Configuring CMS Made Simple and Plogger

I went looking for a Content Management System to create my website. My website has been 'under construction' for about two years because I don't have the patience to hand edit HTML and upload it to the server. Nor am I so tied to one PC that I can install a stupid, heavy WYSIWYG editor on a PC and upload changes to the server.

My hosting company, Netfirms, has Joomla installed. Joomla is so hideously complicated and slow that I don't use it much either. All I need is a site that I can update with the ease of a blog, but with more structure than a blog.

I went looking for live demos and found:

demo.opensourcecms.com

This site is great, if a bit slow and clunky. I highly recommend it. I went through most of the CMS software on the site and settled on CMS Made Simple. It has a relatively good WYSIWYG page editor and allows pages to be structured hierarchically. It also has a News module, and other plugins can be installed when needed. It's like a lighter Joomla (which came with the kitchen sink preinstalled). Plone (NOT on opensourcecms.com) came second, but unfortunately it requires installing software on the server, and with my account I can't do that.


Configuration of CMS Made Simple is easy.

• Download the tar.gz archive from cmsmadesimple.org
• Extract the tar.gz using tar -zxvf
• Move the cmsmadesimple-x.x.x folder to your web server's document root
• Open a browser and navigate to your website/cmsmadesimple-x.x.x
  
• Go through the five step wizard

The only tricky bit of the install is the database setup. Assuming you have MySQL configured and running, you need to create a database and then grant privileges on the database to your user. Step by step instructions are included in the wizard on how to configure MySQL.

Since I have hosting, I had to create a database using the admin app of my hosting company. I then added a user, but CMS Made Simple errored out trying to create tables. I had to create an admin user, and log in to the database through PhpMyAdmin before CMS Made Simple (and later, plogger) worked. CMS Made Simple lets you just keep trying new user names/passwords, etc until the database part works (unlike a lot of enterprise software that bombs out if you mistype one letter).

You can access the admin pages for CMS Made Simple by navigating to http://yourwebsite.com/cmsmadesimple-x.x.x/admin

I added a handful of static pages right away, and disabled the default pages.

My only other difficulty was in installing themes. I looked for themes on google, and found several in zip files. I tried uploading them to the Theme Manager (in the menu bar after you log in as an admin), but got an error about 'DTD Version Mismatch.' Actually, the Theme Manager only accepts XML files. Where are the images, etc? The theme author may have done one of two things:

1. Wrote an XML file, and included resources such as images in the same zip file. You will need to unpack the zip file and upload the resources to the directories specified in the readme file that came with theme. Is the readme missing? Place the theme in your recycle bin because I have no idea what to do with these files.
2. Wrote an XML file, and embedded the resources in the file as ASCII data. This is great, because all you need to do is use the Theme Manager's import button to load the XML file. Away you go.

I tried out two themes, "Grass Stains", "Andreas00" and "Flowered." Grass Stains worked just fine. andreas00 had issues reading the embedded resources in the XML, and is unuseable. Flowered was a zip file of images, css files, and some other files. The README was terse and unhelpful. After trying to make the thing work I just trashed it.



Onto Plogger. Plogger is really easy to install as well.

• Download plogger
• Extract the zip file
• Move to your web server doc root
• Load your browser, and navigate to http://yourwebsite.com/plogger/_install.php
• Follow the wizard to configure plogger

Plogger has less options than even CMS Made Simple. I forget if the wizard had step by step MySQL setup instructions, but if you just finished the CMS Made Simple install, they're pretty much the same, but you will have a different databaseame, username, and password.

If you forget to type _install.php, plogger's main page will tell you to go to_install.php.

After the install is complete, you can access plogger's admin page by navigating to http://yourwebsite.com/plogger/admin

I had trouble logging in using Firefox 1.6 with plogger 2.01 beta. Whenever I tried to type a password, the page refreshed. I had to use IE. I created a collection called "Travel Photos", then an album called "San Diego, March 2007" and then uploaded some pictures. Straightforward.

Woot!