I’ve been looking at CMS Made simple but even though it uses Smarty, its templating system seems a bit difficult to customize. Wordpress has many plugins, so it would probably have something like a helpdesk/support ticket, but it also seems a bit difficult to customize its layout. Can anyone recommend other alternatives? Thank you.
Wordpress is my CMS of choice these days. I’ve found it to be more or less the easiest one to work with, find plugins for, and customize.
By default, wordpress does not use smarty. You must either be using a template that specifically integrated smarty, or a 3rd-party plugin that includes it.
Here’s a couple articles on wordpress theme development:
http://wp.smashingmagazine.com/2013/03/13/guide-wordpress-theme-options/
http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development
As for other CMSes, there’s also Joomla, Drupal, and ExpressionEngine. However, I’ve found Joomla’s plugin and theme systems to be hard to work with.
I used wordpress for 3 years and now I feel satisfied.
Like the other responders here, I have a preference based on the tool I use most. At one time I would have built the site from scratch and used smarty or my simpler templating engine to do the job but now that we have powerful modular CMS systems, building from scratch just isn’t efficient for building, supporting or extending today’s websites.
If this were my task, I’d build a Drupal site and add the case tracker module (http://drupal.org/project/casetracker) for my ticketing system.
Drupal used to be hard before Drupal 7 emerged and it can get complicated but for a simple site like the one you’re suggesting it should be a walk in the park.
Thank you all for your responses. Let’s say I create a series of pages like : Hosting, features, contact, about us etc. Obviously the menu for those would be dynamically generated but I want those menus to be image based rollovers, not just text links. Can this be done with Wordpress? Or would it be a very messy mod?
There should be lots of plugins that will allow for this sort of thing.
On a related note, what control panel software are you using (CPanel, Plesk, etc…) I would imagine that whatever you are using has extensions for theming and incorporating CMS features into it for the public facing site.
Yeah I would have to say Wordpress is very good and Expression Engine CMS is also really good. Those are the only two i would use at this point. Wordpress is free and millions of plugins and themes. Pretty much runs on any webhost too. Expression Engine has higher quality plugins in my opion but you have to pay for pretty much everything with that CMS.
We are running here a web development company in KL. We usually rely on three Content Management Systems:
Drupal: https://drupal.org/
Joomla: http://www.joomla.org/
WordPress: http://wordpress.org/
For Learning Resources, check below:
Learn Drupal:
https://drupal.org/documentation
http://www.amazon.com/Drupal-Explained-Step---Step-Guide/dp/0133124231/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1371049260&sr=1-6&keywords=drupal
Learn Joomla:
http://docs.joomla.org/Beginners
http://www.startlearningjoomla.com/
Learn WordPress:
http://learn.wordpress.com/
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/atushinsky/learn-wordpress
Choose one of the above and roll with it. My personal recommendation is WordPress.
All the Best!
Iis very easy to work with the WordPress because of its editing options and lots of plugins to work with.
The Best CMS for a web hosting website is Wordpress, as it has many useful plugins that can help in creating a fully functional website. Wordpress is one of the most popular CMS and it is widely used by many developers.
Can you provide some specifics of plugins where WordPress excels in the realm of hosting websites so the original poster can see what you’re talking about?
Why image based rollovers? That’s a pretty outdated method… You can do lots these days just with CSS. I don’t think I’ve seen a site use images for rollovers since 2000… It’s not user-friendly, something you should keep in mind. And there’s always the option to use background images, if the scenario calls for it. Either way, this should be the job of CSS, not the backend.