I'm looking for tools or libraries that load simple but old existing websites and produce an output which can be loaded into wordpress or other CMS. The goal is to keep the existing websites navigating structure and content.
Any hints?
What I've discovered is that it really depends upon the CMS. I would recommend a "tag-pair"-based CMS like the new Craft or ExpressionEngine's free Core version (there're others too) where you drop in a looping control area, replace the fields with the tags and then it just runs. I personally like those because they offer a cleaner separation between content and design.
I'm trying to learn Wordpress now and it's backwards of what you want - you create template environments and half the design seems to be controlled by the code. Great if you want to swap generic templates around, but if you customize them you're doing a lot of work. I'm looking at a site I inherited and conditional statements are a nightmare - half in the templates and other in the plugins themselves (Events, I'm looking at you).
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First of all i don't have any experience on wordpress.. So please forgive my ignorance.. I've found a theme on themeforest. Unfortunately it's a wordpress theme. I want to develop my own admin panel. I don't want to use wordress. Is it possible?
Anything is possible, however this is a gum in hair scenario. Ask the theme author if there is an HTML version which is common on ThemeForest. If you do try to "extract" the layout:
Begin with the stylesheet and match up the styles with each page template's markup.
Also, why not use WordPress? The Redux theme options framework is very easy to use.
Since a wordpress theme is just a bunch of html/css/js/php files, yes, it is possible. Depending on what language/framework will used backend side, the easiest way would be to extract the html/css/js parts of the theme and than add your own "content-placeholders" which will be used by your own backend.
But: Think twice about doing this. First, there could be a conflict with the license of the theme (depending on what type of license is used by the author of the theme). And more important, second, you should think twice about building your own backend.
For the case this isn't an experiment and you're building a productive website, building you're own backend is a lot of work. Unless you need some special functionalities (or you would like to keep it very slim and basic), I would suggest using a ready made CMS for this - like wordpress.
My opinion: 95% of self-made backends for basic cms features I've seen (and was forced to work with) are very messy and far beyond available open source cms. It seems like many people don't balance the pros and cons of building an own CMS-backend and undervalue the effort to build a state-of-the-art CMS.
For about a year and a half I used Codeigniter to build my sites. Then a client begged me to build theirs in Wordpress. I soon found the joy of using a CMS (if Wordpress can be called that). So for about the last 8 months I have been using Wordpress as much as possible to buld my sites - I made the content fit the design.
Well, I began to grow very tired of the limitations of Wordpress - I needed more control and flexibility over my sites. So, I have recently started using Drupal 7 (not 6.x - I really like the admin panel).
After working with Drupal now for a little under two months - I have begun to feel like I'm using Stone Age Tools to build Space Age equipment.
So my question is: does Drupal get any better? Do you really have to use Views to display your content? Asking for help on the forums is just a shake better than asking a wall. I feel like to do anything requires a module. Why? Is one better off sticking to a framework?
"After working with Drupal now for a little under two months - I have begun to feel like I'm using Stone Age Tools to build Space Age equipment."
Well, my intiial reaction is that this is what you're going to feel like you're doing when you're working with Drupal 7, which isn't out of alpha yet. A good number of the folks who maintain modules haven't started upgrading to 7 yet, and that means that you're missing out on one of the great features of Drupal, which is it's wide and deep space of premade modules.
Try 6.
Do you need to use views to display all content? No, not at all. You can go in, create a new module, and write the sql and presentation that you want. Or you can find a module that will display things for you. Or, depending, you might be able to get the effect you want just by adjusting the theme you're using.
(As a side note, using an admin theme really pretties up the Drupal experience. I'm fond of rootcandy, although Rubik is nice too. Problem with Rubik is that it's not on drupal.org.)
The strength of Drupal is that by using modules, you don't have to re-write code that someone else has written - you can instead take that code and modify it (with hooks) to do what you want. This means you don't have to write an authentication/autherization system again - it's there in core. You don't need to write up openid handlers - it's in core. You don't need to write code to integrate with twitter directly - there's a module that contains an api that helps out. You don't have to write an xmlrpc server from scratch - you can use the services module.
You don't need to write a website from scratch. Instead, you can start with Drupal, add most of the functionality you need, and then spend your time making it fit what your client wants.
Firstly, you can install the Admin module to pretty up Drupal 6 admin. You don't have to use 7. 7 is still in alpha, by the way. Garland sucks, but, Garland is just a theme- its not 'the' admin itself. The Drupal admin can take the form of any Drupal theme, which is useful in its own right, depending on the use-case.
In Drupal, you can create content types clicking through the interface in Drupal 6 or 7. As far as I can see in WP3, you have to script it. A few clicks vs scripting, the choice for me is not hard there. The first way is a lot more efficient, and a task you can hand off to a non coder to get done.
