Etomite CMS
Etomite Content Management System - Showcase
In this section, you can read real-life accounts from site-owners who have chosen Etomite to manage their content.
Our second featured showcase is from Jelmer, designer of: Amsterdam Brass.
Site: Amsterdam Brass
Genre: Group Website for Brassband
Purpose: This site is about a semi-professional brassband from Amsterdam.
Approximate Age of Website: 3 Years
History of the Site:
The website of Amsterdam Brass consisted of a few dozen HTML pages. Because it was expanded over time, the site became unstructured with over 20 items in the main menu. Also, only one person had access to the site, which was managed via FTP. All news, updates etc. needed to be hardcoded in HTML. This caused the layout to break regularly and the site was almost never up to date. Because our monthly hits started to increase and our band was going to perform on a big art festival in Amsterdam, we realised our site did not fit with our desired image.
Before Etomite:
Before Etomite, the entire site was developed page by page, then uploaded via FTP. Not only was this cumbersome to manage, it was difficult to update.
Finding Etomite
Quite soon we found out that a Content Management System could help us out. But because our site was mostly static and it was to be managed by a relatively small group of editors, we did not need a community-based or portal-like system. Etomite provided us with exactly the right set of tools to seperate content from lay-out and to be able to have a group of editors for specific area's of our site.
It took us a few days to get the "basic" site ready for the audience. Most of the time was spent on the template. It's based on the Mollio C template, converted to Etomite by Lloyd Borret. After the basic site was up and running, we found out what more was possible with Etomite. With a lot of help from the community, we built a set of snippets to fully exploit the new "frond-end visitor authentication" possibilities Etomite offers. That took a bit longer!
"What sort of snippets have you used?"
An array of them really - I've listed them below, with a brief description
- MollioSecundaryMenu for our main menu, with the CSS adapted to match our template
- The whole set of Visitor Authentication snippets:
- AuthenticateVisitor (to display a login form)
- AssignRoles (to assign roles to band members and block users)
- MemberList (produces a list of personal details of all the registered members)
- LoginOut (displays either a login link or a logout link somewhere in your template)
- userEditDetails (allows a logged-in user to edit his personal details)
- userChangePassword (allows a logged-in user to change his Etomite password)
- lostPassword (to assign a new password to a user)
- An adapted form of the NewslistingRev03 to display our band's news
- A calender snippet to display upcoming events
- Various form snippets to contact us or order cd's or concert tickets
- A weblink lister snippet to display links to other brassbands in the Netherlands
- Various: sitemap, Google sitemap, DisplayChildren, MetaTagsExtra, Poweredby, Copyright
"Would you recommend Etomite to others?"
Absolutely! If your looking for a product that gives you a lot "out of the box", but really starts to amaze you with endless possibilities, Etomite is a great CMS. The focus on a websites content instead of portal features makes it stand out. Finally, the support on the Etomite forums is far better than any other freeware software package we have ever experienced before.