CMSMS | CMS Made Simple

The fastest of you noticed the defacement of cmsmadesimple.org site several days ago. The site had been defaced by a script kiddie. The actual script that had been used was r57shell (google). Its a litlle tool one can use to upload / download and query stuff from the server.

The script had been there for a while and gone unnoticed as it wasn’t used for anything else than removing the log entries from that time :/

One thing is certain, the hole they have used is old, it looks like the FCKEditorX filemanager hole was used, but we cant be sure.

We have checked that the release files are intact, and as far as we know no data has been compromised.

We are still trying to dig more info about this incident, and are in the process of securing the server up a notch.

Sorry about the problems.

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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.

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Ok, so Featured Site Of The Week is just two months late, sorry Singapore kept me busy

As I came back from Singapore and started browsing through new sites mentioned in cms show off forum I was greeted with tens of great sites all around the world. Great job everybody.

Todays site Petersburg.ie comes from Ivan with the usual questionnaire.

tsw) Who are you and where are you going to?
Ivan) We are The Design Tribe, small creative web design studio based in Galway City on the West Coast of Ireland. ‘The Design Tribe’ consists of a three person team, Ivan who is responsible for all design and CSS, Alan the PHP/general ‘code monkey’ & Sue-Anne in Admin/Accounts. As a team, our main objective is to diver web design/solutions that are well designed, easy to use and functional.

tsw) What is this site all about?
Ivan) Petersburg.ie is a website for an Outdoor Education Centre in north Galway. The centre provides outdoor education courses to all age groups. The aim of the site was to promote the centre and to excite potential visitors about the possibility of using its facilities. We designed a site that used the strong bold colours often associated with the outdoor clothing industry. The site also features a one minute long ‘Petersburg Adventure’ flash animation that quickly shows the viewer where the centre is located in Ireland and also gives them a flavour of what awaits them in a days’ activities.

tsw) Why did you choose CMSMS?
Ivan) Having evaluated several open sources CMS’s - we chose CMSMS as it (A): had a beautifully designed end-user interface and (b): it allowed us great flexibility in delivering a perfectly tailored solution to each clients particular needs. CMSMS is just perfectly positioned in terms of functionality & features - it’s neither to simple nor to complex. I could go on all day listing out the various reasons why we like CMSMS – but basically - it allows us to produce multifaceted, well designed sites, relatively easily.

tsw) How do you create your designs?
Ivan) The design phase of any project starts with listening to the client and trying to ascertain their needs, tastes and wishes. All our designs start as a blank page in Photoshop so we boot it up and start determining the layout & colour schemes that best suits our clients’ needs. From here the design can go anywhere but the objective is always the same – a well designed usable site. Our designs are always a mix of eye-candy & functionality. Websites are meant to be used by users - so in our opinion usability comes a first, followed closely by eye-catching design.

tsw) What have been your major problems with CMSMS?
Ivan) Debugging can be slow. We’ve made a some modifications nearly creating our own development branch, but this means that we can’t upgrade our base install without a lot of work.

tsw) What has been good about CMSMS?
Ivan) The framework that it provides, initially the learning curve is a little steep, but once you figure it out you can customise any site & provide great functionality quickly. The entire package is well engineered, big kudos to Ted and his army of helpers.

tsw) Did you use extra modules?
Ivan) Yeah, used Album & feedbackform, hacked one together and we have a nice beta Property Manager on the way - which may be good enough for the community (good enough for the community to hack apart anyway J )

tsw) How did the site launch go?
Ivan) Flawlessly – after the launch the client had a few changes/additions – CMSMS made them a walk.

tsw) In your own opinion what’s good about this site and what’s bad? What would you do differently?
Ivan) We could have done with a bit more time to configure the album layout for the Gallery module. Otherwise we were very happy the project.

tsw) Thank you very much on taking the time to answer these questions. Now, what would you like to say to fellow CMSMS’ers.
Ivan) Dia daoibh! & CMSMS rocks!

Nicely done site, Thanks Ivan!

Hopefully I will have more time to write these articles more often during the summer!

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Today we will start a new article “Featured Site of the Week” which will show you some of the sites created with CMSMS usually found from “CMS Show Off” forum.

This weeks site is brought to us by forum user kovver. I had the pleasure to interview him a bit about the site.

tsw) Who are you and where are you going to?
kovver) My name is David De Beukelaer and I’m studying in Holland for Waldorf teacher. Currently I live in Belgium and have studied art in Ghent. I work as a freelancer every once in a while, mostly making artwork for myself, but sometimes making sites for friends and relatives. I also do book illustrators and writing but only in dutch.

tsw) So what is this site all about?
kovver) Its the artist portfolio for me and a friend. I designed the whole concept in photoshop after styling the color palette. We will have regular updates on the site, mostly with links, archive products, etc… Me or my friend will do the updates. I did the design for this version. Another large project of mine is: http://www.anthros.net which is mentioned in eight CSS galleries

tsw) Why did you choose CMSMS?
kovver) I discovered CMSMS a half year ago. I work with it when applicable and useful. Sometimes i write extras on it or fix bugs, etc. That makes me think that i should mention them more often, end even help on the development. If needed…

tsw) How do you create your designs?
kovver) Its very useful to make the design completely offline, in photoshop, with guides, color codes and separate layers.

tsw) What have been your major problems with CMSMS?
kovver) The largest problems are currently the bugs between IE opera safari and mozilla.

tsw) But aren’t those problems more CSS related than CMSMS?
kovver) Mostly it is a horror experience for every designer, included the ones not using CMSMS, but. So to answer the questions above: no problems that can’t be solved.

tsw) How did the site launch go?
kovver) I did not yet get pointers or opinions from others, because the site is only redesigned for three days now. I don’t really know how much traffic I receive daily, some 3500 a month I suppose…

tsw) In your own opinion what’s good about this site and what’s bad? What would you do differently?
kovver) I’m recently developing an own style in web-designing which leads me to simplicity! I was wondering what makes a site worth looking at and in the meantime proudly presenting a clear overview, with valid XHTML. This is a new episode in my search for it.

tsw) Thank you very much on taking the time to answer these questions. Now, what would you like to say to fellow CMSMS’ers.
kovver)

• Focus on your CSS skills, they are the basis
• Try, if capable to contribute to the CMSMS development.
• Make your designs in photoshop, know what you want before you change the css.
• Post your designs, take a look and learn form others. Never copy, it might not satisfy!
• I question the overload on css-galleries! So I’m looking for serious volunteers to make one board to connect them all, but how?

Destile webdign to an art. Because kovver says: style life into art.

So take a look at http://www.kovver.com/ and form your own opinion.

We will try to continue this article series once a week to show you some of the backgrounds of the sites done in CMSMS.

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