Adva CMS - A new state-of-the-art CMS

Hello. Finally got to blog but I’m still porting some of my old Drupal posts to Adva CMS. And I’ve got to say I am a recovered Drupal addict.

Comparing Drupal with Adva CMS seems to be more appropriate than comparing the Ruby on Rails framework with Drupal. Today I got a facebook message: “how well-versed are you with Drupal?”

I have been a Drupal Developer long enough for me to hatch my own CMS (3 years). But there’s really not much sense developing another CMS. We really shouldn’t build apps to inflate our own egos. We build apps out of need and because there’s nothing else out there for our clients to use. Clients know what they want although most cannot articulate it in geek terms. I appreciate that my current client has a very good understanding of what they want. If not, it will be like moving 1 step forward and 2 steps back.

It’s been about a day with Adva CMS and I am liking it so far. Installation is easy. Deploying the app may be challenging on shared servers like Dreamhost. I just got it up now.

Here’s a quick review, much like a first impression of the CMS because I haven’t spent a very long time modifying the app or trying break things so far.

Good Interface

The interface is good. In fact I personally appreciate it more than Wordpress interface. Drupal’s default interface is just yuck but I have heard of efforts on improving Drupal defaults, particulary the D7UX project.

Sensible Approach on Handling Internationalization and Localization

Adva CMS is by far the only CMS I’ve ever tried which handles translating content to different languages very well. The developers of Adva CMS include Sven Fuchs who is primarily responsible for making internationalization and localization possible for Rails since version 2.2.2. Many thanks to them.

I’ve done a bilingual Drupal site (Korean, English) in 2007. At that time Drupal already supported internationalization and localization through translation module but there were several problems which is part of project’s requirement: CJK (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) characters are not well-supported by the Drupal search system. I’ve realized by then that Google does search better than anyone. (Go Google! )

Another problem was I literally had to allow user to switch pages. It was difficult and not sensible because of the flash navigation requirement. It was also not possible to translate nodes then. Today we have the Node Translation module available for version 6.x. In Drupal, nearly all content are “nodes” and there are several node types like blog, page, etc. For Adva CMS, it’s just sensibly called “content.” Like Drupal it stores revisions and stores locales or translation for the given content.

It’s Ruby on Rails

The fact that it is built on Ruby on Rails is a strength. You have the freedom to hack and not “override.” In fact I think using Drupal API for overriding very basic things like the layout of the login and registration form in Drupal is not very sensible although I have been doing it over and over again. In Rails, you do not code to override. For Rails applications implemented as engines, you just have to copy views files on to the root app directory and have the freedom to do all the cool Rails stuff you want to do and use technologies like SASS if you wish.

That’s about it. I hope to be able to blog every Sunday. I have been very busy — in a not-so-normal way but this is just a phase.

Today’s quotable quote:

Have it your way — DHH