johnmccollum.co.uk

CMS Made Simple is the best content management system you’ve never heard of.

Version 1.4 brings a much needed redesign of the admin area, as well as numerous performance and stability tweaks.

As I mentioned before, no-one wants a static site anymore; I believe CMS Made Simple offers the simplest content management solution today.

Why do I love it?

• Any type of layout achievable with CSS is achievable with CMS Made Simple
• Completely table-less setup. (Assuming that’s what you want)
• Focus on accessibility; more so than most other CMS’
• Fine control over what administrators can and can’t do
• Easiest admin area imaginable

But what I really love about it is the speed at which users pick up the knowledge they need to run their site. Most training sessions for CMS Made Simple run at about 30-45 minutes, and not one person has had to come back for further training.

By contrast, I’ve seen training sessions for other CMS’ run into several hours, with repeat sessions required before they decide to delegate it to someone else anyway!

Having said all that, it isn’t perfect for every site; some of the extensions are of…dubious quality, so if a forum, e-commerce, or front-end login facility is required, I would go with another solution.

Having to edit the template in the browser window is also an annoyance, and I don’t favour the smarty templating system, but for small-medium formerly static sites, it can’t be beaten.

So please, check it out and spread the word!

I was recently working on a Joomla! site which required a fairly unusual banner management system. The spec was that the user would be able to enter a list of banners, links, start dates and expiry dates, and that these banners would be displayed in a random order in the main content area. The component will accept all major image formats, and flash movie files. (.swf)

I wasted quite a bit of time trying to mold other components to my needs, but I could have saved myself some time if I had just written my own!

Here we are, then; the result of my labour.

This component requires Joomla 1.5 or later.

LICENSE + DISCLAIMER:Copyright 2008 John McCollum. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.

By downloading this component, you are indicating your acceptance of the terms above. Please make sure you back up your files and database before installing this component.

Click here to download the component!

EDIT - by popular demand, I’ve written a simple module to interact with this component. It simply loads a random image or .swf into a module position, based on dates supplied by the user. Note - you must download the component to use the module, although you can use the component on its own!

Click here to download the module!