You don't HAVE to use Views to display content.
You -can- use Views to make the display of content easier, by telling Drupal to gather data and provide a Page, Block, or Feed to display . This lets you create specific sections of content for areas of the site. Otherwise, you would have to create a node, and hijack its template, run a direct sql query yourself AND write the pager functions just to show something easy like the latest 10 "Press Releases" content type. Then, if someone added a new field to that content type, you have to update all that SQL code and display code. Views makes your life easier in that respect. In minutes you can flesh out site sections and arrange content in a myriad of ways. In Wordpress, this method of arranging content without functionality of Views is/was a modern nightmare and a reason I do not want to use it at all unless its a blog and nothing more.
The Drupal Support Forum is tricky. Not all modules are as active as say, Views or Pathauto (being two of the most popular modules). However, SO is also at your disposal. I answer a lot of Drupal questions here. The trick to the Forum there is you have to ask it in the right spot. True, sometimes you may have to wait a few days to get an answer, then again no one -owes- you an answer for a free product. Thats the nature of open source.
Every developer has their favorite modules to use with Drupal, and more often than not, its the same 20 or so modules. It depends on what you are doing, what you are trying to implement. It's not that 'everything needs a module' its that Drupal is such a vanilla install because Drupal does not want to assume your purpose nor overwhelm with options. The UX is something they are trying to improve anyway, and popular modules are making their way into core.
Well, I began to grow very tired of
the limitations of Wordpress - I
needed more control and flexibility
over my sites. So... I have recently
started using Drupal 7
Why not go back to CI? Drupal certainly has it's strengths, but I don't think Drupal will give you any more "control and flexibility" than Wordpress.
If the standard modules/plugins, themes/templates, from WP, Drupal, or Joomla, fill your needs, then using a CMS can be a lot faster than building a site from scratch. But, if those CMSs do not fill your needs, you could find yourself "fighting the framework" and never really getting what you want.
You're just coming out from WordPress, which has great support and is relatively easy to extend to overcome what you call its limitations, if you know basic PHP, HTML, CSS & JavaScript. Every framework has its own potential/limitations.
As a user of WordPress my humble opinion is that you should have stayed with it.
As of you last question, It depends, to stick with one and only one framework has its advantages and disadvantages, the best of all is that you get to know it very well and eventually learn how to extended it. The bad part is that very often frameworks lose popularity and you are left to you own without an active user community and support.
Regards.
All of the popular CMS products (I'd maybe add Expression Engine to the mix) are great for 80% of what you want to accomplish and a huge pain to handle the other 20%.
That's just the nature of the beast.
On the plus side, it's OS so there's lots of people hacking away at it just like you which opens up the potential for someone else already having invented the wheel.
And with bulky enterprise CM solutions like SharePoint I find that you have to reverse the equation to 20/80 (ugh!).
If you're discouraged with Drupal and prefer to stick with WP, WordPress has many thousands of plugins, including ones that can overcome the limitations you're running into and make WP behave more like a normal CMS.
Just do a Google search for "top Wordpress CMS plugins." There's a lot of articles out there that can recommend ways to get WP to do exactly what you want.
I would like to know how feasible is Joomla or Drupal towards a website development which has around 80 web pages? I'm a part time website designer who does a bit of server end development as well using PHP and Python/Django. However, i have never attempted developing a website of this scale. There is a lot of static content on this website and some user interactions using JS/JQuery. The only PHP used would be in contact forms. Rest would be only HTML/CSS/JS. As there is lot of text information to be coded into the web pages i would like to know how Joomla or Drupal would help me?
When you use Content Management Systems, you don't need to use code to make content, that is what the CMS is for. If your site is purely static content with a contact form, Drupal might not be the best choice unless.
You already know Drupal.
You want to learn how to make sites with Drupal.
Drupal is very powerful, it's extremely flexible and a great framework. But it comes with a cost, it's more difficult to learn. If you just want to make a site with 80 or more pages and a contact form, you will most likely be better of with Wordpress. It's more simple and userfriendly. It's not a great development framework like Drupal, but if you only need a contact form and content, you wont need a development framework anyways.
If you're not used to using a CMS, both of these options will be quite a culture shock. In my experience, Joomla is slightly easier to learn than Drupal, but each are a LOT more work than hand-coding a bunch of pages.
Who will be updating the content, if at all? This should be a major factor in choosing a CMS, especially for a small, relatively static site. If the answer is "you" or "one person who can be trained" then you might want to think about keeping it hand-coded (making use of SSI or similar, where appropriate).
