I knew from my experience with PHP-Nuke that I wanted a CMS that would run on PHP and with a MySQL backend since these were optimal for my requirements. So my first stop was at OpenSourceCMS.com. The website is a boon to content managers and to new webmasters. It provides a listing of Opensource CMS available, provides a description as well as reviews, it has a list that is based on user votes, reviews and downloads and of course has a very good forum from which to get the best insights from users of various CMS.
The most crucial factor in settling upon a CMS is to first test it, and this is the purpose of OpenSourceCMS.com. The site allows a visitor to log on as admin using any of the CMS it has on store and fiddle around with all the available features, and looking at the results. After spending a good 3 days running through every single CMS available, I finally settled on Dragonfly.
As I understand from the dragonfly website, the Dragonfly CMS is a further developed version of CPG-Nuke CMS, which itself was developed from HP-Nuke 6.5. Now, pedigree apart, having tested the CMS out thoroughly on OpenSourceCMS.com beforehand, I felt confident that this is the CMS I want to have on my site.
The final test before absolutely taking the plunge was to download the CMS package and to try it out on my own system. Since I'm currently on a Windows based system, I use PhpTriad on which to test the Dragonfly CMS install. Thoroughly excited with the success of making a complete installon my own system without any hitches, and having added a few extra modules and blocks, I finally decided to upload to my site. Since the entire package is a rather small upload - just about 5 MB (and that's because I retained all the original files <against the 20 MB that PHP-Nuke gets in because of all the un-necessary files like extra language packs in each module>), I managed to have the basic site up and running inside of an hour.
Then came a painful but thoroughly satisfying 4-5 hours of testing each module. For a while the Downloads module didn't work quite well since the module requires shifting of files inside the 'YOUR_THEME' folder to the theme that one's using. My upload automatically created a folder called YOUR_THEME. as soon as that was figured out, everything else fell into place as it should have, if I'd remembered to remember everything the readme files said (the readme files are every simple and easy to understand).
Some of the features that come standard with the Dragonfly install include a forum and photogallery other than the normally present News module on most CMS. One can aditionally add content, blog, calendar, a professional feel downloads section, IRC Chat amongst a host of other modules that one may feel the need for.
The best thing about these modules is that, as soon as you activate them in the admin area, they automatically add themselves to the Menu and you can fiddle around with the edit feature to re-name the modules under contents as well as move the blocks for each one around to best fit your page.
Now, the only tricky parts that required a bit of thinking were:
1. Getting the blocks to appear on the right hand side of the page. >>> In the blocks admin, select the blocks you want on the right hand side of the page. Next, go to the modules section, click to edit the 'News' (Or whichever module you have set as 'home') and select it to appear on "BOTH sides". This will enable blocks to appear on the right side of the page.
2. In the coppermine gallery, the home view of the gallery has a forcd "EXAMPLE" advertisement. To remove this, you need to go to the coppermine settings in the Admin area and remove the 'Ad' section from the 'display on home' area.
That being done, Dragonfly seems to be the fastest CMS I have tested to date, and seems to be great on the admin front too.
