I am have a requirement of creating a user feedback function in a DNN 5 (community edition) site, it includes about 30 MCQ questions and a couple of file attachments upload boxes. Can it be done using DNN survey module (http://dnnsurvey.codeplex.com)?
I don't have much experience with the DNN modules, will appreciate your comments.
You might look at some other third party module like - data springs dynamic forms - http://datasprings.com/Products/DNNModules/DynamicForms.aspx
Would be a little easier in my opinion
Mandeeps LiveForms is the best solution.Gather user feedback and create amazing surveys with star rating, scale rating, and matrix / grid with multiple input types.
https://www.mandeeps.com/products/dnn-modules/live-forms
Related
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.
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
Whats the best way to start to train an end user in a CMS like DOTNETNUKE?
The end user will want to add edit and delete there own content. They will need to install modules and understand how everything works?
Should i create a manual? is there a way to plan some training?
any ideas?
edit: the end users are VERY I.T illiterate, they struggled to even understand the rich text editor. I need to train them on how to use the form and list module and the HTML module for editting content. They want a document of some sort, this is really old school.
PD24, for what most customers do it usually only takes 5-10 minutes of training. I usually create a couple Jing Videos which is a free screen and audio recording tool. I go through and do voice over as I create a page, edit text, add photos, add modules and record it. Then I send them the links they can reference if they ever need a reminder.
Works great! (boooo to manuals, no one reads those and they take a lot of time to make!)
& DNNcreative is probably too detailed for your client, that's a good resource for DNN implementers.
We have a variety of videos in the video library on DotNetNuke.com you could point users to those for specific topics.
We (DotNetNuke Corp) also provide custom training solutions, we could develop a custom training program for your client that fits the scope of your project and delivery requirements. If you want more info feel free to email me at training#dnncorp.com.
Have a look into www.dnncreative.com, they have some awesome tutorials for developers and users.
i need to put a corporate site under a cms, which i haven't finally chosen yet, and have some tight requirements for it:
it should be very well organized at a code level, as i'm a developer and i need to add some very custom functionality to the site;
ability to create custom content types (a la drupal's cck does);
very good i18n abilities as the site will be multilingual to and fro;
caching / performance control solutions as the site experiences tens of thousands unique hosts a day;
publishing features like pre-moderation, authoring and versioning;
sending custom emails;
creating custom web forms with input data validation;
content access levels;
i would like to have my static content (images / css / pdf's etc) on a separate domain (possibly hosted on amazon cloud) processed by caching proxy server like nginx -- not a tight requirement, but still;
i evaluated these requirements and came up with ez publish as a solution. i'm not very experienced in cms world; i've worked with drupal and wordpress, but, being good cms'es, none of these meet my requirements (drupal isn't good at a code level and wordpress is a blog solution). also i don't want to mess with joomla or complexity of typo3. so, my question is -- does ez publish have a competitor in this field, regardless of the implemention language?
Given that you already went through a clear requirement analysis and already figured that eZ Publish meets them all, there is no other need for me than pointing you to the very welcoming eZ Publish Community, in case you would like to have more in-depth, real-life feedback on every of your points above, by eZ Community members.
You can find them there : http://share.ez.no
A recent code-level comparison between eZ Publish & Drupal confirms your intuition : http://share.ez.no/blogs/marko-zmak/ezpublish-vs.-drupal
I must confess i liked reading your :
.. and wordpress is a blog solution
Cheers,
I'd have to agree with Nicolas. I worked for about 4 years doing custom CMS integration for companies of all different sizes and requirements and to this day I haven't found an open source CMS that has the abilities of eZ Publish.
During that time I also did a lot of implementations of "Conversational Marketing" (blogs with marketing purposes) and they were of course all in WordPress. WordPress can be extended to do a lot of different things, but you're very correct in your pigeonholing of it as a blog solution. Any customization of it requires you to extrapolate your problem as if it was a blogging issue.
With eZ Publish, the community involvement is very expansive and the core of the CMS is built to be customized in any way you would like.
Best of luck, and I would agree with your choice and Nicolas's vote for it.
eZ Publish is definitely the right answer here as it meets to all your requirements by its built-in features or by its extensions.
Yes, eZ Publish learning curve can be tough, but it worths the effort !
eZ Publish will definitely deliver all of those functional requirements almost 100% out-of-the-box. Also, check out the eZ Components / Zeta Components library used by that CMS. Feature-wise TYPO3 is also strong but the code isn't so clean ( IMHO ).
The only other system I know of that can come close is Plone CMS ( Python based ).
