Starts and stops to various attempts at article and CMS add-ons?

jonsidneyb

jonsidneyb

Well-known member
I am guessing these are fairly complicate things to write?

Several people have started them and for one reason or another have stopped. It seems to be an area that keeps running into problems for add-on developers. Can someone tell me what problems the various developers are having?

I have specific requirements in mind that I am told cannot be done with what exists but I am curious at the attempts that have not been completed.
 
Ultimately, yeah, a CMS is absolutely not a 5 minute job.

Never mind the actual coding, the amount of thought and planning required to build one is just completely immense.

Ultimately it leads to a very expensive product to develop. If the average developer hour costs £20 / $30 an hour... you're easily in the thousands and sometimes that might not touch the sides.

Nearly always a developer spends more time working on a product than he charges for, and no doubt the same would be true with something like this. Only ten-fold.

So, basically a daunting concept, plus usually not enough people who would be willing to pay a developer that kind of money. Even if it was crowdfunded, that doesn't necessarily solve all of the problems.
 
If you have very specific requirements coding a CMS just for them might be a very fast job! You really have to cut down your requirements as much as possible, that will make your CMS easier to adapt for the future, and it will be easier to both manage and use. So actually the hardest part is on you - figuring out what you need and reducing your needs as much as possible - while telling the developer exactly how you want to have it.
 
jonsidneyb said:
Can someone tell me what problems the various developers are having?
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I guess it is that there are too much requirements. Here are some requirements, that slow down the coding up to a year or much longer:

- users create content or is the content just created by the admin? If its just you as the admin, this is a HUGE time saver to code (usergroup rights etc.)
- how much content types are there? Only one textbox, or do you also apply images? Videos? Some textboxes, checkboxes, radio selectors for creating the content?
- can users just like the content? Or rate it?
- does it have to have an importer? From Wordpress? vb cms?

Every single item on this list can take up from a few hours to months of work and double-checking. Now imagine you also have to code everything in ACP so each admin can have his own CMS by mouse clicks ("textbox in the upper right", "radio selector with data from database table on the bottom"). You will see how complicated that is.
 
The guy that writes Vaultwiki has stats on his page that mention it's been in development (new version) for 886 days with about 4 files and a couple hundred lines of code per day! That means it is vastly larger than XF!

Now, I would be the first to say that is probably bloatware at this point - the "zen" of programming is to do more with less! But, still, it shows one effort at part of a CMS.

I think the "right" CMS for XF will be something written in a moment of creativity - not years! That is, I sometimes liken software to music - it's worse to take years to write a song (in most cases), and having a crew doing it doesn't turn out too well either!

Maybe this is what we've seen in some of the failed attempts here?
Meanwhile, Jaxel wrote quite a nice little lite wiki and portal by his lonesome way back when.....
 
Basically I want to be able to do this same things I used to do in vBCMS. I know vBCMS was not popular but it was able to do everything that I needed.
 
As Chris outlined funds is the biggest problem, rarely anyone one person in willing to shell out that kind of money and if it is crowdfunded then everyone has their own requirements and ultimately it becomes to big and the idea dies off.
 
MOZ said:
As Chris outlined funds is the biggest problem, rarely anyone one person in willing to shell out that kind of money and if it is crowdfunded then everyone has their own requirements and ultimately it becomes to big and the idea dies off.
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Not having the capability anymore has probably cost me many thousand dollars so it is worth a bit to me.
 
A basic cms is not a tough job. I created one in laravel 4 last week. Admin area included. Entire job took less than 2 hours. It all depends on your framework and critically what features it has.
 
RickM said:
A basic cms is not a tough job. I created one in laravel 4 last week. Admin area included. Entire job took less than 2 hours. It all depends on your framework and critically what features it has.
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Which features did your CMS? I guess: admin creates content, there is a page where all content is listed (title1, title2, title3), and there is a page where the the content is displayed (title, contenttype1, contenttype2, contenttype3). Yes, if you really know what you want, you can reach your goals very fast.
 
