Has anyone had experience with MySource Matrix as a content management system? If so, thoughts/opinions/comments?
Thanks in advance.
Absolutely excellent. It takes little while to get used to how it does things with its asset structure, but it is really flexible and powerful. Simple edit interfaces are great too.
Make sure you give it enough hardware. If you want dynamic content without caching you need heaps of grunt to make it hum.
Hands down the best CMS I have ever used. We use it on the Pacific Union College website, as well as many side projects. I am still amazed at all it has to offer compared to other products that are not free.
Give it a good look, and take some time to get past the learning curve, but once you do, it will be more than worth it. :)
I've recently been trying to use it in an organization where many non power users are generating content. - it has many interface bugs and odd behavior, so that many simple tasks (i.e. loading images) often have to be done by an power user (i.e. me).
When you are editing the HTML of page content white space is not preserved. If you where to format the HTML in the WYSIWYG editor, save you changes, and then come back the whitespace you've added will be removed - actually when you switch the WYSIWYG editor into HTML mode it doesn't show you the exact HTML, and does some silly things - like pressing enter inserts non breaking spaces - but doesn't show them until you save and re-enter HTML mode.
it is a number of little details like this which make it generally frustrating to use and disliked by everyone here.
Related
After years of experience with custom made CMS systems, I come to this conclusion:
Clients really want to copy and paste information from word processors into their website CMS. They don't like to create large texts in a website box, and prefer to do so from their good old word processor. Or they simply have their text already prepared for other purposes, and therefore want to copy and paste.
Clients do not like to lose their format. They've spent time on their boldface text, headings, etc, and they do not like to do this all over again.
Rich Text Format fields (TinyMCE, CKEditor, etc) are not yet able to properly convert all formatted text into the right HTML. I do not blame them; this has to be very difficult given the odd 'source code' that word processors put in the clipboard. But reading all SO topics about richttext related issues, I feel this is a known limitation.
What do you do in such cases? I've tried the following:
Explain the client beforehand that this is not a word processor we are implementing, and it has limitations. They can understand, but still want to copy and paste.
Only show very few buttons for formatting (bold, italic, links). That way, we can strip the tags and clean this up quite well, and this limits issues. Works better, but clients keep asking for font options, more colors, headers, etc.
So not a really good solution in sight. Are there others who have tackled this issue successfully?
One solution (and probably the best I've come up with) is to post-process the pasted content. So, catch the publish event and correct all the crappy HTML -- catch all the "mso-normal" styles, for instance, and remove them. You'd have a set of rules which clean stuff coming out of, say, MS Word.
Though, this is not just a word processing problem. You're pasting from one rich text editor to another, and styles just don't transfer between rich editing environments. This is not so much a technical problem as it is a logical problems.
Update: Someone pointed me to this: Copy-Pasting Word to your Web CMS. No real solutions, but just confirmation that it's a sticky problem.
I totally agree with you:
Last week I did a very interesting test with a customer for which I had to prepare some demo's of .NET based CMS systems (Umbraco, Sitefinity, DNN, Composite C1 ect). The customer himself had a Drupal based site and I was ashamed none of my CMS demo's did a 100% job with a complicated Word table (Ceteris paribus: I did not do some CMS fine-tuning, used every CMS out of the box). The worst part was his Drupal CMS did a 100% good job! It was exactly the same as it was in Word. For a client working a lot with Word my CMS-ses were a showstopper. Of course there are a lot of discussions on the web about 'you should not copy from Word' or 'do NOT use Word for CMS things'. Fact is: clients work with Word so we should deal with it.
As a side project I tutor grandparents and other computer novices in Computer & Internet 101, from physically using a mouse to dealing with e-mail/searching/etc. Web development isn't really my area of focus - I do have reasonable HTML/CSS/Javascript etc skills, so I can throw together a decent-looking simple, static site - but occasionally I get asked to put together extremely simple websites for these people, that they can update themselves; that is, edit text-based content without giving Grandpa a heart attack by making him come face-to-face with HTML/Javascript.
I've waded through a mile-long list of CMS software - largely culled from the many other similar questions on SO - but they've all got something ruling it out: hosted, restricts the design (can't use w/existing CSS, looks "Word-press-y", etc), not free/FOSS, etc. I wonder if "CMS" is even the right word for what I'm looking for. What I need is a simple text editor for the client: that is, something that will give the client a text box of some variety, let them edit it, and update the content with that info. They can't mess with navigation, add new pages, change anything other than text. If it was really fancy, they could upload a picture.
I was planning to do this just with a couple of password-protected php forms, but thought I'd ask if there's anything already out there that might provide this functionality? Any suggestions on building my own version of this, in PHP or something else?
