While I found quite some interesting suggestions on this site (the typical WP vs. Joomla) I just couldn't find an answer that could help me get started.
I know this is close to some of the other CMS questions but I'm missing specificities that need answering.
I'm looking for a CMS that can provide me with the following key functionalities, either through minimal programming or additional plugin installations. I'm stating this because it won't be just me, who can program, but also other trainers who are not technically inclined that will handle the site (in the future).
The functionalities I'm looking for:
Schedule management of training
Trainees of the club must check-in before or after the training to proof attendance, thus site must be mobile friendly. This is more proof-of-concept since not everyone has/wants a smartphone.
Each trainee has his own profile that logs said attendance
Possibility to provide feedback on training. For example: give a thumbs up on the last training, give a "yellow card" if the trainee misbehaved, two/three/four and you're prohibited from training ones/twice/thrice.
The attendance allows the trainee to become eligible for the next exam
Schedule management of said exam
Yearly subscription reminders for the trainees and if under-aged required parent information
Management of trainee profiles and subscriptions
Is the above possible through a CMS or is it too specific and will I need to program this myself? Either is fine by me but I'd first like to find out if a CMS can offer this.
I've decided to Go for a custom solution using ReactJS.
There are very good open-source solutions for the admin part and the open/client part is fairly simple so React is perfect for what I want to achieve. Additionally, it also challenges to think differently since I never worked with ReactJS before.
With ReactJS I have a lot of freedom in how I implement the above scenarios while at the same time have a lot of support available online in cause of issues.
Related
I'm currently designing my very first Website for a small business Intranet (5 pages). Can anyone recommend the best way to manage content for the Company News section? I don't really want to get involved in day to day content updates so something that would be simple for the Marketing guy to create and upload a simple news article, perhaps created in MS Word, lets assume the author has no html skills.
I've read about Content Management systems but,
A. I won't get any funding for purchase and
B. Think it's a bit overkill for a small 5 page internal website.
It's been an unexpected hurdle in my plans, for something that I'd assumed would be a fairly common functionality I can't seem to find any definitive articles to suit my needs.
I'm open to suggestions (even if it's confirmation that a CMS is the only way to go).
Your requirements are : small site, no budget and the need for it to be easy for the marketing guy to upload a news item.
My recommendation would be to go with an all in one CMS e.g wordpress which has the kind of functionality you're talking about out of the box.
My guess is this organisation is just getting into "intranets" so something quick and simple that can be used to justify expenditure if value is returned is the key. Perhaps look at a plugin that automatically emails a summary of the blog posts to all employees once a week would be useful ?
There are many options and you can use any one of these:
Joomla
SilverStripe CMS
ModX
Cushy CMS
Frog CMS
Drupal
Additional in what Mr. Mckinnon said, you must keep in mind that if you don't want to get involved in daily updates of the people who is going to use the platform, you should consider the following:
What kind of data you want to be displayed
Who can view/modify that data
Who can create/remove data
How you will be organizing all that data
Your intranet should not be limited to display or create data, eventually all that data can turn into a beautiful Knowledge Base (KB) for your company that eventually your coworkers can share their solutions to common and rare problems that company can present eventually. This KB is amazing and time-saving, it is recommended to start it as soon as possible, so newcomers to your Company have access to it and see the most common issues and they can enter into production asap (we all know time is a luxury in every company regarding size).
Just keep in mind too, that all that knowledge and data is beyond valuable to you and your coworkers, so you should also consider some additional login credentials so your Company System Administrator can manage those credentials and also eventual audit for unauthorized access (if applicable).
I hope this helps from the administrative point of view
I'm searching for a shopping cart or web store framework that supports multiple vendors.
There are many, many shopping cart frameworks out there: that page lists couple of hundred. In spite of the comparisons on that page, supporting multiple vendors isn't a comparison item, probably because it's a rare requirement. Separate to that page I have evaluated a few of what appear to be the top frameworks, and none that I evaluated supported this feature. Which carts would you recommend?
Commercial is okay, although I would prefer open source.
Platform (Windows, Linux, ASP.Net, PHP, Ruby... Minix, Fortran... :)) doesn't matter.
A system
where I manually add vendors who request it (instead of them freely
being able to sign up) is also okay, if there's a store where that's
possible but freely joining up isn't built in yet.