Alternatively, if you want a lightweight CMS, take a look at something like kirby or perch, both of which are excellent CMSs for small sites, with relatively low learning curves.
Drupal is pretty powerfull when it comes to content management content management. 80 pages is really nothing. You can sort everything easily with built in Taxonomy-module(used for categorys, tagging, ...) and even create own displays with the Views module. Because of CCK, you can make as many different content types you want, with all kinds of input options(wysiwig text, select lists, checkboxes, files, ...). For the contact form you just use the built in one or use the Webform-module.
I dout you'll have to do any coding for this, but beware, drupal is quite big and you might take some time to understand how it works and how to install. Once done however, it's all very smooth :)
Haven't worked with Joomla yet, can't help you there, but you might wanna google "drupal vs joomla" or similiar, there's plenty of articles. From what I've read, Drupal can do more, but Joomla' easier to learn.
It totaly depends on what functionality you want to have. If you are interested in multimedia or more complex functionality then Joomla is a better option. Thus when it comes to build up a complex and robust website full of features and functionality, you should go with Drupal. Go through this blog to get clear information: http://hirejoomlaprogrammer.blogspot.in/2012/07/joomla-drupal-or-wordpress-which-cms-to.html
A client asked me to redesign her web site, built several years ago in WP by another developer. Although I've never worked with WP before, I'm pretty comfortable with html, css, and php, and I more or less understand how WP stores content and dynamically builds pages. But I'm wondering how to approach these challenges:
My client's site has about 75 pages. There are about 25 that are static (i.e. the content changes infrequently if at all; things like "about us" and "faqs") and there are about 50 pages that are more "blog-like", except that instead of posts, the content contains directory-type info (e.g. 12 DJs in the area) or event-related info (e.g. upcoming shows at local theaters). Both of these categories contain many sub (and sometimes sub-sub) categories (e.g. medical services > pediatric > kid allergy specialists) and the content updates fairly frequently.
I understand the difference in WP between "pages" and "posts". But I need to find out the best way to structure the static content. Should I just set up a parent/child hierarchy of pages, changing the permalinks to something that makes sense? Or is it better / easier to just build the static pages outside WP and somehow link to them from the common navigation?
As a web designer, I want to "wow" my client with a great design. While there are loads of wonderful WP themes available, I really need to create something unique. But I'm wary of breaking something, so what's the best way to take an existing theme and just tweak it enough to make it look a little different?
Finally, other than mounting a massive "copy and paste" effort when the new site is built, is there a way to transfer content from the original site to the new one?
By reading your question, it seems to me that choosing WP for this kind of website was a bad choice.
Redesigning it, though, won't be that hard if it's using page templates for pages.
And yes, there's a import/export tool in WP to tranfer content. (see administration panel)
I, really, advise you to read this great tutorial about creating WP themes.
I've a blog-like WP site myself (contains RPG development articles). Here's what I did. Nested static pages simply have parent-child hierarchy: /about/mingos - that's easy to understand and i value this kind of content organisation (personal opinion).
As for themes, there's a no-brainer tool that, while not exactly apt for real business, has the capability of letting you see how stuff will look in seconds, and can sometimes give you great ideas. It's called Artisteer and there's a demo on its site that you can have a look at. Try your design ideas with it, see how stuff will look like. I'm sure you can come up with some great ideas for a "wow" design :).
Exporting content, as Soufiane Hassou remarked, is possible from within the admin panel.
Don't rule out using categories to create your hierarchy. That way you'd get the benefit of cross categorization of DJs and venues by location to create a robust cross reference system. Pages don't get this benefit without extra work.
To make this in to a directory, though, is gonna either be heavy work on managing the pages or heavy work on creating a solution that will cross reference everything and bring the content together in a usable way on the front end.
our website resides on iis-server and is completely written with Expression Web using templates and pure html-pages based on those templates. There's also some slight functionality built using c# in code behind.
Now i've been looking into DotNetNuke 5 as an alternative, so that our content editors (no tech bg) wouldn't have such a hard time when doing updates, adding pages and so forth. Naturally we would like to keep our finely tuned css-layout and maybe add some additional functionality later, probably using DNN modules.
I'll begin with a broad question:
Are there any best practices for migrating into DotNetNuke from an existing website?
Any articles, blogs, webcasts, books etc. related to this question would be much appreciated!
https://www.datasprings.com/Resources/ArticlesInformation/MigratetoDotNetNuke/tabid/737/language/en-US/Default.aspx
http://forums.asp.net/t/843931.aspx
The last one is a bit older - not sure if these will help - I think the thing to do is sit down understand how DNN does its pages and menu etc and then map it out on paper
planning planning planning -----------------
No matter what going from html to dynamic system like DNN is going to take grunt work