I need a CMS. Trouble is, I don’t know which one, and sites like PHP-Nuke that don’t even bother to publish simple feature lists are not helping matters.
Here’s what I want:
Automatic local navigation
I am sick and tired of fooling with navigation. I want a CMS to be smart enough to say, “hey, there are 10 other files in this directory. I bet they’re related to the current page. I think I’ll dump them all into a sidebar, using the page titles as the linked text.” How hard can this be?
Automatic breadcrumb navigation
Again, not hard; I have some Javascript and some PHP that will crawl the directory structure back up to the top and, using the page title of index.foo as the linked text, create a breadcrumb trail for me.
Editable in Dreamweaver
I don’t want to edit HTML by hand. DW will handle just about anything in PHP, ASP, ColdFusion…. these are my options. Python is not one of them.
News
I don’t want to lose any of Movable Type’s features (except maybe TrackBack, which would be irrelevant in my work pages). Therefore, my CMS needs to handle news updates with categories, multiple authors, multiple output formats (see my calendar view for an example). I need to be able to display the news by category (research-related news on the research pages, etc.). I want RSS, comments, auto-archives, the whole bit.
Events calendar
MT can be twisted into displaying a calendar and handling future-dated posts, but it requires some trickery with the templates and a few extra steps on the author’s part – not to mention spawning a separate blog for the calendar. I want this to be an integrated, intuitive part of the system.
Custom fields
I want to be able to label things my way, so I don’t have to spend hours explaining it to convent providers who want to update their own sections. (MT Pro has this. Ben and Mena are on top of things, as usual.)
HTML for layout, CSS for appearance
MT does this right. I want HTML pages for the structure, and CSS for the look. (And ne’er the twain shall meet.) Futhermore, I want to be able to customize the layout however the hell I want – if I want to use CSS, I don’t want to be tied to a CMS‘s table-based legacy crap. And did I mention I want the code to validate? I don’t want to go through what Wired did with Vignette.
Search
Site-wide. All pages. Everything.
Newsletter management
Along with the news posting, I want people to be able to sign up to receive the updates by email if they choose. (Not just an excerpt and a link to the page – ALL the news.)
Polls and surveys
I want feedback, and I want it to be anonymous if people feel like it.
Workflow
Some people should not be allowed to post to the site until another pair of eyes has gone over their work. Draft/approval is a necessary thing.
Text Formatting
Whether it’s a plugin or an integral part of the system, I want users to be able to publish their stuff without knowing HTML.
And it needs to be free.
If it includes portal features (user-specific info), voting (as opposed to unsecured surveys), and link management, I wouldn’t complain. Those aren’t essential to me at this point.
Typo3 is tempting, but the fact that the news, calendars, and newsletters are add-ons makes me a little nervous. I’ll have to play with it and see if everything plays nicely together. I’m also not sure it can handle the navigation like I want it to. The other CMSs I’ve looked at so far don’t even come close.
Note that all this has to do with work rather than with my personal site; here, I’m perfectly happy with Movable Type. But I’m in the throes of redesigning a huge site at work, and MT is not enough there.