Rationale: I'd like to create an app-store like website. "App store" is a close analogy: it won't sell apps, but it will sell digital goods and I'd like anyone to be able to sell their item on the store. It's this second requirement, multiple vendors selling through the store, that I'm finding hard to satisfy.
I've used multiple shopping cart frameworks (a lot of them broken), and my favorite (which just so happens to support multiple vendors) is PrestaShop. It's free, open source, and suppports all that you asked for. Is this the framework you were looking for?
-JXP
The Wikipedia page you cited lists multiple vendor support as a column in Other Features, along with features that are pertinent to your search.
This question otherwise requires domain knowledge and likely requires multiple answers. The best I can do is offer the bounded set of software that competes directly within this space, at least according to Wikipedia.
The easiest solution for achieving your stated goal of allowing multiple people to sell on your site while exercising fine-grained control of who can and cannot do so is perhaps using WPMU's MarketPress in tandem with BuddyPress or WordPress Multisite. I'm not a die-hard fan of WordPress, per se, but that might be an expedient way for you to get to a minimal viable product and to validate your idea before shelling out the time and/or cash to custom build it from the ground up, and/or labor ad nauseam with tweaking an existing framework. MarketPress is a good plug-in that'll give you many of the features of a full-fledged e-commerce framework... BuddyPress, of course, will allow you to set up individual vendor's with their own sites under your brand. The two work together. More on MarketPress at:
http://premium.wpmudev.org/project/e-commerce/installation/
Another alternative is Jimdo's PagePartners. I haven't used it, but it looks intriguing. I like their design sensibilities, and their stated business ethos. This might be a viable option, too. The caveat being: it's not white label. More info about Jimdo's PagePartners here:
http://www.jimdo.com/pagepartner/faq/
Finally, another interesting CMS to explore is SetSeed. I think it'll allow you to launch multiple sites for each vendor via a central hub you control, and will allow you to maintain your branding within each. How, the,n any sort of renumeration would flow back to you for setting up an individual vendor's store would be up to you to figure out... This is a fairly new CMS and it looks like it's evolving smartly and rapidly. If you require some customization of it, to approach more specifically what you ask for, now might be a good time to reach out to the developer...but you might be able to think of an effective way to adapt it for your use right out of the box.
http://setseed.com/multi-site-cms/setseed-hub/
Unfortunately, none of the above is open-source--but, again, the ease by which you could get to a functional site approximating your idea may off-set that drawback. Jimdo is an open-source contributor, however. So, maybe even an e-mail to them might be a fruitful dialogue to begin. If anything, check out each of the above, and it may influence how you search for other solutions, and will at least provide some models in your own thinking or with other developers. The shopping cart is an integrated feature, I believe, in all of the above cases. With regard to giving your vendors the capacity to deliver digital goods (e-books, mp3s, etc.), check out Fetchapp.com. Very cool app. Very easy to set-up...could probably be rolled into one of the above frameworks. The frameworks would handle the issue of individual vendor profiles and/or sub-domains.
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I am looking to help out a non-profit get a website up and running.
Only, they don't just want a website with content, they also want to maintain a database of members, and allow those members to register and pay for classes/events/seminars held by the club.
It seems to me, that if all they wanted was to post content, nearly any of the available CMS's out there would fit the bill.
But the registration portion would require some customization.
I have considered just installing a basic CMS for them, and then creating separate web application for the registration section. And this would still work...
But if I wanted to hook into the users/roles from the CMS and use them in the registration side, I think I would have to have some way of either extending the CMS or easily using it's data in the sub-application.
I have been reading about the following CMS's:
Orchard
Umbraco
C1 Composite
All of them seem to have the ability to be extended, but I'm not certain how much "work" is involved to extend each. Given that my requirements are rather simple and the fact that I don't want to spend a ton of time doing this (it is free work, after all), does anyone have a recommendation?
I'd pass on Umbraco and C1 Composite, as they generally aren't user-friendly. I think Orchard is best, as it has the best feedback of them all. Umbraco is aimed more at developers who want to tweak a lot of things.
