Hello Mathew,
Request you to please share the “Course Website” link which you refereed in your comments above…
Thank you,
Rajat
Can you elaborate more? I don’t toot my own horn very often… but I sincerely don’t feel that Total CMS fits into this statement. But I am biased.
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really great post here with lots of info!
@kryten great points. A+C is on the cards. Inline editing (B) not really on the roadmap yet but would like to do it.
Thanks @Mathew - very exciting and happy days to be using RapidWeaver, I agree 
It’s a pity none of these excellent solutions provides complete user control. I really need something which will not only control who contributes to a site but also who has access to particular pages. I run a society website with about 260 members and I need to have a number of levels of access. I also need to blog and a members’ contact list to all members, but with different amounts of detail according to user role. Yes, I could use SiteLok but I don’t really want multiple unrelated scripts accessing the same database.
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@rajat: I’m afraid I can’t share any of my course websites. They all contain student information that I need to keep private. (Students themselves contribute a fair amount of content to each course website.)
If there is something very specific you want to know about or see then I might be able to share a screenshot. But, again, it would all depend on maintaining student confidentiality. I’m sorry.
On the other hand there are ways for me to slightly mimic key features on a course website on my regular (and unfinished) personal website. So if I know what you’d like to see more of then maybe I can add some “fake” students to my personal website so you can see how things work.
I’m with Joe on this one. These are pretty broad statements you make. (And from what I’m seeing of Contribute it has a fair amount of it’s own “clunk” starting with the website ain’t even responsive. But it was nice to visit 2008 once again. 
).
I don’t doubt the solutions may be clunky for you, but it’s not clear what you really mean by that and whether it would generalize to other folks.
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Ever thought about Joomla or Typo3?
@mastermix Indeed, I’ve heard many good things about Muse. Some RW folks either use it sometimes, or now use it all the time.
While I agree that a solution from RMS makes a lot of sense, and may happen at some point . . . it doesn’t help clarify what you see as clunky about current tools (TotalCMS, Armadillo, and others) aside from they weren’t made by RMS. Put differently your sense of what’s clunky may provide good feedback for how current developers could refine their products. And that would benefit all of us.
And want to pay $50 for it I guess?
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Adobe Muse is 17,84 € for me - per month.
Other companies charge 50 € license costs for an enterprise CMS system - per user! (200 user = 10.000 €) + support costs.
If you need a enterprise ready CMS system for no costs: https://typo3.org
@yuzool
That is tremendous news. Dropkick IS an outstanding CMS for RW and deserves to be on everyone’s shortlist. The clients who I have deployed it for absolutely love it and in some ways the points I raised about one long list of content blocks and no media store are actually advantages - depending on how you view it.
As a non techie end user they always know the block they are looking for MUST be on that page and if they want to show an image they just upload it there and then. Done! So it very much depends on the user’s perspective. I have a couple of users who drive their blogs with it too… they love the speed and simplicity … I give them a whole page and they just fill it with their stuff and it just grows until they are ready to start again… works for them.
Just wanted to reinforce that Dropkick is a top notch mega powerful piece of artillery.
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@Mathew :- Thanks for the quick response Mathew, I was just curious too see the design of your website to explore the potential of Armadello stack. Also i am doing some charity work for a school by developing a website for students so I thought maybe i will get some idea by looking at your website design. 
Regards,
Rajat
rajat: Yes, I understand and I’m sorry I can’t share the actual site with you. I can describe a bit of what I’m doing however. Students contribute to the website in 3 ways:
- for each class they submit a “reflection” plus follow up comments about the learning materials for the week. I use Solo Content stacks for this on a dedicated reflection page for each class session. I use Disqus for the comments.
- once a month students submit a much longer “connection” piece and this is done on our “blog” page. (Using standard Armadillo blog setup). By including author links in the side bar it’s super easy to see the various blog contributions by each student at the end of the semester.
- one of their “big” projects is to create a webpage of their own about their research specialization area. For this I use Solo Content again. We haven’t started on this project yet, but I think one solo content stack per student will be fine. The key is each student has one page in the overall RW project file.
In my case I taught my students to use Markdown: this has many benefits. By having weekly reflection writing this helps to gently reinforce their new found Markdown skills, the Connection blog pieces again support Markdown, so that when they develop their own specialization web page using Markdown and embed codes are (hopefully) second nature to them.
I’m very sorry I can’t provide visuals.
Great use cases @kryten and like those examples
Maybe an option for listed or nested pages could be a good idea?
Thanks for all your support, appreciate it
@peterdanckwerts My Page Safe stack will allow you to create different logins for as many pages as you want.
I am pretty sure that you have not really looked at Easy/Total CMS. One of the major points is that it has no design. You build the CMS using stacks. The design of it is 100% up to you. This means that all of your customers have a 100% custom CMS built for them. This makes you look even better because you are supplying a premium product/experience to them.
I you use my Foundation stacks then you have 100% control. If you don’t, then you can still utilize that style of the theme that you have decided to use.
Shoe-horning 3rd party modalities can create challenges for other things such as SEO activity. SEO integration, for example, won’t be easy without careful analysis.
I am not sure what you mean by this. However, my CMS allows even the user to control their own SEO data. They are just text elements on the webpage. If there is text on the webpage, my CMS can manage it.
My SEO Helper stack (inside Foundation) also works great with the CMS.
Perhaps 3rd parties could work with Realmac to publish their respective interfaces and styles - to facilitate content editing. Editing could be done from both mobile devices and the desktop.
First off, Realmac does not have any interface or styles. All of the styles are controlled by the theme and content that you add to the page. My CMS allows you to build your own interface as you see fit.
Multi-user editing system with permission and assigned roles features.
Stellar security to thwart hackers and spams. There could be proper user registration and authentication.
My Page Safe stack works great with my CMS. You can protect groups or individual pages with a single login. Can you can setup multiple login pages as well so that if you were to login to one page, you do not necessarily have access to the others.
It does not have full blown user management. I did this on purpose as I feel that a majority of the size sites that are built using RapidWeaver do not require such a complex solution with usernames, roles, etc.
Total CMS does ship with a simplified version of Page Safe. I do have plans on making this more robust in the future.
All of this is pretty darn secure as well.
Proper RSS feed support.
The Feeds stack in Total CMS actually supplies an RSS Feed. So will the blog stack when that ships.
Version Control (ala Subversion or similar).
Total CMS will back up the last 10 edits for every single CMS area. This allow you to revert back to a previous edit pretty easily. I have plans to integrate this into the UI i the future. However, for they all of the files are there and easy to find.
Fast and User-friendly.
Sites built with my CMS are faster than Wordpress sites. Hands down. I have to say that my CMS is pretty darn user friendly as well.
There are more…
Bring it! 
I hope that this educates you a bit more about my CMS.
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