I want to consolidate all the loose information of the company I work for into a knowledge base. A wiki seems to be the way to go, but most of the relevant information is buried inside PST files, and it would take ages to convince people to manually translate their emails one by one (including attachments) into wiki pages. So I'm looking for a wiki engine that supports page creation by email, that is, capable of receiving email (supporting plain text, html and attachments) and then create the corresponding page. Supporting file indexing and looking for duplicates would be a huge bonus.
I tried with WikiMatrix, but didn't find what I was looking for. I wouldn’t mind to build my own engine (borrowing a couple of snippets here and there for MIME decoding), but I don’t think is that a rare problem so there is no implementation.
Both Jotspot and MediaWiki allow you to do this. The latter has support for a lot of plugins, of which this is one. The format is essentially PageTitle#something. Jotspot is a hosted solution where you get your own email address, MediaWiki is self-hosted and you give it a mailbox to monitor for incoming.
Articles are appended to pages if they already exist, or a new page is created if it does not. This does require a degree of discipline for naming conventions, but is great for CC'ing.
We use MediaWiki here and I like it a lot. It has the same flaws as many other Wiki packages (e.g difficult to reorganize without orphaning pages) but is as good if not better than other Wiki packages I've used.
I don't know if this is exactly what you're looking for, but I know many of 37 Signals' products support adding data through email. I use Highrise to keep track of some of my business correspondence, and I'm able to CC or forward emails to Highrise and they get added to the appropriate contact.
Related
I’m working on a project (one I’ve inherited) with one main website for the purposes of gathering contact information from potential customers and a collection of sub sites which serve the same purpose. Each of these sites has a different design and each one is served from a separate directory under the document root directory. Each of these sub sites is also served from the same URL as the main site with a different directory specified in the URL for each one of these subsites, e.g. “http://www.example.com/subsite/”.
The problem as it is now is that our web designers have to make manual changes to the HTML in each of the files for these sub sites whenever a change is needed. Ideally, they would like to be able to manage these sites and make changes to them in a more rapid way and without having to make manual changes to something like 60+ sites each containing potentially 10-15 pages of HTML.
I’ve been doing research into various solutions and I’m not sure which would be the best to manage something like this. These sites are all built in PHP and I’ve been looking into CMS solutions such as Drupal, SilverStripe, and MODX but I’m not certain if they would meet our needs. I don’t have a lot of experience working with a CMS so I’m hoping someone with more experience can provide some insight. Any suggestions anyone can make regarding how best to handle something like this are greatly appreciated.
If I’ve left out any information that might be helpful/necessary in someone providing advice just let me know.
Any CMS will do what you need.
If I've understood well every subsite share the same domain, but only resides in a subdirectory.
For example with MODX you could define different templates with specific design for every subsite.
All subsites however could share some chunks (html code) or snippets (php code), so that a change in shared things applies to all subsites.
You can easily migrate the exisiting design to MODX:
http://codingpad.maryspad.com/2009/03/28/building-a-website-with-modx-for-newbies-part-1-introduction/
and find the additional pieces you need:
http://modx.com/extras/
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
We are done migrating a website from old CMS to SDL Tridion. We have thousands of clients out of which fewer than five are migrated. Now let's say we need to automate migrating the rest of the thousands clients, obviously we can not use manual effort. Is there a way to develop automated solution against SDL using any APIs it may provide? If yes where can we find documentation for APIs? Any Books or online tutorials for the same?
all very technical answers. Whatever route you choose you need to weigh up the option of not doing a technical migration (and trying to get that right) versus employing a load of students to copy and paste.
Regardless of the CMS, the complexity of a migration can be measured based on how organized is your content in the system you want to migrate from.
I categorize the migration into 3 types related to the Origin and Destination:
1--> CMS to CMS
2--> Database to CMS
3--> WebSite to CMS
If the original source is a database or another CMS typically the complexity is reduced, as the content is already structured.
You have to extract that and map the existing content with the structure that will have in the new system
If the goal is migrate an existing website into a CMS the complexity increases as the content is more disorganized that
having that in the CMS.
Again, if the content in the site is properly structured is still possible to automate that, but most of the cases are old sites
maintained manually.
There are commercial tools that crawl the content from the sites and apply patterns to identify common elements, common content, common metadata, structure
and are able to massage the original content and apply logic based on rules that allows to structure the content, however even the best tool has a hard
work to do when the source is disorganized.
Also I have seen migrations that cut the final html in pieces and put that in the CMS. That is an easy approach but of course a wrong one, as
you are not taking any advantage of the CMS
And 3 Types related the source type we migrate from and the source type we want to obtain
1--> Content to Content
2--> (HTML + Content All together) into (HTML) + (Content) separated
3--> (HTML + Content + Code All together) into (HTML) + (Content) +
(Code) separated
Content to Content Migration is less complex
Second option is of course more complex, as you have to Separate Content and HTML that will become templates
Third option is even more complex, as if you are extracting the html of the page (using an http client for instance as most of the commercial tools do),
you are not capturing the logic of the page. For this case you need to work at the file level
Try to do a very depth analysis before you enter in a migration, as things can turn complex.
Only if you have a very good knowledge of the original system and solid patterns to apply you can think in an automation
Tridion has extensive APIs and these are thoroughly documented. Your starting point for SDL Tridion 2011 is https://www.sdltridionworld.com/downloads/documentation/SDLTridion2011SP1/index.aspx
Automated migrations are perfectly possible, however API support is not the limiting factor here. Understanding your data in your source and target scenarios is much more important.
