Hello all,
I'm sorry for the long post, but I think it's better if I'm as detailed as I
can be so that I don't make a mistake in my choice and so that there's a
clear understanding of to what I'm looking for.
I'm looking for a content management system to use on a site
(http://www.nigeriavillagesquare.com) that I help to moderate. Unfortunately
(as I have discovered), there are literally hundreds of CMS's to choose
from, so I am understandably confused. However, I would appreciate it if
anyone will be able to recommend a good one based on the criteria I'm going
to give.
In order of priority, the criteria are:
1. Ease of use involving minimal manual intervention. What I would like is a
system where once someone has posted an article and editors have approved
it, it gets published not only to a main 'articles' page but parts of it
(e.g. a link to it with the subject in the title) *automatically* get
published wherever we would like these parts to be published.
For example, currently, we get people to publish articles using Blogger.
Unfortunately, it means that once the article is approved, we still have to
manually insert the link to our front-page and sidebars to our messageboard
using PHP include statements.
See the sidebar on the following page for examples:
http://www.nigeriavillagesquare.com/board.
What we would like is an article management system that would publish
articles to an articles page and also populate the front page and sidebars
automatically.
2. Integration with existing message board and site. I would like a
situation where the content management system would sit side by side with an
existing vBulletin messageboard we already have so that we can show
part of the content on the same page as the messageboard (as I have
described above). It would be nice if we could also cause parts of the
article to appear on other parts of the site as well.
3. Ease of import of previously published articles: I have already mentioned
above that we already have some articles published using Blogger. We would
not want to lose these, so it would be great if there was a
mechanism for importing these articles into the content management system
with minimal manual intervention.
4. Ease of composition: We would like people writing articles not to need to
be masters of html to compose articles for submission to our site. Ideally,
we would like them to be able to paste their articles directly into the
composition window provided by the content manager from a rich text format
application like Microsoft Word without losing their formatting. Failing
that, it would be nice if the content manager provided a simple markup
language that allowed for basic formatting, with the option of html
formatting if the article writer wanted to do something really complex.
5. Article rating. We would like people reading the articles to be able to
rate them. It would be nice if we could configure the rating system so that
we could choose the range of points to be awarded.
6. Good portal system: We would like to have a front 'portal' page with an
index to the latest articles (with a "more articles" link that will direct
readers to more articles the main articles page). We would also like to have
links to other sections of the website where we would post news,
entertainment and other stories.
7. Comments and Login Integration with Vbulletin. Again, we want to have the
ability to integrate with our vbulletin board in such a way that members who
are already registered do not need to register again before posting comments
to articles.
I am assuming that because our existing site is based on PHP, the CMS should
be PHP-based as well.
I would be extremely grateful if you could point me in the direction of a
CMS that would meet most if not all of these requirements.
Cheers,
--
Akin
aknak at aksoto dot idps dot co dot uk