Orchard - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1978360/anybody-using-orchard-cms
Link - Reviews/Comparison of Open Source ASP.NET MVC CMS
Umbraco would be a very good choice because it:
is mature and has a proven track record.
is very easy to use for most use cases.
has a built-in member system which could (and should) be used for the member registration.
has a Big and friendly community always glad to help out.
has lots of plugins and extensions covering some special use cases.
If you will go outside of .NET and IIS, Joomla is another popular CMS in LAMP. This can be hosted in either Unix or Win environments. There's a large community, lots of implementations and robust API for plugins. I run it on MAMP on my Mac, and it also runs on WAMPServer, for development.
Last year I created a membership style site in Joomla using Mighty Extensions for a bed and breakfast listing service (http://uurehome.com). Mighty User and Membership was enough, this adds custom user fields and subscription plans. You do have to pay for Mighty Extensions. Payment for the B&B listings is done thru Paypal, Mighty Membership enables this.
The subscription plan feature is Mighty Membership is very good. You can have length of time, cost renewals, renewal nag messages. Could have written myself, but why at this cost :-)
Joomla can certainly handle the community side of a non-profit site, there's the usual assortment of content, discussions, news feeds and so on. It's also ok for mere mortals to administer.
Not so sure about comparing to Orchard, as I haven't kicked the tires on Orchard. I have done enterprise web CMS for a living in the past, so I am used to evaluating these sorts of products. Orchard looks similar to Joomla in how it works, based on the screenshots I see in the docs. One thing I will say with confidence is that it's easier to standup Joomla (or something LAMP/WAMP/MAMP) than on the MS Webmatrix. However, if you already have a Webmatrix provider, then it's similar. Said by someone that has done a bunch of IIS and pretty much all the web technologies going back to the beginning of time (that's 1993).
Another aspect of using Joomla for me in this project, which is for a small business, was knowing that there's a bunch of Joomla knowledgable web design shops this owner could use if I stop helping her. While I am not going to say there isn't a base of folks doing web design that are doing Orchard, my sense is that its much smaller than Joomla. This is a factor for me in helping non-profits, churches and so on, not leaving them in a place where I am the "only" person that could keep whatever it is running. Still, if there's even a couple of local web design shops that do Orchard, I'd say that's enough to feel comfortable.
We built http://aclj.org on Orchard with a custom membership implementation within to support millions of members. We do form processing through Kimbia for donations and petition signatures. We're very happy with the implementation and feel that Orchard worked out well for us as a platform. It is VERY extensible and we developed 32 custom modules in-house.
For a non profit organization it is unlikely to maintain a costly server where LAMP stack has both low cost server and some decent CMS which meets your requirements perfectly. Some of them are :
Drupal
Joomla
WordPress
Any of them are highly extensible, got a great community support , plenty of themes and modules readily available and you can get awesome things for free though there are some paid once too.
And if you want my recommendation i would go for Drupal as it provides :
Build in role management service.
Very matured and friendly community.
Great scalabilty.
Secured out of the box
And some more .......
Hope that adds a new dimension to your search :)
Best of luck
I would recommend wordpress for your requirement.
Advantages:
1. More forum support.
2. Easy to learn.
3. Very less server cost to host the site.
4. You will have N number of plugins and widgets etc...
Hope It gives some sense :)
I'm a front-end designer/developer whose weapon of choice for the back-end is WordPress. Up to this point all of my projects involving WordPress were fairly basic and it has handled everything beautifully. I just landed a new client that wants some extra functionality built into his next project and I'm hoping some of you WordPress wizards can give me some good advice while I'm putting together the quote.
I'm trying to limit the need for any subcontracting for the back-end functionality, so my question is whether or not WordPress can handle the following (via plugins or light custom manipulation):
The idea behind the site is to be a community calendar based on location that Health Care providers can log in and post their events to, as well as participate in discussions, blogs and all the other WordPress goodness. The specific functionalities that I'm unsure of the best way to accomplish are:
Full featured calendar that members with access can add their own events to - must be searchable by date/type of event/location etc
Event generator module for members that integrates with calendar - includes upload field for images and forms for details event info
Interactive map to filter both of the above by location (I'm assuming this will need to be flash, but I'd rather find another solution if possible)
I know there are other solutions out there that may be more suited to this than WordPress (Drupal, custom build, etc) but if it's at all possible to tackle this as a one man show then I'm going to charge it head-on!