I would consider contacting Kapow or Vamosa who both specialize in crawling sites and then importing them to a CMS. They both have connectors for SDL Tridion. This may save your clients both time and money.
Every migration is different, unless you are migrating "thousands of" sites (assuming a client is a site) from same source type to same destination (SDL Tridion in this case) with extremely close data models. Several SDL Tridion partners are already solving this problem and built/building assisted migration automation tools. Get in touch with us if you need more information.
I have a web site project, a mixture of complex dynamic pages and authored CMS-managed content. I have the tools for the complex dynamic part and would like a CMS that allows me to call it to retrieve content that's been approved, i.e. for web site inclusion.
To be clear, I need the complex dynamic part to be the master and the CMS-managed content to be served up as and when I want it.
I had thought they'd be loads of options around this - it being an obvious (to me) thing to want to do. I'd also thought that CMS's would naturally publish API's (web service based ideally) to enable this...but my research so far doesn't seem to show this. Hopefully I'm just missing a trick. Can anyone help?
I've looked, btw, at openText, Alfresco, Jahia, Enfold, Percussion, Interwoven, EPIServer, Ektron to name a few.
Ideally, I'd like an open source CMS solution if there is one, definitely can't afford the big $ that some of the vendors are looking for.
Am I right in assuming you are wanting to use an API or Service to retrieve content from the CMS that has been through some approval process?
This is definately possible with EPiServer, through either the code API or, if more appropriate, a webservice, although I think the price might be an issue here.
I'm creating a site for a video store and it needs to be CMS. I'm doing this for free so I need to use a free CMS like Wordpress, Drupal or Joomla.
Do I need a new CMS, a plugin or some PHP of my own?
What I need:
User accounts
Categories
Custom post
Here's the site as it stands with WP: http://sundancevideo.ca. Right now an experimental site to try to work this out.
What I've done now, is created a "Draft" that includes a template table with images and text and so on. The user would then have to copy everything, past into a new post and replace necessary. This really isn't working well. As you may notice by the condition of the posts.
What I would prefer is if it was integrated into the WP UI. Like a field for "Description" and field for "Image" where they can upload the images as necessary. This would then generate post, with a table including all the information and images, for as many movies that were added in the UI.
I would suggest taking a look at PodsCMS as a great way to implement real CMS functionality in to WordPress. It allows you to create various content types, relate these content types, and more importantly live outside of the "WordPress bubble".
You'll find a fairly good codex and user guides (the ones authored by Johnathan Christopher are a great start). There is a solid API for this in the event that you need to integrate Pods in to an existing plugin or one you are creating. There are also developer and user contributed packages for Pods and there is even a YouTube video package you may want to check out.
PodsUI (soon to be merged with PodsCMS) allows you to create administration menus in WordPress very easily and allows you to pretty much make it look and feel how ever you want.
Flutter is a dead project and while it may be a little more user friendly than PodsCMS it lacks in in development, support, and over all usability.
Feel free to drop in the Pods Chat or # them on Twitter.
As for the user accounts you should read up on WordPress user roles/capabilties and also check through the WordPress PHPxref. A lot can be done in the way of using WordPress' current user system and you can even add other meta information for users if needed.
If you want a full CMS backend then you can't use Wordpress without extensive customising. You might want to check out pods cms for Wordpress which is an extension to attempt to turn Wordpress into a CMS. However, I have tried using it before and you will still be left with a confusing UI for your users. It will allow you to do the custom fields you want, however.
If you want full control over the UI, you will have to use either your own PHP or Drupal. Which one depends on how complex the project is and how much experience with Drupal you have had. If it is simple and your Drupal experience is limited, definitely go with your own PHP because Drupal is hard to learn. I think it would take you more time to learn Drupal than it will be to get a simple interface going with PHP.
I think this post will be helpful, depending on your experience, if you go with your own code.
i don't have particular suggestion for you custom need. Except beware for how much you give permission for your member. Please make sure they were a contributor and not author. In wp, the contributor role has no ability to publish. They have ability to post something just as a review. Thus, Administrator can review them and then published if it appropriated.
The problem with this situation is when you need them to upload things. The member with contributor role has no ability to upload video, image, or song. You have to custom this.
But if you only need their snippet or HTML link to the video (probably in youtube), then you don't have to change default wordpress role.
sorry if i mislead by your question. just trying to help as much as i can
I guess it depends on your shop's needs. I understand wanting to use wordpress, and you can do it, but at this point it almost makes people think... 'why?' If youre just going to use paypal and have a few products it might be a good idea but I think carts like zencart and oscommerce that are much better suited to store's needs. Though they are a little older. Magento and opencart are more modern, and all free. Though I've only ever used zen cart. None of these are terribly hard to set up. I guess You could always have you wordpress from page and use a link to your carts store menus.
MODx is brilliant for customisability - it was designed from the ground up to be extensive. It runs on PHP and MySQL.
You can create your own templates, add fields to those templates that appear in the UI when someone wants to create or edit a page based on that template. It has widgets for different data types, like images, dates etc that your users can use to add data to a page.
You also have full control over the HTML because you write the templates yourself. If the core code doesn't do what you need, you can write snippets in plain PHP to change the behaviour.
I've used it on a few projects over the past 3 years and I love it. I'd recommend MODx Evolution (v1.0.3) as that's stable. There's a brand-new rewritten version (Revolution 2.0.0) which is a release candidate at the moment, so you might want to have a play with that instead.
I reckon once you know MODx enough to create the site design, it'd be fairly easy to implement an off-the-shelf shopping cart into it (there may even be a MODx plugin that already does this.)