SEO and Marketing

Re: How did I arrive here?

• 2008/11/16 20:47:39
• Will

1 - What was the first CMS you used?
XOOPS 2.0.7 - prior to that only static pages for school projects.

2 - Why this? Why not others? What others did you check?
The first site i did with a cms was a clan gaming site, and all of the well known gaming sites used php-nuke. Well, my father was hosting me, and refused to allow me to install php-nuke on his server - regardless if all the other kids were using it.

3 - Describe your path from this CMS to iCMS. When did you move on, and why?
To sum it up, I had absolutely ZERO input in decisions made about XOOPS - and it took me a long time to realize this - but neither did anyone else. I came to the conclusion that regardless of how it was branded, it was closed source and decided to leave the project.

Shortly thereafter ICMS was born - then someone gained access to my XOOPS account and put a link to icms in my sigline. Next thing you know I am banned from XOOPS - which led to a war between Mamba and I. Ultimately we both did and said a lot that was pretty wrong - and I can admit to that. I think it was the best thing that could have happened though.

There were definitely drawbacks: My business suffered drastically from leaving XOOPS - coupled with the economy of course. It may not have been the absolute best time to make the move, but it really feels good to know that I was in on the ground floor here at ImpressCMS.

Also, Tom makes me wanna be a better man. :thumbup:

Re: How did I arrive here?

• 2008/11/16 20:12:56
• marcan

Very interesting Nachenko! I could not resist to blog about this: How did I came in ImpressCMS

For people liking summary:

1 - What was the first CMS you used?
XOOPS 2.0

2 - Why this? Why not others? What others did you check?
I used Nukes-like, but XOOPS was the first that really worked!

3 - Describe your path from this CMS to iCMS. When did you move on, and why?
All explained in my blog post, but in summary: XOOPS => SmartFactory => XOOPS Core Dev => ImpressCMS

Now I gotta go to sleep !

Re: How did I arrive here?

• 2008/11/16 19:06:40
• Madfish

1 - What was the first CMS you used?

XOOPS 2.0. Prior to this I was hand coding html. It was laborious and I was quite bad at it. It came as quite a revalation to discover that there were programs that would automate all the hard work for you. It still suprises me how many people out there are hand-coding html because they don't know this. Really, the world is full of them.

2 - Why this? Why not others? What others did you check?

Experimented with a variety of Nuke clones (Nuke, Post-nuke, Nuke-it-again-just-to-make-sure). While thrilled at the potential (see above) these tools were not flexible enough to do what I wanted, even back then. XOOPS was i) more flexible and ii) simple to use, so it got the gong.

3 - Describe your path from this CMS to iCMS. When did you move on, and why?

*nuke => XOOPS => XOOPS + ImpressCMS.

I use and like both. I find myself 'hanging out' here though partly because most of the people I used to work with are here, and partly because not so welcome elsewhere any more (but let's not get into a discussion about that). Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that a CMS project isn't a pile of code, its the people that make it (the community).

Secondly, the recent development of ImpressCMS has suited my needs and I appreciate the active and continuous development of the system. Sustainability is important to me. I take a long term view so I am always looking at the future prospects of a system rather than where it is now.

I think Impress has a pretty good and constructive community now, but there's a lot of good projects out there and a lot more competition these days. Finding ways to stand out from the crowd is not easy. Publicity, propaganda, publicity publicity!

Re: How did I arrive here?

• 2008/11/16 17:49:44
• JMorris

Quote:

Not counting CMS hacks to bulletin boards, PHP-Nuke. I used Nuke prior to the fork that ended up becoming XOOPS. After many issues with Nuke and having my site hacked, I moved to XOOPS as I felt it was a better product.

If you're talking all the way back to the beginning, I started out with phpBB in early 2001.

Quote:

What haven't I checked would be an easier question to answer. If it's on http://opensourcecms.com/ I've probably tried it. I've gone even further and tested and/or used many of the more popular systems.

To date, I've done the most with Wordpress and XOOPS. By far, I built more sites and did more coding for XOOPS.

Why I chose iCMS? Let's just say that is is nearer and dearer to my heart than XOOPS or any other system.

To be more specific, iCMS is headed in a direction that is more inline with my own goals and needs.

Quote:

I pretty much just did that above, but to clarify...

phpBB (2001-2002) -> PHPNuke (2002-2003) -> XOOPS (late 2003-2007) -> WP & iCMS (2007 - Present)

Edit: Just found my first post on x. Man, I lurked for a loooong time!

On a more personal note, nearly all of my close, personal friends are here. While I still maintained some contact while not being involved in this project, it wasn't the same. Here, I feel a since of community I have not felt anywhere else and it is that "feeling" I want to be involved in nurturing.

As one of my very good friends said today, we need to focus on building a community experience, not just a community management system.

Wise words from a wise friend.