Stack Overflowers and fellow WordPress fans...your insight would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance for your time.
This graph grants your experience with your weapon of choice, but the results are still clear. You can still tackle this as a 1 man show, it will just take a bit of a learning curve to conquer the fundamentals of a CMS more suited to the task at hand. I'm sure plenty of WordPress affecionados will come along and strangle my reputation, but I've worked with both and have found that in terms of flexibility, WordPress is not king, and for the custom coding you are going to have to do (hope you have some PHP?), I feel that you will find it easier to integrate with another platform. This task will be difficult if not impossible to accomplish without writing code, even if there is a set of plugins that appear on the face to match your needs perfectly.
But anyway, since you probably don't really care that much about my opinion, for WordPress, your plugin options look like..
Calendar - Events Calendar
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/events-calendar/
The screenshots don't look terribly promising though.
Most plugins I have found are geared toward being administered from the admin panel, it may be difficult to provide a user interface to such plugins, and it does not look like the event calendar is an exception. An experienced developer should be able to hook into the event publishing code with relative ease, but it could be a frustrating experience for the inexperienced.
For interactive maps, the Google Maps API is very feature rich, and you should be able to adapt it to your suit your mapping needs, regardless of platform.
If you want all of your providers to have their own blog, etc, what was once the WordPress MU plugin, but is now core-bundled WordPress MS (multisite) is what you need.
This again may also prove rigid, and you may encounter difficulty trying to bend the iron of WordPress enabling all your multisite users to be able to post to a common community site. I've only built 2 platforms with MU, so I'm not positive about this.
To unapologetically reiterate my first point, what would be light custom code may turn impossibly frustrating using WordPress.
I like WordPress, and choose it often for my clients. I have never extended it to suit a larger project.
If you do decide to use it, I look forward to hopefully helping you with any questions you may have along the way, feel free to ask.
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I'm working in a small company and weeks away from deploying a web-app that will be used a lot. Everyone at one location will have to learn to use it, and although I think it's pretty easy and intuitive I may be biased.
I've written a help guide with plenty of screenshots that's available on every page, but I'll still need to train everyone. What's the best way? How do you take a step back and explain code you've been working on for weeks?
First try to avoid the training:
Perform usability testing to ensure your web app is intuitive. Usability testing is a very important aspect of testing and it is often ignored. How you see your system will probably be very different as how a new user sees your system.
Also add contextual help as often as you can. For example when I hover over a tag in stack overflow, I know exactly what clicking it will do, because it tells me.
Also this may seem obvious, but make sure you link to your documentation from the site itself. People may not think of looking in your documentation unless its right in front of their eyes.
About training documentation:
Try to split up your material into how your users would use the system. I personally like the "trails" option that Sun created for their Java tutorials. In this tutorial you can do several things, and you can chose on which trail you'd like to go.
Support random reads in your help documentation. If they have a task to do in your web app, then they should be able to get help on that without reading a bunch of unrelated content.
Make sure your documentation is searchable.
About actual training sessions:
If you are actually performing training sessions, stay away from explaining anything related to your code at all. You don't need to know about the engine to drive a car.
Try to split up your training sessions into very focused aspects of your system. If you only have 1 training session available to you then just do one specialized use case of your system + the overall description of the system. Refer to the different parts of documentation where they can get help.
Letting the community help itself:
No matter how extensive your documentation is, you'll always have cases that you didn't cover. That's why it's a good idea to have a forum available to all users of the system. Allow them to ask each other questions.
You can review this forum and add content to your documentation as needed.
You could also open up a wiki for the documentation itself, but this is probably not desirable if your user base isn't very large.
Few ideas:
Do you have some canned walk-through scenarios? Don't know if it is applicable for your product, but I built a pretty substantial product a couple years ago and developed some training modules that they'd work through - nothing long, maybe 15 minutes tops for each one.
I put together a slide presentation that hit the highlights to talk about what it does. I would spend about 10 minutes going through the app's highlights to familiarize them with it before doing the hands-on stuff.
People don't tend to read stuff, unfortunately. You could put hours and hours into a help document, and still find that folks simply don't read it or skim over it. That can be frustrating. Expect that answers that are in your guide will be the topic of questions your users will have.
