Notes: ShadoCMS Prepared Presentation
These are notes of the prepared presentation for ShadoCMS on its website.
Installing ShadoCMS. Same process on any platform. First step is to install CFMX 7, which actually is included in the price of ShadoCMS. Next, create a database (Oracle, MSSQL, or MySQL) and the DSN. Finally, deploy the site by dragging the software into your site’s web root. You can either begin building your site or use a template to start as a jumping point for your site.
Editing some content. Like many CMS packages, displays editable regions with a colored border around them. When clicking “Edit”, will open that region and can edit the content. Has a very typical WYSIWYG editor.
Site Management. Pages are clearly visible with a site tree that is collapsible by clicking on containers. From this view, you can view past history of a page and roll back to previous versions if desired. Easy to cut/paste pages in and out of various sections of the site, and your navigation can be automatically controlled by this to make it easy to be updated. Very nice.
Adding new pages and new content objects inside those pages is very simple. A click to create a new container, and the new object in a page is created.
Application framework. Shado provides an object-oriented framework for developers. Has a comprehensive, documented API for developers. Because of this exposure to the API, it is simple to modify the objects in Shado. In the demo, he took a user object and added a new field, which then showed up in the user manager form. Nice.
User Mgmt. Built to integrate with an LDAP directory. Can control what pages users can see, etc. Users belong to groups and permissions are assigned to their groups.
Modules. Additional modules can be built and deployed on the site. News/Events mgmt, form builder, Microsoft Word Import Engine, SEO, etc. Custom modules can be written by Shado or even by customer.
Search. Verity K2 is used, and excellent Google-esque searching is thus supported.
I haven’t used the CMS in a hands-on fashion yet, but it does indeed seem like a very solid CMS.
August 24th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
How easy it to use the CMS so far? Have you used this CMS in production yet?
August 25th, 2008 at 11:15 am
I did not end up using this CMS in depth, so I have no feedback beyond my experience from the preso.
July 9th, 2009 at 7:51 pm
ShadoCMS.
Step 1 – The Introduction with the developer: Grant Straker flips out in a presentation and starts saying things like “Shado cures cancer”, “The Shado CMS can stop terrorisim” or “Yes, we have a cures world hunger module in development”.
Step 1 ver 2 – The introduction with a supplier: Sales consultant completley skips over Shado functionality and breaks into a sweat when you ask for a live demo. Suggests there is an alternate to the CMS with is a hacked up mash up of various PHP components. Looks genuinley suprised when you want to go ahead and order it.
Step 2 – Install: Cross fingers and wait for first crash. Re-write install process from scratch but run into something that looks like its encrypted. Attempt to consult user documentation but realise that its only five pages of marketing fluff and is poorly written anyway. Log bug report with Straker, find out its the 721st since the last version. Go over project time by two weeks frantically hacking a fix because there is no community to help you except for the imaginary user groups discussed on the straker website.
Step 3 – Modules: Discover that every module costs extra after you’ve ordered it. Order multilanguage module and discover that you need to write each page of content in each langage because there is no way the CMS can translate written copy like it says on the straker website. Request a forum plug in and realise during install that you just paid 7k for Fusebox with a namechange.
Step 4 – Skinning: Discover that nothing about the CMS is compliant with any type of web standard. Give up on the hopes that your site will be accessable.
Step 5 – go live: Site is finally live but hits the wall when more than 5 people view it. Discover that you need a gig of dedicated carrier grade bandwidth on a server farm about the same size as google’s to make it work without choking out.
Step 6 – aftermath: stumble across FarCry. See that it is OS and remember what it felt like to hand over 40k for Shado.
Step 7: Kill yourself.
June 1st, 2010 at 7:24 pm
LOL, I feel flattered that the Anonymous Jeebus was so impressed with my sales skills
. Given we have hundreds of clients around the world and have been in business for 10 years I have no idea when, why, how , who the client was but if they hadn’t heard of Farcry one would figure it was a long time ago or its from a competitor. Also a great deal of our pricing was the underlying ColdFusion licensing cost through our OEM. Obviously not OS but if the requirement is that it is OS and not actually what a system does then we can’t win that one.
These days you can use ShadoCMS for as low as $99 / month on our on-demand platform and try it for free by signing up for an instant trial which is the easiest way to see if our multilingual functionality does what it says on the box, which it does BTW.
Still, made me smile and to be fair the documentation comment was not far off the mark a few years back and I’ll pass on to my team.
Grant