Comparison with AM2

Article Manager has a search engine, supports categories, gives you lots of control over over what users can access, email notification for changes, etc. It also only supports two kinds of content, though, "Articles" and "Categories". It's for "article" heavy sites like Newspapers, School websites, Blogs, etc and is really good at that.

CMS Builder doesn't have a search engine, only basic category support, basic user access controls, but lets you create as many "editor menus" as you want, each with different fields. You can create sections for "Jobs", "News", "Events", "Products", etc. CMS Builder is a more general tool for for all the other sites where Article Manager doesn't quite fit. It's also really easy to learn.

An easy way to give CMS Builder a try is with the $19.95/mo subscription. You can always switch to a full license later and either way you get the same 90 day money back guarantee.

Thanks Dave,
I love IT and just want to make the right choice for my current project. I have a template and quite a lot of 'static' pages to add. AM2 is intended to then drive the new content and article side of things, hence I need to integrate AM2 into my own template. Can you elaborate if CMS would be the better tool for this task?

Thanks,
Mickey

If you're not sure, and you can spare the time, I'd start with CMS Builder. It's $150 less than Article Manager right now and a lot quicker to learn and implement.

If you're in a rush, you're familiar with AM2, and know that it will do the job, then you might want to stick to what you know and save CMS Builder for a future project.

Hi, Dave.

I have a related question about comparing AM2 with CMSb.

One thing we like most about AM2 is the SEO friendly .html output capability.

Does CMSb share that capability?

thanks!

RBW

Absolutely, there's a number of options for SEO friendly urls. By default urls look like the following, but you can change it to just about anything you want.

articleViewer.php?This_is_the_title-1

When you generate the viewer code to paste into your page theres an called 'titleField' that lets you specify which field content to display in the url and another option 'useSeoUrls' lets you use / instead of ?. So if you set those like this:

$options['titleField'] = 'urlKeywordField';
$options['useSeoUrls'] = '1';

You'll get an url like this:

articleViewer.php/whatever_you_want_here-1

(In fact, with a bit of .htaccess magic, you could even rename the script and tell your web server to ignore the '.php' part, making the script appear as a folder in the URL, like "articles/whatever_you_want_here-1".)

So you could have it use the title field for the url, add another field just for url keywords, or basically have it anyway you want.

Hope that helps. If you need help crafting a specific kind of url just let us know.

Hi CBD,

CMS Builder is very different from Article Manager. In fact it can't do everything that Article Manager can do. For an Article Manager style of site you're still better off with that product.

To get started you create "Sections" in CMSB for the areas of your website (such as News, Jobs, etc) then use the code generator to create a "list" viewer page an d a "detail" viewer page then upload those to your site.

That's the basics. Do you have an url to the website or website section you are trying to update with CMSB?

Let me know.