CMS Suggestions for improvement

محروم.كوم · #1 05-09-2010, 05:40 PM

Okay so I have been using version 4 since RC1. The software has gradually become better, but there is still muuuuch more improvement that needs to be made. I must say that for posting news/articles, Wordpress is the standard. The current incarnation of vb cms provides a template which could be awesome, but seriously lacks in functionality right now.

Why? I don't know. Is it because it is really new and they are still working out the bugs? Possibly. Is it because the developers really needed to learn how to use a product such as wordpress before developing the CMS? Possible ( I know I have seen some posts here by the developers that make me scratch my head. I mean seriously, not knowing what a tag cloud is??? ) Or is it some other reason? Don't know.

Here are a few ideas that I would like to see implemented and soon.

1. Inserting images problem - Some of my articles have close to 150 images in one article. When inserting them, the CMS randomly inserts the order of the pictures. It would be nice if they would insert them via filename or at the very least allow you to sort them in the same way Wordpress does. Currently I have to spend valuable time dragging and dropping images and it is a pain when there is no way to tell the image name from the WYSIWYG.

2. Thumbnail size problems. The CMS usually assigns the first image in the article as the preview image for the CMS. This becomes a problem when the first image is 450k. I don't know how the resize thumbnail stuff works, but it has to be improved. This increases load time of the home page tremendously.

2a. Allow an article to have a "preview image" assigned to it. Something that I can control the size and image height and width. This image does not appear in the article at all. This is purely an intro image to the article. (This would help out a ton!)

3. Source input. My site is basicallly a comic news site (http://www.bzzurkk.com). Sometimes the news comes from other websites and I would love to have a source field so you could post the hyperlink to the original article and it appear in the final product.

4. Category displays issues. Currently if you click on a category it will bring you a list of articles in said category. The results are very bland. A little default image with a brief intro to the article. The category display should be showing results like any section page would. With preview images as well as a preview of the article. This is a must!

5. Promoting forum posts is horrible. Why in the world (supposedly one of the reasons for the CMS) would you promote something so it can create a new forum posting in the forum? The forum post is already there! The article should use the current forum that article is in for its comments!

6. Why do I only get to choose one forum to be the "comments" forum? There should be an option to select which forum the article gets posted in when creating articles. Another must. The way the current format is, it just creates more work for everyone.

7. When you have a fixed width forum and multiple sections inside of sections, choosing a section for your article is a nightmare. When creating the article you only get to see so much of the section you want because there is no scrollbar to see the entire section. I pretty much have mine memorized now, but if you have multiple sub-sections, choosing the right one on the article creation page is ridiculous!

8. The ability to hide certain sections from the default section display. There are some section that I don't want the news articles posted to the front page. I would like to make people click on that certain section for those particular articles. Very frustrating for everything to show up...

Now with all that said the CMS has potential, but it needs to have its game stepped up and stepped up quick. I have already stopped using the CMS on one site because it isn't quite ready for "PrimeTime". Hopefully these issues will be worked out soon... __DEFINE_LIKE_SHARE__