Break up any training you do into manageable chunks. I've been to a full-day training exercise before and the trainer broke it into short pieces and made it easy for me to get the training topic in my head. You don't want to data-dump on them because their eyes will gloss over and you'll lose them.
Ultimately, if your app is highly usable, it should be a piece of cake. If it isn't, you'll find out. You might want to have a few folks you know run through your training ahead of time and give you constructive criticism on it. Better to fix it before the big group is trained. You'll be more confident in the product and the training materials (whatever they are) and you'll likely have a better training experience.
If applicable, provide an online help/wiki/faq for them. Sometimes that is helpful.
Best of luck!
You should really have addressed this issue a lot earlier in the development cycle than you are doing.
In my view the ideal scenario for corporate software is one where the users design their own application and write their own documentation and I always try to strive for this. You should have identified key users early on and designed the system with them (I try to get my users to do basic screen designs and menu layouts in Excel or similar - then I implement that as static pages and review before writing a line of significant code, obviously they won't get the design right first time, but it's your job to guide them - and ideally in a way where they think they came up with the correct design decisions, not you :-) ).
These users should then write the user documentation from this design in parallel with you developing the system. I have never seen help documentation delivered by a IT department/software company used significantly in a corporate setting. Instead what happens is the users will create their own folder of notes and work-arounds and refer to this (in fact if you're ever doing system analysis to replace an existing system finding the 'user-bible' for the old system is a key strategy). Getting the users to write their own documentation up-front simply harnesses what will happen anyway - but this is vastly easier if the users feel they have ownership of the system because they designed it themselves in the first place.
Of course this approach needs commitment and time from your users, but generally it's not that hard a sell. It's trite, but working as a facilitator so the users can develop there own system rather than as a third party to give them a system pretty much guarantees user acceptance.
As you are where you are you're too late to implement all of this, but if you can identify a couple of keen, key, users and get time from them to write their own documentation then that would be a good move. If you can't get even that then you need to identify an evangelist who you can train to be the 'departmental' expert and give them 110% of your energy to support them.
The bottom line is that user acceptance is based on perception, and this does not necessarily correlate with how usable an system actually is. You have to focus on the group psychology of this as much as the reality of the system, which tends to be tricky for developers as we're much more factually based than most people.
I'll be looking into something like this too in the next few months.
In your case, hopefully the UI has already undergone user acceptance testing. You say you work in a small company. Is it possible to get the least tech-savvy person there to try it out? In fact, get them to try it out without any guidance from yourself except for questions they ask. Document the questions and make sure your user-guide answers them.
The main thing for me would be logic and consistency. If the app's workflow relates logically to the task it has been designed to accomplish and the UI is consistent you should be OK.
Create a wiki page to describe the use of your system. Giving edit rights to the users of your system lets the users:
update the documentation to correct any errors in the initial release of documentation,
share any tips on usage they may have found.
share unusual uses for the system that you may not have thought of.
request features.
provide any workarounds they've found while waiting for the new functionality to be implemented.
Try a few users first, one or two in a small company. Mostly watch, help as little as possible. This tells you what needs to be fixed, and it creates an experienced user base - so you are not the "training bottleneck" anymore.
Turn core requirements/use cases/storycards into HowTo / walkthroughs for your documentation.
For a public training, prepare a 10..15 minute presentation (just that, not more!) that covers key concepts that the users absolutely must understand, than show your core walkthroughs. Reserve extra time for questions about how to solve various tasks.
Think as a user, not as a techie: - noone cares if it's a SQL database and you spent a lot of time to get the locking mechanisms right. They do care about "does it slow me down" and "does something bad happen when two people do that at the same time". Our job is to make complicated things look easy.
It may help to put the documentation on the intranet in an editable form - page "comments", or wiki maybe. And/or put up a "error wiki" for error messages and blips - where you or your users can quickly add recomendations, workarounds and reasons for anything that does not go as expected.
Rather then train all those people I have chosen a few superusers (at least one person from each department) and trained them to teach the rest of the employees. It is of course vital that those super users are
well respected in their departments
able to teach
like the application
The easy way to ensure that they like the app is to have them to define the way it should work :-). Since they should work with this app each and every day they are the prime stakeholders, no matter what management states