CMSMS | CMS Made Simple

Needless to say, I’m a bit frustrated. Take a look at this review…

Very clean and simple CMS. Editing stylesheets and templates is a bit awkward, but after some time creating your own stuff, one can get used to it.
The quality of the user-submitted modules is abysmal. Many of them are fundamentally flawed and their PHP code is often plainly wrong.
If you avoid 3rd party modules, CMS does the job very well.

This comes from our page on opensourcecms.com, which is pretty much the largest pusher of traffic to our site from the outside world. A lot of our new users find our name on the list and check us out. And this is pretty much the first thing they see now.

The developer’s forge is a great idea, but it almost seems like it’s hindering as much as it’s helping. It’s not the first time I’ve heard this complaint, so we as a group need to try and figure out what we can do about it. Whether it requires a more strenuous testing/acceptance procedure (which we don’t really have the manpower to do), or if we just only approve projects that we now will be done right… well, we just don’t know.

Any suggestions? This needs to be corrected or it will become a downfall of this project. And I refuse to let that happen.

Bookmark to:

The time for the developer’s get-together is almost upon us. For those that didn’t read before, the developer team is putting together a face-to-face meeting of the minds in Copenhagen, Denmark over the weekend of Sept. 8, 2007. Most of the plans are set, but we have one issue: money.

Originally, we thought we would be able to cover expenses without looking to the community for funding. However, it’s down to the wire for buying plane tickets and several people need some help… in the very near future.

Given the trends of buying plane tickets, we have about 10 days or so before prices skyrocket. As it stands, we need roughly US$1000 before the 15th of August. That’s 10 days from today. The sooner we can get it together, the better. Any money left over after buying tickets will go into a pot to help the group pay for any additional expenses they might have.

Donating is easy. Click on the donation link on the left hand side of this page. All donations are handled through paypal. Remember, donations are not tax deductable.

Everyone who donates will get their name put up on this page and also the main donations page… and I’ll keep a running tally of how much was donated. If you’d rather be anonymous, just say so in the paypal donation comments. Also, advertising options or official get-together sponsorship is available if you’re interested.

For those of you interested in the event itself, we (at least me, I’m a photography nut) will be posting pictures on flickr each day and we will also post any details about discussions as we go. We’re going to try and plan a schedule before hand, and will post that as soon as we possible.

Help us make this a successful meeting and give the developer’s morale a nice shot in the arm! Thanks!

Sunday
Benjamin Verkley - $10
Hakki Dogusan - $20
Jeroen Vos - $20
David Streever - $15
Gareth Jones - $20
Jelmer Schreuder - $10

Monday
Millipedia - $100
Paul Richards - $30
Anonymous - $50
CJ Houghtaling - $25
Neil Southwood - $20
Edward Nowotny - $100
Mark Reed - $20
Sun Kim - $50
Mana Ties - $50

Tuesday
Steve Alink - $20
Peter Gasston - $30
Steven Epstein - $20
Jan-Felix Schmakeit - $40
Image Works Studio - $200
Mccord Computer Solutions - $10

Wednesday
Israel Cefrin - $15
John Scotcher - $40
Mark Reed - $65
Quality Interfaces - $50
Veli-Matti Saari - $30
René Helminsen - $50
Maine Webworks - $30
Michael Erb - $25

Thursday
Dieter van Baarle - $20
Anders Rehnvall - $25

Friday
Anonymous - $50

Sunday
Reinhard Mohr - $10
Andrew Moore - $20
Patrick Honorez - $50
Torben Hoerup Nielsen - $15
Prism Mail Solutions - $33

Monday
Andre Gellert - $5
Gunnar Grimsson - $50

Tuesday
Finn Lovenkrands - $100
Martin Johnson - $20

Wednesday
Martin Weber - $30
Sanjay Jain - $100

Grand Total: $1,693

Thanks to everyone who donated! The trip is definitely on (all tickets are bought) and the rest of the money will go towards making Copenhagen a little less expensive for everyone.

Thanks again!

Bookmark to:

For the 2nd year in a row, Packt Publishing is running the Open Source CMS Awards. This year there are several categoires and more prize money to be won. Hopefully we can rally enough support this year to get a nomination in one of the few categories. This would be a huge win for publicity for our humble project.

So, please, click the links below and nominate us if you feel we’re worthy.

http://www.packtpub.com/article/nominate-overall-open-source-cms-winner/system/CMS-Made-Simple

http://www.packtpub.com/article/nominate-open-source-php-cms/system/CMS-Made-Simple

Thanks!

Bookmark to:

CMS Made Simple is gladly joining in the gophp5.org mission. On 5 February 2008, many PHP projects, including us, will not be releasing any more versions that will be compatible with anything less that PHP 5.2.0. This is to help push ISPs into supporting php5 finally… which has been out for 3 years already.

In actuality, we’ve already said that CMSMS 2.0 will only support php5, but this seals the deal on a version number (5.2.0) and also gives us leverage for this decision. CMSMS 2.0 will also be coming out before that date, but that just means we’ll be a few months ahead of the curve.

If you’re having trouble and worrying about a host supporting future releases, then you should probably check out the list of hosts on this page and get your migration plans ready.

Thanks to the folks at gophp5.org for giving us a reason to finally push php acceptance in forward and positive motion. It really is THAT much better that php 4.

