Anyone used CMS Made Simple?

M

mrleesimpson

Guest
Has anyone got experience with CMS Made Simple?

I'm doing some contract work and the client uses this as standard on all projects. I've taken a look through the system backend and building templates doesn't look all that easy.

Anyone?
 
I havent used CMS Made Simple, no, but there are plenty of others that are easier to use than this.

What content would need to be changeable by the client?
 
Unfortunately the option isn't there not to use this. Its another design firm I'm doing work for and it has to be used.
 
Hi Lee,

I used it a little while back now, its not that bad a system but i just hated the admin interface.

If I can help in any way drop me a line.

Nathan
 
this is a little late, but it is very easy to use. It has a built in menu manager that controls the menu, it has support for vertical drop down or horizontal pop out.

Creating a template is simple. Create a new template, add your html, add the tags that pull the data from the database which are pretty simple to be honest:
{metadata} pulls the keywords, description and any other you meta data you enter
{sitetitle} enter the name of the site
{menu} inserts the menu

It really is easy to use. You can also create global content areas, so for example i use this for a footer and then i can easily insert it into the template(s) and if i ever need to change the footer i change it once, instead of in each page or template.

It is easily extendable with modules to add on to it, there is one for most situations you can need.

I have to say all in all its very easy, i had a site ready for client testing in 2 days.

This site, Kwik Sweep - Welcome to Kwik Sweep - house, junk, office, garden rubbish clearance London runs on cms made simple and its worked really well.

Sorry I'm so late in replying
 
I have used CMS made simple as well...i actually actively use it for my gaming community right now: Burning Vision Online Gaming Community - Home

Overall I love it, there are a few things that bug me about it such as whenever I copy and paste text it doesn't retain the formatting...it just pastes it as plain text (not including the paragraph tags etc).

Setting up the template is really simple though, much easier than any other CMS (such as Wordpress etc). I took a full html site that I created and had it setup in the CMS ready to add content in less than 2 hours. Global Content blocks are real nice too because you can setup say a header or a footer or a navigation and have it show up whereever you use the tag...much like the php include function.

Like TomB said, it has a lot of modules but I've found the module support to be lacking in comparision to other more well-known CMS systems. For example they have a RSS feed module but neither really works to my liking so I had to refer to my web host to make an easy to use RSS feed. Also the comment module is a bit annoying because it doesnt have as many easily customizable features (like in wordpress how you can easily change the look of comments, with this it isn't that simple).

If you need any help PM me, I could maybe give some tips.
 
I'll chime in just to say that I also downloaded and played with it a year or two ago. I found it extremely simple to create templates and use overall. Granted it's not the slickest looking CMS around and could use a graphical make-over. But functionally speaking, for small sites, it is one of the easiest to use CMS' I've found. It really is "made simple" !
 
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