New CMS and Page Builder

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Greetings to all members of the forum.

After creating many websites using some popular CMS systems, I got very disappointed on how complicated they are. They are supposed to be very easy to use even for a plain user… but my experience tells me that its impossible for a plain user to create something decent using them. Even a programmer is having hard times to properly setup everything… not to mention what happens when you want to create custom themes or plugins… Sometimes the plugins needed to do simple things are making things even more complicated… This is my opinion…

All these made me decide to attempt to develop my own CMS system. I started having some results that I think they are satisfying. I would like to share with you my work and of course i am very interested to know your thoughts about my project. Thank you very much.

The link to the admin panel:
http://demo.typos.center/typOS/admin

Feel free to experiment with the admin panel. Don’t forget to try the Page Building System. You will find some very interesting options there. Please do not destroy the database completely so others can experiment too :slight_smile:

The project is not finished yet. Its having some bugs and many features missing. I intend to add much more design elements, an E-Shop module (already made some work on it), a Real Estate module (almost done) and more.

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Oh, my eyes! This blue color, is too blue. I think you need to change the scheme to lighter and less saturated blue color. Also there’s seems to be a lot of contrast between colors, you need to smooth it, otherwise it looks very sharp (for my eyes at least).

Guess what? It seems that admin of your CMS is much complex than regular WordPress panel. Everything seems to be confusing. That’s my, though. Right now, it’s more fashionable to create all these flat, minimalist, popping out interfaces like the neighbor topic:

It seems to be very user friendly.

Also noticed some styling problems:

Menu
Menu799×303 46.1 KB

Which reminds me of this :laughing: (sorry):


Good luck with your project!

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thank you for your feedback. I agree on some of your comments, I dont in others, but they were usefull anyway… thanx.

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I would agree. I think you have been staring at this to long to realize just how complicated it is. At least with all the other platforms out there I have a large community and some ok – good docs to go on. Here I have absolutely nothing – no community, docs and arguably not a very friendly user experience. Not to bash on you or anything but it is your kind that are doing the web dev ecosystem a disservice. I mean realistically you use this on a project, all goes well and move onto the next, etc. Though, the next guy inline is going to have no clue what this is, no docs to go on, no community to rely on. They are going to be left their own demise to utterly curse at your one off solution while they try to untangle it. I’ve seen it more often than not costing more time, effort, etc in the long run than to find something suitable in the open source ecosystem and modify it to your needs. At the very least there is than some level of standardization that clients and employees can use to evaluate effort and fits for a position managing the software. Here it would pretty much be well you know X technology. Can’t tell you much more than that… it’s completely custom.

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“My kind” !!.. our nest must be somewhere around…
what can I say…

It still a work in progress… of course there will be full documentation to make things clear. And then you will realize how much more simple is for a developer to create plugins and stuff, than current systems and for a simple user to set up a web site with much more freedom and less effort. At least this is my aim.

Your point of view is like… “lets use Joomla for the next 50 years since we are familiar”.
Progress is not coming from this kind of thoughts…
I intend to try to develop a community around this product when I find some business partners.

I really cannot understand what is it that you find more complicated than the current systems. Except that it is your first contact with that product and you are familiar with the others. Maybe you mean the page creation system. True. It seems complicated without documentation. But it also offers features that cant be found in the “standard” systems (this will be more obvious when I will develop more modules).

It is “completely custom” you say… Everything is completely custom… Several factors can make custom things define the standards. Of course community and documentation are VERY important, but everything has to start somehow.

PS: Excuse my poor English please.

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Geeze that is an amazing amount of work, did you do this yourself!?

To be honest this wouldn’t be user-friendly for plain users. But like you said, the big companies aren’t either. The problem isn’t you it’s the end-user. Even when simplified, CMS’s are complicated beasts (anything with the word Management is lol).

I could definitely see this as a great tool for teaching PHP, like an interactive version of Codecademy or something, or maybe like an interactive tutorial for how CMS’s work for new developers.

Like I said though, the amount of work you put in is amazing!

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Oz you are right. The CMS task is complicated at its core. Actually you just gave me an idea on how to try and make it a little more simplified and clear. I will try it and inform you to check when its ready, if you are interested.

A tool for teaching or interactive tutorial… Interesting thoughts.

I am doing everything myself. The only plugin I am using is for the text editor but I will have to find one that I can use for free. Well… it is a lot work but I enjoy it… And i hope that I will manage to make it a good tool.

Thank you for your comments.

1 Like
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Definitely let me know :slight_smile:

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I am learning how to build websites using CMS now. There are some cool articles on webbuildersguide.com website which help me a lot too. Maybe, it will be useful for you too

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I found it not so intuitive as you probably are aiming at, or maybe I am missing something obvious, and that (me missing the obvious) should be your yardstick, meaning I could be one of those plain users.

What I am trying to say is that what can be obvious, and simple to you it might not be for me as plain user, and perhaps that is what makes all the CMS too complicated for not so web savvy people.

And that is for mainly two reasons:
1 - when you create something you know every aspect of it, and you already know its behaviour based on the action, you create the reaction to an action, so it’s simple for you to expect the object to react exactly like that, but any user, even an expert one, doesn’t know the reaction.
2 - when you know something you give for granted many aspects that have become part of your knowledge, and you use that knowledge unconsciously, where as a novice could never know.

Try teaching an average 80 years old how to use the web, or email, what is very straightforward, and simple to you it might not be for him/her.

I am not a coder, but I have made sites with some CMSs around, and like you I thought why does it have to be so complicated to do this task, and I have three answers:
1 - maybe some technical difficulty I am unaware of
2 - there are so many ways to do things, and what looks complicated to me might be very straightforward for others.
3 - most coders, if not all, make the mistake of giving for granted some stuff, see my point above, and mostly no one sees it from the unsavvy perspective.

My best advice would be to get a bunch of NON experts to look at it, and see their reactions.
Last, maybe you could add some tooltips to your buttons.

Anyhow I think is good what you are trying to do, there is always room to improve and ease things, and wish you the best in achieving it.

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keneso, thank you very much for your comment. I think you are right in most things that you say and I have them on my mind on my project developement. I intend to add 2 “layers” of editing. One simple and one more advanced (for experienced users that want to edit in detail).

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Would have liked to have seen it, but can’t login. Keep getting ERROR LOGGING IN. Maybe you can fix that part?

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I can’t login either.

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I am sorry. It’s fixed now

I have to say that I stopped working on that project… I will continue when I find some time or budget to do it. Maybe it will be not easy for you to find your way around since there is no documentation yet. Thank you for your interest.

PS: the tags and comments are not working on this version of the demo

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fixed

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