Marcus said:
Which features did your CMS? I guess: admin creates content, there is a page where all content is listed (title1, title2, title3), and there is a page where the the content is displayed (title, contenttype1, contenttype2, contenttype3). Yes, if you really know what you want, you can reach your goals very fast.
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Just a pretty basic system

Admins can login, view a list of pages and add/edit/delete as needed. Each page has a title, status (draft or published) and a body. A created and updated date is stored automatically.

If you get into advanced stuff then it can take a little longer, but generally even a more complex CMS shouldnt be a big task these days with systems like Laravel around. Sure if you mess around with manual SQL it'll take a hell of a lot longer, but no sane person would do that anymore :)
 
RickM said:
Just a pretty basic system

Admins can login, view a list of pages and add/edit/delete as needed. Each page has a title, status (draft or published) and a body. A created and updated date is stored automatically.

If you get into advanced stuff then it can take a little longer, but generally even a more complex CMS shouldnt be a big task these days with systems like Laravel around. Sure if you mess around with manual SQL it'll take a hell of a lot longer, but no sane person would do that anymore :)
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You could basically create this kind of CMS very easy: Just setup a forum where only the admin can create and view threads. Add "draft" and "published" prefixes to this forum. Then write a small addon that displays all "published" threads on a cms page like forum.com/home
 
I might have someone that can make one for me. Waiting on more information.

My needs for the landing page were met by vBCMS. Now that I am on XenForo I want to replicate what I did using vBCMS.


1. I would like it to be the front page of my forum.
2. I would like to promote the first post in a thread to an article on the front page. While retaining the thread in the forum.
3. I would like posts in the thread to appear as comments on the front page and would like comments on the front page to appear in the thread.
4. I want permissions so that only admins can promote a thread into an article.
5. I want to be able to control the order the articles are displayed in.
6. I would like it to allow me to set the articles up as double column of articles.
7. I want categories or an index of some kind that would allow the users to only have articles show inside of that category if they select one, other wise they are in the order I select.
8. I want it show the XenForo Menu bar and Banners that I have up while on the front page.
 
point 5: makes it complicated !!!

1. So basically you just want to display one additional template that is displayed at top of each thread for the admin: "Promote this thread to cms. *category1 | *category2 | *category3 [click on one category to promote it to cms]"
2. Add a new route like forum.com/home and display there all threads that you selected. A user can click on *category2 and then only threads of this category are displayed on forum.com/home/category2

It should take a half day for a developer.
 
Marcus said:
point 5: makes it complicated !!!

1. So basically you just want to display one additional template that is displayed at top of each thread for the admin: "Promote this thread to cms. *category1 | *category2 | *category3 [click on one category to promote it to cms]"
2. Add a new route like forum.com/home and display there all threads that you selected. A user can click on *category2 and then only threads of this category are displayed on forum.com/home/category2

It should take a half day for a developer.
Click to expand...

Would the formating add additional time?

I would like it to display the articles on the landing page like xVCMS does.
 
jonsidneyb said:
I might have someone that can make one for me. Waiting on more information.

My needs for the landing page were met by vBCMS. Now that I am on XenForo I want to replicate what I did using vBCMS.


1. I would like it to be the front page of my forum.
2. I would like to promote the first post in a thread to an article on the front page. While retaining the thread in the forum.
3. I would like posts in the thread to appear as comments on the front page and would like comments on the front page to appear in the thread.
4. I want permissions so that only admins can promote a thread into an article.
5. I want to be able to control the order the articles are displayed in.
6. I would like it to allow me to set the articles up as double column of articles.
7. I want categories or an index of some kind that would allow the users to only have articles show inside of that category if they select one, other wise they are in the order I select.
8. I want it show the XenForo Menu bar and Banners that I have up while on the front page.
Click to expand...

5 isn't so important for me. As for 7, as long as I can use the specific forum name that the post was promoted from as the category, I'd be a mega happy camper.

I had extremely high hopes for Jaime's WordPress bridge, but after nearly a year of little to know progress on it, I've all but given up on using it. I gave Jaxel's ZenPortal a try last year, but it was too basic for my needs. I may try it again on the testbed to see what type of updates have been made to the addon.
 
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