Re: [Sheflug] Hi All

[Alex Hudson <home [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2005-05-03 at 19:52 +0100, John Southern wrote:
> Finally subscribed.

(Who let him in?)

> However, I now have need of a decent CMS to handle some web pages. As a result 
> I went back and read the thread but unfortunately it does not help my 
> requirements.
> 
> Does anyone know of an open source content management system that is capable 
> of being  easy to setup and manageable.

The short story is that they are all crap and worthless.

The longer story is that there are a set of faults with CMSes, such as:

      * really awful urls,
        e.g., /index.php?mode=view&page=my_page&blahblahblah, which make
        me want to weep
      * claim to support XHTML, but really just have clean-ish templates
        and will break when content that isn't an XHTML fragment is
        inserted
      * require you to be running something "enterprise" on your apache
        server, eg., Tomcat, Zope
      * are mindlessly complex (e.g., Typo)
      * require a database for absolutely everything
      * have security holes big enough to put a bypass through
      * are not free software
 
etc. etc., I could probably think of more, and all CMSes exhibit at
least three of them. They're often built on top of some developer's idea
of a "platform" which usually means the code is inhospitable to anyone
trying to hack it. Usual signs of such "platform"ness are "we support
modules", "we have an API", etc.

I believe writing a CMS is usually the first thing someone does when
they learn PHP.

> I would like to be able to have a styleswitcher on the front.
> 
> Failing this, does anyone know how to implement a styleswitcher to work across 
> all divisions on a page.

I don't know what you mean by the latter, but you can have a
styleswitcher without any support from the CMS so long as you can alter
the templates. You can either rely on browser support (by giving
alternative stylesheets) or use a Javascript one.

Cheers,

Alex.

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