Re: How did I arrive here?

• 2008/11/16 15:09:38
• nachenko

1 - What was the first CMS you used?

Xoops 2.0.7

2 - Why this? Why not others? What others did you check?

I had been build static websites for a year, and i met a new possible customer that needed a site he could update on a daily basis, and I desperately needed new customers, so I accepted although I had no idea about how to get the job done. My brother told me about PHPnuke. I found it interesting in the concept, but unacceptably ugly, so I did some research. I also found Mambo, but although good looking, i found difficult to manage.

I needed something i could understand with my very limited knowledge, something I could manage and install and at the same time something that lets me make a good design.

So i found Xoops, the "extend by modules" concept was easy to me, it had hundreds of modules, so i had more than one choice for anything i wanted to do. I saw a visual installation guide, and it looked pretty straightforward. I found an amazing site in YAXS section about american fotball or something like that.

It seemed a good choice at that time.

3 - Describe your path from this CMS to iCMS. When did you move on, and why?

Short after building this my first Xoops site, soem bigger projects arrived, and there came X. 2.2. It looked great, the new admin backend was themable, and the default theme was nothing special, but it was neat and well sorted. It looked much more profesisonal. X. 2.2 seemsed great, i thought i had chosen a winner.

Then, the drawback, the downgrade script, the "x. 2.2 is hell", no tech explanations on what was wrong about x.2.2 and why lose all these great features, such as custom profile fields or block instanciation. The promise of a branch merge that today, three years later, has still to be done. No development and no possibility to take the code done and check it by ourselves.

But hat really pissed me off was Xoops EXM. When I tried it, i said inmediately "this should be the official version". It was that easy, store it in the server, change logo and say "hey, this is the new official version. It's the same version but with a cool backend".

That easy. That easy didn't happen and I knew Xoops was a sinking boat.

Studied Xaraya and Drupal. They were much more complicated, but a hundred times more powerful. Xaraya was too complicated, and looked in a difficult position. Drupal was a monster, but I got it. I still use it for "monster projects", but I discovered it's very difficult to theme and too much for most of my customers. They wanted something friendly, simple and clean. Joomla? CMS Made Simple?

What's this new thing? What about Impress? Like if Xoops were somewhere?

I did a test. i had found a bug in Xoops 2.0.16 regarding user timezone and foreign languages. The bug and the fix were documented. No one at Xoops listened. no patch. No comments. No nothing.

The same day i notified the bugfix on iCMS bug tracker it was included in the trunk. At that time I didn't know what a trunk was. We had a winner.

This is my story. i'm still on Drupal for some customers, but I'm not closed on that. I just use the appropiate tool for the appropiate customer. You can check in News area who are my iCMS customers. All them are very, very happy with it.

Re: How did I arrive here?

• 2008/11/16 14:14:46
• thomas

Quote:

It all started in 2001 with Xoops 1. I was very excited when I found Xoops it seemed like the answer to all my prayers! I went from plain old html, htm & even shtml to php. I quickly fell in love with it.

Quote:

I have ran other Cms in fact most since I started using xoops. Xoops was my first system and I have enjoyed the years working with it.

As far as others go http://www.opensourcecms.com/ would explain most of what I have used over the years.

Quote:

Lets face it xoops 2 had so many mods and hacks that were never included in the core. Great people came and went as the core sat idle for years. All the beautiful code that was shared from wonderful people around the world fell of def ears and was never used.

So instead of sitting there using xoops 2.018 or even 2.30 with none of the hard work put in by the community into the core. I decided to switch to WHAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN XOOPS all along! IMPRESSCMS SMOKES XOOPS 2 on so many levels that its not even in the same ballpark. The people here in this open source project make this the best place on the net for me bar-none!

Thank you all for you hard work!

How did I arrive here?

• 2008/11/16 12:18:09
• nachenko

Health and republic.

I'm incubating a article/formal proposal/essay/something worth considering for the community, and I'm at the idea collecting level.

You know, that level many people don't get out of in years.

But I'll try to get out and bring something. Promised.

Please everyone spend some time and do this for me, for the whole community an exercise of introspection. please reply for me, and for the community, these questions:

1 - What was the first CMS you used?

2 - Why this? Why not others? What others did you check?

3 - Describe your path from this CMS to iCMS. When did you move on, and why?

Re: 2008 Nonprofit Software Development Summit

• 2008/11/5 10:12:41
• seth_sd

I'll be right on that Tom....

Re: 2008 Nonprofit Software Development Summit

• 2008/11/5 10:02:25
• Tom

I can be in California if you get my return flight tickets, accommodation, you know the usual stuff, lol

Ohh and some of that food you kept showing me photo's of!

