As some may know, I’m an avid user of CMS Made Simple and I’ve developed many a website with CMSMS as the foundation. After much research and consideration, I came to the conclusion that WordPress was my best avenue in regards to something more blogger-friendly and jumped right into development. I needed a system that handled my ever-growing blogging desire more precisely and felt that WordPress was my best bet. At work, my colleague has been fitting a website template with WordPress for a radiostation and it’s been nothing but a dream. The website is primarily a blog and so WordPress fit the bill without question. His enthusiasm in WordPress version 2.7.1 is what sparked me to make the final decision and get this bad boy into transition.
Decision Making
As much as I love CMSMS, it was lacking in an area that my website thrives on most: Blogging. Although all CMS Made Simple packages come bundled with a News module and it functions extremely well, I needed something that archived and catalogued my entries neatly and flawlessly, while offering my viewers the ability to interact in the conversation. Again, WordPress fit this bill perfectly. Hell, you wanna know how great the News module in CMSMS is? I’ve repurposed it and used it for multiple things, such as portfolio galleries, XML feeds, etc. I consider it one of CMS Made Simple’s “pocket knife” modules. It’s fantastic but it’s no WordPress. Even CMS Made Simple’s creator Ted Kulp is an avid WordPress user (Hi, Ted!) and we’ve both agreed that the latest greatest version of WordPress is, well, great.
CMSMS pages administration panel
Getting My Hands Dirty
Despite the fact that I have some prior WordPress development experience, I was somewhat rusty in what was required of me to get my template and all of my content shoved over into a new system. Regaining my bearings was a simple task and one I was able to complete in approximately 3 days. It’s funny because being without my Xbox 360 has allowed for me to get some much needed dev time into my own website, instead of melting my brain with late night sessions of Left 4 Dead, Far Cry 2 and Street Fighter 4.
If you’ve ever used CMS Made Simple yourself, you will know that it’s hands down one of the easiest content management systems to use, both in development and manipulating it to suit your needs. CMSMS uses the Smarty PHP engine, which I’ve grown to love, and implementing a template requires a style sheet, a single file with the required smarty calls plugged in and your images. It’s dead simple and it’s a beautiful thing. You can also use multiple templates throughout your website and even apply a separate template to each page, if your heart so desires. Also, all templates and style sheets are stored as database entries, as opposed to being physical files. This has its flaws and advantages. Like a lot of you developers out there may be, I’m pretty anal retentive about how my files are organized and sorted. I prefer to work with a physical style sheet file and physical files in general. Not to fret though. There is a module available called Template Externalizer which, when turned on, exports all of your template and style sheets as physical files in a directory on your web server. You can then edit these files at your leisure and when the Template Externalizer sees that the files have changed, it updates them in the database. I have a lot of experience and it works great.
Needless to say, it was a bit different when it came time to port the template over to the fresh new WordPress installation. Each template is split into multiple PHP files and dropped into a directory. I love having physical files at my fingertips. I guess it comes from the nostalgia of once working with entirely static websites when CMS weren’t as prominent in the mainstream (and when I had barely any sort of experience with them). Static websites are nearly a thing of the past.
The Final Say
If you’re a developer looking for the perfect blogging solution as your foundation, WordPress is your best bet. If you’re more on the market for something that offers a wide array of expandability and less of a blogger platform, CMS Made Simple is an awesome choice. I’ve built multiple websites with it and love it immensely.
If you’re interested in taking a look at my previous CMSMS setup, head on over to this directory and poke around. I plan on leaving it active as my own personal playground.
