CMS for managing plain-text content, with tagging - tags

We have some quite-specific requirements for our app that a CMS may help us with, and were hoping that someone may know of a CMS that matches these requirements (it's quite a laborous task to download each CMS and verify this manually).
We want a CMS to allow users to create and manage articles, but storing the articles in plain-text only. All of the CMSs that we have looked at so far are geared towards creating HTML pages. We want the CMS to manage workflow (approval process), and tracking of history.
The requirements for plain text only is that the intent is to allow business people to generate content which we are going to display in our Silverlight application - we don't want to go down the route of hosting and displaying arbitrary HTML in the app as we want the styling to be seamless with our app, amongst other reasons.
We would also want to allow the user to be able to link to media stored on the server, but not to external sites (i.e. HTML with no formatting, or some other way of specifying article links), and the third requirement is the ability to tag articles and search on articles.
Does anyone know of any non-HTML targetted CMS systems that may match these requirements?

I would expect several CMS systems to allow this, but eZ Publish stores content as plain XML. And you have a way of allowing certain tags if you wish; and explicitly prevent for example external links. You then have options for how to present that content according the templates you choose to use.
You also have control via a /layout/set/myLayout directive.
You could for example retrieve the content as a plain xml feed or a print layout or whatever custom format you choose at the time. With appropriate headers.
http://doc.ez.no/eZ-Publish/Technical-manual/3.10/Reference/Modules/layout/(language)/eng-GB
vs.
http://doc.ez.no/layout/set/print/eZ-Publish/Technical-manual/3.10/Reference/Modules/layout/(language)/eng-GB
You could define a layout such as /layout/set/xml/....
Workflow as in content approval processes, versioning, tagging and search are standard.

You can give Statamic a try.
http://statamic.com/
Not sure if you can disallow external links, though.

Related

Change CKAN API Interface - are there limitations on the API?

I've looked around the site to see if there are any people who have changed the CKAN API interface so that instead of uploading documents and databases, they can directly type onto the site, but I haven't found any use cases.
Currently, we have a page where people upload data sets through excel forms that they've filled out, but we want to make it a bit more user friendly by changing the API so that they can fill out a form on the page rather than downloading the template, filling it out and then uploading it.
Does CKAN have the ability to support this? If so, are there any examples or use cases of websites that have use forms rather than uploads?
This is certainly possible.
I'm not aware of any existing extensions that provide that functionality, but you can check the official list of CKAN extensions if there's anything that fulfills your needs.
If there is no existing extension that suits you then you could write your own, see the extension guide for details on how to do that.
Adding an API function to CKAN's API is possible, but probably not what you want in this case: the web UI usually does not interact with CKAN via the API but via Flask/Pylons controllers. Hence, you would add your add controller which first serves your form and then processes the submitted inputs.
You can take a look at the ckanext-pages extension, which does exactly that (for editing static pages instead of datasets, but your code would be similar).

.NET CMS to manage copy changes

We have web application that renders dynamic content. We want to manage our content copy changes via separate managed system where developer does not get involved in writing copy and just leave place holder and later on copy writer adds copy.
Per my knowledge, any CMS takes control most of front end and leaves developer to just do design and layout level control.
I am looking for some CMS that does not take control page structure but instead it runs as a thin layer before page rendering and replace the place holders with content.
To give an example, https://localizejs.com/ simply do localization with a JS on client, I can use that but I guess SEO will an issue since content is replaced with Javascript which most search engine won't execute.
I think what you are looking for is called a headless CMS. That means it is a back-end interface for users to manage their content, but there is no front-end to render it - just APIs to access the content. You can call those APIs from your application.
A few examples I've used or looked at in the past:
Directus
Blackstar
There's also a lot of momentum around using Drupal as a headless CMS.

Form creation interface and simple back-end, should I go for CMS or is there a better option?

I often need to create similar, but very long HTML forms for a client. The forms contain some inter-dependent fields and lot of validations. Some images also need to be uploaded.
Then the client needs to check the database in the CPanel and export it from there.
I want to create something with easy interface which can create complicated forms. Also, client is asking for easy-to-operate back end. The CMS option looks like an overkill. I want to keep the site as lightweight as possible because of performance requirement.
Please suggest me the best path I should take. Should I try to develop everything from scratch? Should I use a CMS? Is there any particular CMS more suitable for the task?
We use ChronoForms along with Joomla 3.1 to create such forms. It has two modes, an easier one that limits the functionality but creation of forms is much easier. The other one offers the full capabilities of the engine but requires manual steps to do even simple things.
Having said that, ChronoForms is the most powerful web based forms designer I have come across. It seems they also support Wordpress now.
They have a drag-drop mechanism to design the forms. Validations are easy to do via check boxes for the standard ones. You can save the results into database tables, send emails, redirect users to specific pages, add captchas.
The backend allows you to view the records and create new tables based on the fields of the form. You can also export the result as CSV.

CMS for Extranet, Forms

I'm looking for a CMS for our extranet. We need users to be able to authenticate themselves and we'll want to design forms that submit data to a database. Just wondering what CMS systems people can suggest.
I think the majority of CMS systems can accomplish creation of simple HTML forms for data capture purposes. I guess it really depends on what you want to do with the forms - how complex are they? What do you need to do with the data afterwards?
I have experience with Ektron and can tell you that everything you want to do is possible with Ektron. You can setup Ektron to authenticate against Active Directory to enable Single Sign On for your users. Ektron users can create HTML forms for other users to use to submit data too.
It also depends on your budget - there are several open source CMS packages that you may also want to consider.

Wordpress custom pages CMS

I'm considering Wordpress as my CMS platform for a client site I'm doing at the moment.
However, I need to create a couple of custom 'modules'. One of these modules is a form that people will be able to complete and have a quote, and once submitted, in a special place in the Wordpress panel (like a menu or something), there will be a listing of all the submitted quotes (just fetching it from a table in my database).
Another one is to manage a cafeteria menu, so the client can add a different meal to each day of the week.
I know perfectly how to do this kind of things using some kind of MVC framework and doing it 'by-hand', but I'm just wondering if this would be possible to do with WP and if yes, what kind of tools I'll have to use.
Thanks
Quite simply, yes, WordPress would be a more-than-capable asset to your criteria. But it's whether the learning curve in getting to know WP outweighs using a framework you're clearly already familiar with?
Personally, it sounds you like you're pretty solid with PHP, and considering the fact that, in my opinion, what you're planning on doing is relatively easy, I'd say WordPress is an excellent solution.
I'd recommend reading about WordPress 3.0's new custom post type API, and skimming the basics of hooks and filters in the Plugin API.
Submitted quotes would merely be a custom post type. You'd be better off writing the front-end code (like handling the form, UI etc.) yourself, either within a theme or plugin, then using wp_insert_post and let WordPress handle all the database administration. In fact, WP will go one step further and set up the entire admin for viewing, editing and deleting quotes.
Post meta (also known as custom fields) is also there for you if you need to store additional information about a quote that doesn't quite fit the post's table structure.
For the menu, this is even easier. I'd say just create a post category called 'Menu', and the client can publish 'dishes' to it as you would with a blog or any similar rolling format.
I've only licked the surface here. Get stuck in with the above, then check out some other goodies like meta boxes and custom taxonomies!
If you want to try a plugin instead of writing something yourself, Flutter might work. It's a little unpolished sometimes but it makes this sort of thing an absolute breeze.