What I'm really interested in is:
1) the simplicity/customize-ability of the admin interface (or lack of admin interface, if the client could somehow edit directly in the page), and
2) ease of set up for me (not getting paid much if at all for this, don't want to wade through three million plugin options to figure out how to get some unwieldy, high learning-curve framework to do what I want).
Try pulsecms.
Here is another very simple CMS that has JQuery and modernizr , HTML5 Boilerplate and TinyMCE.
I have my wife setup with Windows LiveWriter
http://explore.live.com/windows-live-writer?os=other
This means that she just builds her articles as if she is using a word processor (almost exactly the same) and then just uploads the article to her blog. I use Blogengine.net to host the blog on a Godaddy hosting solution.
Blogengine comes with built in support for LiveWriter and only required that you input the address, username and password in.
I understand this is an old post, but i hope someone find this of interest.
You could give the users the instruction to upload text files to the site, and the have the HTLM/PHP/ASP pages load the context of such .ts files.
Each web page should have a specific named .txt file associated.
I need advice/suggestions.
At my place of work - we have a large data set.
We would like to server the data up as editable html pages.
(Its mostly lists of simple text)
We would like to add data, change it's order, update text etc...from the editable pages.
It has to have a pretty low bar for usability and WYSIWYG is a must.
The folks who will edit are not programmers by a long shot.
We are not sure Wiki will work.
It might have to do - but not sure.
Changes have to be tracked and written back into the DB
I am thinking some kind of open source CMS might work?
Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal - something that can get us up and running pretty quickly.
I really am open to suggestions - not sure where to begin on this one.
Thanks all
If you don't have someone available right now with expertise with a specific CMS, it will not be quick to set up at all. One good reason is that you'd have to import all of your existing data into whatever form the CMS supports: this is a task for someone who has done it before. On the other hand, if you can pull that off, some of the built in WYSIWYG editors are quite easy to use, with some systems you get versioning and author information for free etc. I'm speaking mostly with the eZ Publish CMS in mind, although it's probably true for other systems.
I would make a simple CMS site that uses the Ajax control toolkit HTML Editor and perform updates to the database on postback.
Here is the link to the Editor example
http://www.asp.net/ajax/ajaxcontroltoolkit/Samples/HTMLEditor/HTMLEditor.aspx
CMS Made Simple (http://www.cmsmadesimple.org) is very easy to set up and use. You do need to understand xhtml and javascript for the theme whacking, but once it's set up it has been trouble free. See my http://www.ConvinceProject.com as an example. It is MUCH easier to use than Drupal and appears to be more stable. I've had Drupal crash when installing security updates to modules, for example. It gives you full access to the header metatags, has fully integrated php and smarty tags, seems quite complete.
AFA importing, this is all mysql-based, although it can use others. If you have a web-whacking coder, pages can be 'scraped' and stuffed if it's more than cut and paste will do.
Lots of us can do it, it's not hard.
If I understand you correctly, it seems like you just need a web-based GUI for editing your DB. Honestly it would probably be faster to just roll your own in the language most familiar to you. There are many fine WYSIWYG editors out there that you can wrap around a text field, such as http://ckeditor.com/.
On the the other hand if you're hoping to solve this problem with DB skills and not do any web dev it may indeed be easier to find a simple CMS. ModX and SimpleCMS comes to mind. Joomla, Drupal and WP all come with so many out of the box features you'd have to strip out - look for something that starts fairly simple. Drupal in the right hands could do this, it has tools for importing/exporting to external DBs but the learning curve is pretty steep. Be aware that some CMSes do strange things with entry data...you may have to look for a text field inside a stored array (Drupal) instead of stored as a straight text field.
I understand that no matter what I do, someone will be able to copy it. However I can still make them work hard for it. What are some good ways of making data not easily copied using php compatible coding.
--- Added ----
The data is a listing of results for certain local sports events. We send people out to collect the information, post the information, make corrections and such. However a competing website takes our results (I know they are directly copying them) and never updates them which causes people to call our office and complain.
---- Answer for my Use ----
I picked one of them, however I am going to use multiple of your answers. I am going to add my link in a using the copy pasta trick. I am going to put fake hidden text into it. I am also going to do the fake hidden text trick with different versions of the div tag that are fake (making it even harder to scrape or to do something like copy to textpad and replace it real easily), and I am going to talk to a lawyer as well about legal recourse and what I can do to make it illegal for them to copy the data (such as creative bios or something cool like that). Thanks for your help.
Joe, you can't really make them work really hard to get your data. It's essentially just a single request to any of your pages. Your best option is to explicitly state that you own the rights to all of your content, and that any infringement on that ownership will lead to legal ramifications*.
* Not a lawyer
Your data will be copied to every computer that requests the page and it will stay there until the person clears their cache. To answer your question, you can't.