Bookmark to:

Just wanted to make a quick comment about the number of releases in the last couple of weeks. We’ve basically had 2 major security releases in a matter of a week, and I’m sure that raises a red flag with some of the more established users.

I just want to emphasize something… this is a good thing. Sure it takes you several minutes to update your sites to the latest version and there isn’t an automated way of doing that yet. But as we gain users and gain popularity (very, very quickly I might add), more and more people are banging on the system and deconstructing it… finding these great obscure bugs that some hacker might’ve found first. And I make sure that we as a group jump on them as soon as I can. Instead of just sitting on them and waiting for a bunch to come in and bundle them up like Microsoft does, the group does all they can to get a new release out and get the word out quickly. This has become a philosphy for us and luckily all of the devs support it.

Annoying? Sure. Responsible? Definitely.

We’re trying out best to make a great, safe product with the little team that could. And sometimes this is the best we can do.

Thanks for you patience! Someday this gig will be fulltime for us and we can put a lot more time into making this the great app it should be.

Bookmark to:

Yesterday we held a developer conference in IRC. I’ll post a transcription of it as soon as I can get it together, but here is the rundown…

1.1
We are going to do an rc3 version. This is mainly because of some translation issues (mostly in French for some reason) and also because TinyMCE wasn’t in the rc2 build (my fault). The idea is to release rc3 today, and then have 1.1 out in the middle of next week. We just need some quick user testing to make sure everything is correct now.

Dev Team Additions
ThomasM and Reneh (both of their IRC nicks) have been added to the dev team. Both have been a great help to the cause, especially on IRC. We will update the About Us page soon. We also realized that DeeEye isn’t on the About Us page either, so we need to correct that.

2.0
The dev team is committed to finishing up 1.1 and moving that into maintenance status. At that point, the trunk will be changed over to the 2.0 code and the others along with myself will start working on it. While not said in the meeting, I’m still hoping for a beta in the September timeframe.

Forge Rewrite
As stated previously, I’m in the process of rewriting a simple gforge replacement. I just gave a quick overview of what is there and what is needed for launch. Hoping to beta that in about 2 weeks.

Dev Team Meetup
This was kind of the big topic we wanted to discuss. Basically, the dev team wants to finally meet face to face later this summer. We’ve set a date of the weekend of September 8th in Copenhagen, Denmark. We’ve chosen this location because 1) we have a team member there who has an apartment we can do some work in, and 2) because it’s pretty central to several people on the team. Of course, for those of us in North America, it’s pretty darn expensive and will probably require some fundraising, but we’ll get there. Luckily, it’s only 3 of us.

Plans for what we’re going to do while there haven’t been fleshed out. I’m hoping for a decent social/work mix, but it’s going to be kind of up in the air in order to keep everyone content. Though, it does seem like the 2.0 beta will hopefully be poking up it’s head around that time, so there will probably be stuff to discuss/work on.

Conclusion
Another productive meeting. We took right around the allotted 2 hours and got a lot accomplished. We agreed that we wouldn’t probably meet again until after 1.1 is released and it was time to start figuring out the 2.0 duties for the devs. The transscription (with some email addresses and urls removed to not promote spam) can be found here: http://cmsmadesimple.org/uploads/devmeeting-2006-06-06.txt

Bookmark to:

Hey all,

Sorry if I haven’t been around as much lately. As least with the forums, blog and working on 2.0. It’s just been a hectic month.

However, I do have some good news. We’re in for a few infrastructure changes onver the next few weeks. Here’s the quick rundown…

I’ve purchased a new server. In fact, this blog has been running on that new server for about a week now. It has double the memory, way more than double the hard drive space and is MUCH faster. The existing server is really struggling with the increased traffic load we’re received over the past few months, so this should help get rid of some of that down time.

I’ll be moving the main site, wiki and forums over tonight (sometime around 4 to 5 AM GMT — May 20, 2007). The downtime should be minimal, and it’s pretty much the slowest traffic time of our entire week, so I’m not TOO concerned about it affecting too many people. If I see a problem and have to abort, I will. In fact, I was going to do it last week, but mediawiki wasn’t having any parts of it, so I gave up. The issues are resolved now, so it should be good to go.

Gforge (dev.cmsmadesimple.org) will not be making the move, unfortunately. Gforge is great and all, but it’s entirely too much system for what we do with it. The mailing lists are annoying, it’s creating all kind of users and directories on the server, it’s cron jobs are taxing the system, etc.

Instead, I’ve rewritten a minimal gforge replacement in ruby on rails and figured out how to migrate the data. The rewrite isn’t complete yet, but it’s very close. I should have something working in another week or so, at which point I’ll be asking people to help to beta test and work out the kinks. Then when it’s time for it go live, we’ll just do a final database migration and shut gforge off forever.

After the first version goes live, I’ll be looking for people to help add some new features, so stay tuned for that.

After all this is done and the old server is off… the summer will be spent on 2.0. I’ll have another announcement regarding that soon, but the dev team and I have to work out a few scheduling issues before I’ll announce what it is.

I’ll make sure I post an update to this message after the migration is complete, for the curious…

Thanks!
Ted

UPDATE — The sites are moved. Everything seems to be working correctly. Let me know if something isn’t.

Bookmark to: