This post has been a long time coming. I’ve had a love-hate relationship with CMS Made Simple for a number of years now. It can be quite idiosyncratic. But then, so can WordPress. But the big difference is that when WordPress misbehaves, there are myriad resources to help you get back up on your feet. The CMS Made Simple forums seem to be quite elitist and help is not very forthcoming, other than by a few individuals. It’s also been my experience that quite a few of the main contributors to the forums are in Europe. (The main developer is in Canada.) There don’t seem to be that many from the U.S.
And of course, last year, CMS Made Simple lost the support of two great contributors with its heavy-handed ways. This sounded the death knell of my involvement with CMS-MS.
I had been curating We Love CMS Made Simple, a showcase site that I had created to showcase some of the fine web sites that were being developed with CMS-MS. Now that the shine is off the apple, I have found somoene to take over maintenance of that site. He is a well-respected forum member and now a CMSMS dev. I think he will make a real go of that web site. I wish him luck.
So I’ve spent this weekend revamping this web site to delete references to any design services involving CMS Made Simple. Of course, we do still have a handful of clients using it (two to be exact). So we will continue to give our support as long as necessary. But it is our hope that eventually those clients will permit us to port their sites to WordPress.
But don’t think that we are one-trick ponies. We do have expertise in quite a few content management systems. It’s just that we now prefer to focus most of our energies on WordPress, which we’ve been developing and designing for since 2004, over 10 years. How many web design firms can say that? (Truth be told, we have our eye on October CMS. Wink, wink.)
Joni Mueller has been designing web sites for hire since 2003, when she first blew up her web host’s server by insisting on running Greymatter. Since then, Joni has designed for Blogger and Movable Type, TextPattern, WordPress and CMS Made Simple. She lives with her cat and shoe collection in a bucolic old section of Houston called Idylwood. For some strange reason, Joni likes to refer to herself in the third person. When she’s not working on web design, she’s ordering lawyers around. And blogging about it. Or both.
Leave a Reply