I thought I would share my experiences of using CouchCMS. Where I came from, why I needed it and how I used it. I emailed my positive feedback already however please consider this an expansion of it.
ORIGIN.
I run a website - a large one, however one that has of late become stagnant, been updated less frequently each year and is rather like an overgrown garden; No one wants to visit and it is a nightmare to consider tidying... (Good analogy there!)
Anyway my site - http://www.3d-palace.com - has been going since 2002. When I used to need people to register I had 130,000 users on the database and up until 2008/2009 was considered one of "the" places to go for 3d education, free learning and the like. Unfortunately in 2008/2009 I was persuaded by someone to consider using Wordpress - and here are the reasons (at the time.)
- I needed to be able to add front page content to the site - at the time I was mostly using VBulletin running a download system for tutorials. The time of community forums was coming to a close however with less and less users each month in a catastophe curve and for me the future was definitely more about content that was updated more consistently on the front page and links there-from. Vbulletin's CMS was basic at best and was the standard early 2000s 3 column staple with walls of text. Wordpress appeared on looking to be a visual and way more attractive approach with wywiwyg, image uploading and numerous plugins galore.
- I needed something to manage my downloads that was integrated into the CMS.
On reflection EVERYONE in here should know that the first item was more of a honey-trap and the second was unlikely. Good download management software for anything on my scale was not happening without bespoke coding however... I am not a coder (remember that part) so I thought this would be the easy option.
5/6 years later - Wordpress is a cumbersome piece of trash. I do not run a blog and for the first few years I thought that the continual slowness, updates and use drop off were teething issues. I saw complaints about WP however at the time I was running two dedicated quad Xeon boxes for hosting and could not see how they could possibly be murdered by WP.
Simple fact - wordpress is NOT for large sites. Not even close. Its barely for small sites;
The plugins do not play well with each other as there is no cross checking of plugins by developers.
Themes that look pretty are almost always because the dummy data was set perfectly (even the one I purchased custom made).
Databases crash ALL the time.
Wordpress is hacked constantly.
Anyway this is a lecture ... apologies...
THE HUNT FOR A CMS
Ok so years of angry swearing later, 10 days ago I start the process of actively looking to change my site engine permanently. I have an old theme I purchased from codecanyon for something like $18 about 4 years ago and never used because I am terrible at HTML however I thought perhaps I could use it and embed a CMS inside it if that was possible and not too hard. So the search began in earnest. And ended after 11 minutes or so...
I came across CouchCMS while using google - embeddable CMS. I think that was pretty much all I typed - I then ignored the TEN BEST CMS nonsense results that invariably think I need more Joomla and Wordpress. (I really dont) First thing I did was read ALL the tutorials (which is hard ass work for me - code really isn't something I do, I can about handly basic html tags in Dreamweaver) on the site.
Those tutorials are GOLD. Read them if you haven't. I did the about.php page and then the more complex stuff - and I FOLLOWED ALONG using that template I mentioned above (it was called leetpress... sigh).
The about page worked. First damn time too. Then I used a tip from the forum and added a field to add a youtube page to the page. That also worked.
Then I made a news page post. Took about 15 minutes with the template. Then a news list one. That also worked in about 15 minutes.
Over the past week I have now made a gallery, news pages, tutorials pages, a shop, IRC chat area (script plugin), shortcodes, about page, admin controlled header and footer and sidebars with the menu being dynamic.
I have EVERYTHING that I need and NOTHING extra. And the pages load up in a second. A damn second. And it looks better than ANY page wordpress tried to give me in over 6 years and I dont even have dummy data in it.
Anything I want to change - I load the php base template or page in Dreamweaver and add it. Change to the menu - I load header.html from the snippets. Same with sidebar and footer.
Is there a piece of code I need? In wordpress if it wasnt part of the base CMS I would have to go check out a plugin that might not be updated for weeks, months or years if ever and slows the site exponentially. With CouchCMS and my template I just go on google.com....
Shop? I imbedded Ecwid
IRC? I embedded freenode
Discussion and Forum? I embedded in Disqus
The shop and the discus can both use logins from facebook, twitter etc so the end user has a smooth experience. I do not need anyone to be registered on the site as I do not need anyone restricted from pages however if I did - hey theres an option in the admin for that... which reminds me...
THE ADMINS LOVE THE ADMIN PANEL.
Want to write a post in WP? We didn't. CouchCMS admin is one page - it loads and you do your admin stuff. Super easy, really fast and really compact. WYSIWYG is great too.
CODING THEN?
I know nothing about coding - and I still know nearly nothing. If you know how to use an img tag and know how to read and follow a tutorial - you can use CouchCMS - I did.
Changeover for my site happens in about 6-12 hours. I am just getting data ready and so on. Meanwhile if you want a peek in the meantime you can go in a non linked page at http://www.3d-palace.com/irc.php
I rate this CMS as fantastic. Keep up the very good work! It makes me actually enjoy administration of a website again.
Cris
3d-palace.com
ORIGIN.