:lmao:

2008 Nonprofit Software Development Summit

• 2008/11/5 9:27:54
• seth_sd

Folks,

Marcan contacted me to see if what my thoughts were on attending this conference and getting the word out about Impress since I am what appears to be the sole California representative for Impress.

http://www.aspirationtech.org/events/devsummit08

I would like some real input from others here on the following:

1. Is this a conference that caters to people that would be interested in Impress?

2. It is a 500 mile journey for me in that I live almost at the Mexican border and this is near San Francisco...would you go?

3. If it is worth attending I need some serious help with a handout like Nachenko did before and some real talking points so that I represent Impress CMS properly.

It would be a stretch for me but I think we should start doing more of this type of marketing and maybe we can use this as a brainstorming for ways to get out there and making people aware. Does anybody do local Open Source or Linux user event presentations? I mean, it is kind of weird that nobody else is from California around here...are they?

Seth

Re: SEO And Impress

• 2008/10/4 10:35:04
• mjmurphy53711

Aphex got it working - he's a genius.

Smart Section and Content Manager pages seem to be ranking very well - like I say I think there should be an automatic assignment of "nofollow" to the pdf and print features but Impress has stepped it up HUGE and I should have 15 sites on the platform before to long.

Now, if we could get a nice forum that allowed friendly URL's I'd be in heaven.

Re: SEO And Impress

• 2008/10/1 11:52:16
• Vaughan

content manager should accept HTML. make sure the allow/enable HTML box is ticked. or you might need to select a different Editor.

Re: SEO And Impress

• 2008/10/1 11:32:37
• mjmurphy53711

Yea, I'm playing with the new content manager, but it doesn't accept HTML?

Also, could you show me an example of smart content?

Also, I'd love to see what type of things people are doing within the content manager - anyone?

Plain and simple ImpressCMS is rocking my socks, as I've told my friend Aphex many times it just keeps getting better and better, but I'm still very much so learning it's capabilities.

I'd love to see and participate in more SEO related discussions in how to optimize ICMS and modules.

Re: SEO And Impress

• 2008/10/1 10:09:20
• Vaughan

not that i know of.. i use SmartContent for that. But impresscms 1.1 has a built in content manager now, so that you can create your own content if you like.

SEO And Impress

• 2008/10/1 9:45:49
• mjmurphy53711

Hey all, I'm happy to be here at Impress finally! Over the last two years I've learned so much, and I'm working very hard at being an internet marketer with some limited initial success so far, but along the way I've noticed some things about Impress that have me wanting to hear some more educated opinions:

SmartSection - SEO wise, Google seems to love this module once the SEO hack is put into place - but I've noticed that if the PDF and Print features remain google will occasionally index those URLS first, thus causing a duplicate content issue.

I'm just curious, is anyone using a stripped down version of Smart Section just to post news and articles? Not blog style, more like static content.

Re: ImpressCMS for dummies - An installation guide

• 2008/9/21 6:35:10
• GibaPhp

Quote:

ok, no problem my friend

Re: ImpressCMS for dummies - An installation guide

• 2008/9/21 5:41:25
• nachenko

Uploaded to the addons site, documentation section.

Re: ImpressCMS for dummies - An installation guide

• 2008/9/20 21:27:38
• nachenko

Quote:

Sure! It would be great!



On translations

Sorry, some paragraphs and chapters were written directly in the design program (Xara Xtreme), so there's no updated OpenOffice version at this moment.

But as I'm not going to enforce anyone to get Xara, I can export the file to SVG, Adobe Illustrator or PhotoShop, where text boxes should be fully editable for translation.

Re: ImpressCMS for dummies - An installation guide

• 2008/9/20 16:52:30
• skenow

Nicely done!

Can I suggest we add that to the addons site for download?

Re: ImpressCMS for dummies - An installation guide

• 2008/9/20 14:23:06
• GibaPhp

HI nachenko,
Can You send me the file in format OpenOffice for translation?

I have translated a small part of copying the text pdf file, but I think it will work if you create this translation in pdf format again. Is this possible?

Thanks belissimo material

[pt-br]
Você pode me enviar o arquivo em formato openOffice para a tradução ?

Eu já traduzi uma pequena parte copiando o texto do arquivo pdf, mas eu penso que irá dar trabalho se você for gerar esta tradução em formato pdf novamente. Será possível isto ?

[/pt-br]

[translated...]
Um guia para a instalação do ImpressCMS
Pensamientos Divergentes
www.pensamientosdivergentes.net
Eu sou uma leigo,
Eu tenho WindowsTM
e eu quero começar
um website
I sou um leigo,
Eu tenho WindowsTM
e eu quero começar
um website
Esse guia irá mostrar como instalar ImpressCMS
(www.impresscms.org)
em um servidor para construir seu próprio Web site.
Este guia está sob a Licença Creative Commons.
Atribuição, não comercial e Derivados.
por Ignacio Segura
www.pensamientosdivergentes.net
[/translated...]