Considering moving to CMS Builder

Hi designer, Welcome to the CMS Builder forum! :)

If you can hand code HTML, and especially if you've used even a little PHP before, you'll find you can likely build a lot of your own CMS solutions with CMS Builder and not have to rely on specialists or developers to do the work for you.

Some answers to your questions:

>- How easy is it to build custom Plug-in features?

We're just getting starting building a plug-in system. So there's no documentation or official support for that. But because CMS Builder uses standard PHP/MySQL you can build all kinds of custom widgets on the website frontend and integrate them with the CMS.

>- If we build special modular plug-ins can we market these features to existing CMS Builder developers?

Yes, you could. Our site and these forums are for support though, so you'd want to clear it with us first if you wanted to market through it. If there was enough interest we might create a special forum for plugins. Feel free to email me directly if you want to discuss that more (dave@interactivetools.com).

>- Does CMS Builder offer a media manager to manage media assets referenced throughout the site?

No, this is on our planned feature list though (no ETA)

>- Are there any existing plug-ins to allow user registrations to enable sites to offer secure members areas?

No, we've done a number of custom jobs like this, though. Basically it's just a PHP form to add users and some PHP code to check login credentials from the accounts table.

>- I have noticed that url are posted as www.domain.com/page.php, can this be updated to remove the .php suffix

Yes, but this is done though the web server not applications. Either with .htaccess or mod_rewrite

>- Is there a quick way to map existing site urls, and redirect to an CMS Builder site (such as custom url entry per content item)?

No quick way. Quick once you set it up once. It would be with mod rewrite. You could have a unique filepath for a record in CMS "like-this.html" and then use mod_rewrite to map example.com/like-this.html to example.com/index.php?id=like-this.html behind the scenes. Which is how much CMS's do it.

>- Does CMS Builder use standard PHP and MySQL, with no encryption allowing for full customisation if needed.

Yes, and or all my no answers, there's lots of things you _can_ do that are quite cool. The best thing to do is try it out. We have a 90 day refund policy if it doesn't meet your needs.

>I would also be interested to hear from other designers formally using
>complex CMS frameworks such as eZ Publish who have since moved
> build projects to CMS Builder and the related success or difficulties
> experienced in the change of development approach.

We hear from developers who have used Drupal, Joomla, WordPress and other solutions. I'm not sure if anyone has eZ Publish experience. If they have please feel free to post here.

Hope that helps, let me know if you need anything else.