpress/wordpress-als-cms/">WordPress als CMS</a>.
Wordpress is extremely powerful. I’m running a brand directory, commercials and slogans database on it + search engine. A good user-level-system is already in place and with plugins you can do everything you want. I just love it. There is also a good cache plugin and spam filter.
I also have been consistently using my own self-built system and from time to time I go through a phase where I feel like I’m reinventing the wheel and I wonder why. After much wasted time browsing open source systems I always end up back with my own system because I have full control and can change things to make them suit the individual needs of my clients—basically anything is possible with ones own system. I have recently, however, started some projects with WordPress and am very impressed. I don’t necessarily like most of the available templates but it is actually surprisingly easy to create your own and it looks like, with some PHP knowledge, one can easily customise the system to do many things. I’m leaning towards WordPress for new projects and am keen on the possibility of creating my own plugins to do the things it can’t already do. One problem I do have (like some others here) is that it is predominantly a blogging tool and not truly a CMS in the sense that it revolves around articles sorted by date rather than pages and sections…. perhaps I need to think outside the square of the system I have created for myself…. Just my two cents worth…. good discussion by the way.
”[…]started working on a project based on WordPress[…]” BASED on WordPress? So is this its own project or is it just a personal revision of WP? I’ve hacked WP for use as a more full-fledged CMS, but it’d be neat if there was a specific CMS project based on WordPress.
After the final release of e107 v.7 i have to recomment this thread. So if you don’t had a look into e107 I will suggest you visit e107.org and get the latest build and set it up. :-]
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Hello. Liked your site very much. Great design and content! -----
