Kieran Chapman Design » CMS

Quick.CMS: Simple CMS, Easy Admin

admin — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 12:13:59 +0000

When I build a site for a small company — especially those with only one or a few people — the website is often not the main part of the business. The site needs to be professional, clear, and easily updated, but there isn’t one person whose only job is to maintain the site. There’s often not even a single person handling marketing (including the site), but one person wearing many company hats. Quick.CMS’s simple and intuitive administrative tools are one reason why I’ve built sites using it. The fact that it uses a flat-file system instead of a database — which is fine for these small sites — has the added bonus of being easy to install on a client’s server.

I’ve looked at many different content management systems (Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, TextPattern, to name a few). One thing they had in common was very powerful and customizable templates. Unfortunately, this also resulted in more complex administrative tools. These small business owners want to spend their time actually running their business, not learning a new application to manage their website…and then sometimes re-learning it when they want to update their site weeks or months later.

The Quick.CMS admin tool makes it extremely easy for people to edit and update their site. It’s not the most powerful CMS platform, but it gives site owners the control they need. I’ve trained clients on the Quick.CMS admin tool in less than 30 minutes, after which they were already editing and adding new pages.

However, one of my complaints about Quick.CMS is the lack of polish. The default template isn’t very good and the add-on templates aren’t much better. Luckily it’s highly (if not easily) customizable, so with some work I’ve been able to change it to do what I need from a layout and design standpoint. The administrative tool UI is also very basic-looking — nothing flashy or fancy at all, perhaps a little dated. However, my clients who have used it have been satisfied with it…and they’re more concerned with how their customer-facing site looks more than then admin tool behind it.

You can download and try Quick.CMS from their site, or contact me about getting your own site designed.

Barbara Peavey Website Re-Launched

admin — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 01:39:34 +0000

I re-launched the site for oil painter Barbara Peavey this weekend. I switched from my custom content management system I built with PHP and MySQL — which did the job well — to an “artist website” package I built using Quick.CMS. (Other sites built on the artist site are Leanne Hannah’s and Craig Rousseau’s.)

If you’re an artist in need of a custom website, please contact me.

Learning WordPress the Hard Way

admin — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 11:53:21 +0000

It looks like I’ve learned my first lesson with WordPress: when upgrading, proceed with caution! A recent upgrade for NextGEN Gallery plug-in, which powers the Portfolio page and part of the home page, caused it to fail: I had no screenshots showing up at all.

Luckily, the fix turned out to be an easy one (I needed to re-upload my custom template files, which were deleted with the upgrade). But from now on I’ll proceed with caution before clicking any automatic “update” link.

Learning WordPress

admin — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 12:56:05 +0000

Part of the delay with launching this site was the platform it’s built on: I’ve been wanting to learn WordPress, both as a blogging tool and for general site content management, and this was a good excuse to do it. I’ve been hand-coding my personal sites since I learned HTML (I’ve never been satisfied with the code WYSIWYG editors generate) so this was quite a change for me. And since I didn’t want to use a generic WordPress theme, there was a big learning curve figuring out how to customize the templates to do what I want.

Rather than start from scratch, I did some research and decided to use the Thematic Theme Framework, a simple but easy-to-customize WordPress template. I still had to do a bunch of custom PHP work and there’s too much unnecessary code under the hood, but overall I’m happy with the result. Thematic let me get up and running relatively quickly, and so far I’ve been satisfied with WordPress.

The other bit of learning was with the NextGEN Gallery plug-in. It’s a very powerful and easily customized photo gallery plug-in for WordPress, and I’m using it to display the portfolio images on the site. Finally, I used Header Image Rotator Pro for the main image on the home page.

Eventually I’ll get the templates and code cleaned up the way I like it, but for now I’m happy to have a site that easy to update.