Silverstripe or Modx or CMSMS?!?!?

Dear all,

I’m in the maze of CMSs; trying to choose the could suit my need. Went through tons of comparisons and decided to not even try cms-s like:

- drupal, plone, symphony and other complexies (they are too complicated and they seem to force us to learn their own tag language rather than just plain PHP; so learning curve steeeeeper than Modx, i guess)
- joomla and others (just hating that it [almost] doesn’t allow us to customize the templates and also not standard compliant)
- CMSMS (it just seems good, but ... does it also make people to learn and use a new tag or something language thing ? )
- some simple CMS-s (they are nice in that they are simple, but they are not enough for what i’m planning for my web.. like i think they can’t handle my news-or-blog (but no WP no + i hate blog like tools; i’m more of having full control over my design) like web of 20-30 articles per month). So... gave up
- gave a thought on starting from scratch, but.. no... it’s gonna take a huge load of time from my happy life... no..

To be honest, I never tried any of them. Just my comparison based on people’s comments and their experiences. Isn’t it faster ?

So, now i seem to have left three choices: Silverstripe, ModX, and CMSms. Because, these are CSS, XHTML, and PHP friendly. And I can have my own CSS design, which is one of my requirements.

Please drop your opinions if you have one. Which one is better than the other two and why?

Oh... btw.... the website i’m gonna to build should have the followings:

- daily or weekly article publishing (so it will grow beyond the light CMSs within a few months/years)
regarding the content; it will also need 2 separate content areas. Both of them contain either news or article, and prev-next links to make it easier to navigate within each.
- a small shop which sells some pictures or anything. so i need an ecommerce/shopping cart solution (it’s a must)
- a forum where people can create a community of their own interest (must too)
- blog (optional)
- and archive etc for sure.

Silverstripe offers all of these above-mentioned features as built-in and opensource.

Every comment is greatly appreciated.

Kindly

Elvie

Pleaze, help mee to make up my mind.

Silverstripe offers all of these above-mentioned features as built-in and opensource.

Well you’d think so from the website but in reality it’s not really there yet. Silverstripe is still a young system and shows huge promise, but the last time I installed and played with it (about 2 months ago) there were all sorts of bugs and problems with the various modules. Ecommerce in particular just doesn’t seem to work at all. The community is still quite small so the forums aren’t much help. Anther big problem for me is the url scheme, which doesn’t allow nested directories - not only is this really bad for SEO but it won’t just scale for larger sites where you need a proper taxonomy. The final problem I found was performance; the Sapphire framework which makes Silverstripe so interesting and powerful from a developers point of view unfortunately seems to generate multiple recursive left joins which can choke the database, at least in the limited testing I did. I’m keeping a close eye on it as it develops and I’m betting all these issues will be sorted over time, but I wouldn’t use it right now.

MODx + Foxycart + SMF would certainly be one solution to what you need, and if your site is leaning towards content management with a bit of community building and light ecommerce then that’s your best option. However another option you may not have considered is Expression Engine, which has some really excellent community features built in and can also use Foxycart I believe.

Thanks for the feedback on SilverStripe; its essential we know people’s views so that we can continuously focus on the squeakiest wheels.

Therebychips; all the points you raise are items we’re actively working on improving;

1. besides the core software the ecommerce module is the most actively worked on module currently and has sites like www.perweek.co.nz successfully using it,

2. the URL scheme is to be improved although I do note websites with thousands of pages have accomodated current limitations,

3. and the framework’s left joins are a standard issue with MVC/ORM frameworks. We generally view a bit of programmer productivity outweighs a few milliseconds of CPU time. Indexes help a lot, and we’ve found very few instances where it causes problems. The only exceptions so far are where database reads in general are too computationally expensive, such as californiawomen.org and demconvention.com which make use of new caching code that supports their multi-million-pageviews-per-month requirements. However, that approach would still be necessary if we had no left joins in the code.

Also, we acknowledge the forum base is still growing, and hence the core team makes a committment to be on IRC an hour a week to answer any questions, for those who don’t have the resources to pay the team for commercial support.

@SigurdMagnusson

Welcome to the MODx Forums.

@elvie Here is the deal. No matter what CMS you ultimately adopt you need to try a few. I’ve worked with Wordpress, Mambo, Joomla, Drupal and Plone. I came to MODx as a designer looking for a CMS that wasn’t a hack and override fest at every turn. MODx seemed to work the way I think and does can work in ways you might not think without hacking core or bloat of unnecessary features.

MODx does use some tagging in both the 0.96x and the recently redubbed Revolution 2 (using smarty) although you could use php snippets if you want but why not take the shortest route.

You need to get your hands dirty and try to see what works best for you. If you went solely on what others told you we’d all be using Joomla or Drupal (even though I’d rather scratch my eyes out).

In addition there are some types of projects where Joomla or Drupal are just what the project orderered. CMS’s are not on size fits all.

Play with MODx, get it to do what you want and get past the hump of learning the terminology and understanding the power of Snippets, TVs, Chunks and Plugins and you’d likely stay with MODx. That being said, you may find that you really like Silverstripe.

Most sincerely,

Jay

WoW. Thanks a lot for your quick and helpful replies. A sign of a very good community, huh?

@Therebechips and Sigurd: Valuable and great information I wouldn’t find anywhere else. THANK YOU VERY MUCH!

@Jay: Right on. I take your words and will follow from right now on. THANK YOU VERY MUCH!

My thankful kisses (I’m a girl , not a guy )

Thank you again and keep commenting please

Elvie

@SigurdMagnusson

Great to know you’re working on those issues. Silverstripe is a really interesting system, similar in many ways to MODx Revolution I feel, and It would be great to see it being more widely used.

I noticed in the Silverstripe blog that the svn has seen some improvements. Most noteable for me was the improvements to url handling. Apparently now "the URLs can be arbitrarily deep" where url segments can be automatically mapped to models -> subcontrollers -> methods.

Just about my only gripe with Silverstripe when I tested it ages ago was the the php_memory_limit issue - recommended to run properly is 64mb. Maybe it was my crap hosting that wouldn’t allow me to increase the memory size from 32mb - but this put me off. Oh well...

I am just finishing up a site using SilverStripe. It’s a great CMS, but the ecommerce module is a complete mess, and very weak in it’s current state (few payment gateway options, poor shipping options, etc.).

Here’s the site:
http://www.nikawater.org/

Quote from: NEXUS at Feb 27, 2009, 10:25 PM

I am just finishing up a site using SilverStripe. It’s a great CMS, but the ecommerce module is a complete mess, and very weak in it’s current state (few payment gateway options, poor shipping options, etc.).

Here’s the site:
http://www.nikawater.org/

Beautiful site.