I run a website - a large one, however one that has of late become stagnant, been updated less frequently each year and is rather like an overgrown garden; No one wants to visit and it is a nightmare to consider tidying... (Good analogy there!)
Anyway my site - http://www.3d-palace.com - has been going since 2002. When I used to need people to register I had 130,000 users on the database and up until 2008/2009 was considered one of "the" places to go for 3d education, free learning and the like. Unfortunately in 2008/2009 I was persuaded by someone to consider using Wordpress - and here are the reasons (at the time.)
- I needed to be able to add front page content to the site - at the time I was mostly using VBulletin running a download system for tutorials. The time of community forums was coming to a close however with less and less users each month in a catastophe curve and for me the future was definitely more about content that was updated more consistently on the front page and links there-from. Vbulletin's CMS was basic at best and was the standard early 2000s 3 column staple with walls of text. Wordpress appeared on looking to be a visual and way more attractive approach with wywiwyg, image uploading and numerous plugins galore.
- I needed something to manage my downloads that was integrated into the CMS.
On reflection EVERYONE in here should know that the first item was more of a honey-trap and the second was unlikely. Good download management software for anything on my scale was not happening without bespoke coding however... I am not a coder (remember that part) so I thought this would be the easy option.
5/6 years later - Wordpress is a cumbersome piece of trash. I do not run a blog and for the first few years I thought that the continual slowness, updates and use drop off were teething issues. I saw complaints about WP however at the time I was running two dedicated quad Xeon boxes for hosting and could not see how they could possibly be murdered by WP.
Simple fact - wordpress is NOT for large sites. Not even close. Its barely for small sites;
The plugins do not play well with each other as there is no cross checking of plugins by developers.
Themes that look pretty are almost always because the dummy data was set perfectly (even the one I purchased custom made).
Databases crash ALL the time.
Wordpress is hacked constantly.
Anyway this is a lecture ... apologies...
THE HUNT FOR A CMS
Ok so years of angry swearing later, 10 days ago I start the process of actively looking to change my site engine permanently. I have an old theme I purchased from codecanyon for something like $18 about 4 years ago and never used because I am terrible at HTML however I thought perhaps I could use it and embed a CMS inside it if that was possible and not too hard. So the search began in earnest. And ended after 11 minutes or so...
I came across CouchCMS while using google - embeddable CMS. I think that was pretty much all I typed - I then ignored the TEN BEST CMS nonsense results that invariably think I need more Joomla and Wordpress. (I really dont) First thing I did was read ALL the tutorials (which is hard ass work for me - code really isn't something I do, I can about handly basic html tags in Dreamweaver) on the site.
Those tutorials are GOLD. Read them if you haven't. I did the about.php page and then the more complex stuff - and I FOLLOWED ALONG using that template I mentioned above (it was called leetpress... sigh).
The about page worked. First damn time too. Then I used a tip from the forum and added a field to add a youtube page to the page. That also worked.
Then I made a news page post. Took about 15 minutes with the template. Then a news list one. That also worked in about 15 minutes.
Over the past week I have now made a gallery, news pages, tutorials pages, a shop, IRC chat area (script plugin), shortcodes, about page, admin controlled header and footer and sidebars with the menu being dynamic.
I have EVERYTHING that I need and NOTHING extra. And the pages load up in a second. A damn second. And it looks better than ANY page wordpress tried to give me in over 6 years and I dont even have dummy data in it.
Anything I want to change - I load the php base template or page in Dreamweaver and add it. Change to the menu - I load header.html from the snippets. Same with sidebar and footer.
Is there a piece of code I need? In wordpress if it wasnt part of the base CMS I would have to go check out a plugin that might not be updated for weeks, months or years if ever and slows the site exponentially. With CouchCMS and my template I just go on google.com....
Shop? I imbedded Ecwid
IRC? I embedded freenode
Discussion and Forum? I embedded in Disqus
The shop and the discus can both use logins from facebook, twitter etc so the end user has a smooth experience. I do not need anyone to be registered on the site as I do not need anyone restricted from pages however if I did - hey theres an option in the admin for that... which reminds me...
THE ADMINS LOVE THE ADMIN PANEL.
Want to write a post in WP? We didn't. CouchCMS admin is one page - it loads and you do your admin stuff. Super easy, really fast and really compact. WYSIWYG is great too.
CODING THEN?
I know nothing about coding - and I still know nearly nothing. If you know how to use an img tag and know how to read and follow a tutorial - you can use CouchCMS - I did.
Changeover for my site happens in about 6-12 hours. I am just getting data ready and so on. Meanwhile if you want a peek in the meantime you can go in a non linked page at http://www.3d-palace.com/irc.php
I rate this CMS as fantastic. Keep up the very good work! It makes me actually enjoy administration of a website again.
Cris
3d-palace.com
As of today I put in the 404.php page and got it working, turned on pretty urls with help from KK and a rather simple error I made (make sure that the .htaccess is in the right folder!) and off she goes!
yep it's back on wordpress ...