What you can do is create a CSS style such as:
.copy-pasta { display: none; }
And then throughout your content, add something like this:
<p class="copy-pasta">Content provided via [your website here]</p>
This will increase your page rank when copy-pasters blatantly steal your content, meaning you will show up first in search results.
Place some <div style="display: inline; position: absolute; overflow: hidden; width: 0px">useless words</div> in the text. It won't display for reading, but if someone copy and paste... "WOW where it came from WTF!! *CRY*"
How about putting links to your site in with the displayed data? No big fanfare, but just suggest that the for the most up to date figures, they can go to the real website that publishes them.
Most of what you try will only work for a time. Until you exceed their laziness factor. (What they're doing suggests a high laziness factor.)
Laws don't protect publicly available data, but you may be able to protect the packaging and presentation.
Programs used to copy out data look for the data using pattern-matching. You could 'decorate' your data with randomly-chosen tags (like one row would have a span tag surrounding it, the next row a div, etc...). Just a thought.
Clarification:
With screen-scraper at least, the user of the program specifies what HTML comes before the data they want, and what HTML comes after it. You can make it more difficult for them to automatically retrieve the data.
Why are people calling your office to complain if the data is on a competing website? If they have a domain name that is similar enough to yours that people are confusing the two of you or if they've put something on their site that makes it look like you've endorsed them, then you've got them for trademark infringement.
Disable the context menu is a start.
$(document).bind('contextmenu', function(e)
{
return false;
});
Or
<body oncontextmenu="return false;">
Forbidding people to get data is almost impossible. You can mess up your tags and make the code really dirty and hard to parse... but it's not really enough. You could also generate a big image with the data in it, this would be painful to parse! ... but you don't want to do that.
Because you said...
However a competing website takes our
results (I know they are directly
copying them) and never updates them
which causes people to call our office
and complain.
... my call would be to take this the other way and create an API allowing people to get your content in a way that YOU designed.
Also if they are just shamelessly stealing your data and they don't have the right to do it, consider a legal option.
Another option is to use PHP code to generate images from the site's HTML. You would use the images to display the content, instead of HTML which can be easily copied out. Example code is here, and I bet you could find more code to do this by Googling:
http://www.acasystems.com/en/web-thumb-activex/faq-php-convert-html-to-image.htm
Try Copyscape it wont prevent your content from being copied, but it will make finding the copies very easy.
You may encrypt the data on the page, and have javascript obfuscated decoding routine that will decode it for you viewers. You may switch keys and encryption algorithms from time to time. Same javascript should disable ability to select text and/or copy it to prevent manual copy-pasting.
They won't be able to copy manually and their scraper would have to be able to run javascript to get the data.
Caveat is that the data won't be visible for Google, but if data is rather numeric it might not be such a big harm.
If they scrape automatically and very often you may also try to pinpoint their IP by observing most active IP-s on your site and serve them fake data.
Please don't use lawyers, that's hitting below the belt.
use swf to display your data, just like other online books
I am looking for a nice framework for developing a GUI builder Application. We have an application where 100Os of custom data entry forms and their print formats are required and each client will need some modifications on these. We have a developed a product using java based open source templatnig frameworks so that the layout and field definition are stored in database and rendered dynamically to the user. We also have an appication to design these forms but cannot do visual design.
Now I am trying to make a Visual Form Designer application for generating these forms. Can any one suggest some open source frameworks than can be used? Can I use Eclipse Visual Editor? Or is it better to develop some kind of parser for HTML using AntLR and then parse the HTML output from already existing GUI builders like Dreamweaver to get the desired output?
Thanks and Regards,
-- Kannan
Oooh, great question!
I wouldn't know any readily availble framework that you can use. Depending on your needs however, I think rolling your own shouldn't be too hard.
First of all, you probably wouldn't want to give the users too much freedom. Freedom only gives them the opportunity to mess things up and make the resultant forms hard to use. I think from your description that the fields are pre-defined, so that the user only needs to customize which fields appear on a given form, and in what order. Order can be a simple thing like top-to-bottom. Some semi-intelligent automatic layouting could be used to conserve screen space. Adding a feature to group fields together would probably also be useful, and grouping would lead to some kind of standard "group" widget.
Accepting simplified functionality like this, you don't really need the flexibility of a full gui editor. A couple of listviews, maybe a property sheet and a preview window will be enough to give your users the functionality they need.
Of course, this only holds for screen forms. Print forms may be trickier to layout, as people may want to cram as many fields as possible into very little space so the entire form can fit on a single page or something. I really don't have any suggestions for you there, but maybe a similar "simplified" approach with some intelligent auto-layouting could work.
Overall, my advice would be: Keep It Simple! (S... ;)