Increasingly, I have noticed the number of Content Management Systems in use. I have some familiarity with SiteCore. I have read some literature on Umbraco. I only just got wind of Orchard the other day. I have only heard positive feedback about EPiServer. I am soon to move into a role that uses it.
Do these differ vastly in features and price? What has led you to choose one (or several) over the others?
EDIT
I did a brief review of so-called free CMSs here: On Free Microsoft Compatible Content Management Systems
Reasons I ditched Orchard when developing a 50k page website:
The Orchard CMS import tool is simply too slow. It would only accept
small batches at a time. Initially, it took eight minutes to import
1000 records. So, working on that principle I expected that it could
take seven hours to import all the records. Unfortunately, I started
to receive performance issues as more records were inserted into the
database. I even started to reduce the batch size, which helped only
temporarily in the early stages. (See Saying no to Orchard)
I can only comment mainly on Sitecore and a bit on Umbraco from my knowledge of others using it:
Sitecore is an enterprise level web CMS with an "enterprise price tag." It's very extensible, has a lot of developer/community support, and is very developer friendly. The structure of content is based on a tree of nodes with parent-children relationships. Sitecore is well known in the WCM community as a leader in content management and is rated very well by companies sch as Forrester Research, etc.
Based on my previous research and conversations with friends, Umbraco is very similar to Sitecore. It has a lower price compared to Sitecore but its not a complete rip off. Umbraco is also built on ASP.NET like Sitecore.
Here's a three-part series on Sitecore vs. Umbraco from a developer.
Of the ones you mention above, I have only used Umbraco and Sitecore to build with and am certified in both. I like the way they allow me to build systems that really work well for my customers. They both have a feel that they simply give you building blocks to create your masterpiece instead of "modules" of functionality plugged in that give you a blog, forum, etc. They make it really easy to share content throughout the site and create really nice admin experiences.
Umbraco's community is really great. They both struggle a little on the documentation side IMO, but Umbraco's videos really help and the community is quick to help. Also, if you're talking cost then its free (Umbraco) vs. quite expensive (Sitecore).
But the reality is that each developer has their own taste and the style of CMS they like to work with. Ultimately, its the team that has to build the site that really matters most when it comes to how each CMS performs for the end user.
In addition to the links above, here are a couple blog posts that may help you get a feel for the different systems:
Orchard & Umbraco - Introduction (part 1 of 4) - Aaron Powell
Sitecore vs. Umbraco Terminology
Good luck!
I mostly work with EPiServer and Sitecore, and I can tell you the difference in short:
Sitecore has broader architecture and more powerfull UI. CMS is deeply configurable and highly extensible, it has clever publishing and caching system, powerful search and page editor. But it doesn't provide much out of box and UI is pretty old, slow and hard to learn. So this will be a long journey until you understand it good and make a good support of all its features for editors.
EPiServer is easy, friendly to users and developers. It provides an essential bunch of features out of box, has easy UI and page editor, good drag-and-drop experience, easy personalization. It is code-first, distributed with NuGet, provides dependency injection for its services, out of box MVC support. But it's not so extensible and configurable, has pure search (without expensive EPiFind module) and generally lower-featured comparing to Sitecore. So it's good for small/middle websites, but can be an obstacle in complex solutions.
Both have similar tree-item concept, rich documentation, pure public module system and hard UI customization. Both expensive and not open source.
As I know, Umbraco is pretty similar to EPiServer and Sitecore, but free and open source. Of course you get less features, more bugs, not much docs and no free support.
Orchard is really different comparing to other three CMS. It is module-based like Wordpress: you use standard or public modules and themes, instead of writing the whole website from scratch. You create your own themes and modules to customize the website and CMS. So entire CMS is highly extensible and provides a lot of free community modules. But in the same time you lose control and learning curve is much longer. Orchard is free and open-source, entirely MVC-based, UI and API are well done, but it can be hard for both developers and editors to understand it.
Wordpress vs Episerver:
http://tedgustaf.com/blog/2011/2/comparison-of-episerver-and-wordpress/
OK so the guy who wrote that is an Episerver consultant but it's interesting and balanced.
All the different web content management systems have different strengths. So which one is best for you depends a lot on what kind of sites you create, what kind of budget you have and what you think matters the most in a CMS.
For example, Orchard and SiteCore are VERY different systems.
I'm a bit biased as I work there, but I believe that Webnodes CMS have several important advantages over the systems you mention.
Keywords: Relations between content, actual classes for the different content types, custom LINQ provider for all data access, expose all content as an OData endpoint etc.
Microsoft used our CMS to demonstrate OData at Mix11. Video from Mix 11