I received an email today from Mr Yabdab announcing that GoCMS was available as an all you can eat, unlimited domain version for exactly the same price as GoCMS from Nick Cates current GoCMS at $79 per domain. The link from the email goes to Mr Yabdabs site which doesn’t appear to show GoCMS, which seems odd.
For 2 devs who collaborated on this product, this seems to be a somewhat strange strategy.
I remember trying the original GoCMS and the online editing was impressive, but AFAIK GoCMS uses a phone home check to verify the license and there was a period of about a day when the GoCMS system was offline, and users blog and CMS content did not appear. This was a show stopper for me, for the type of applications that I though that GoCMS might be a solution.
I would be interested to hear of anyones experience with GoCMS.
From what I can see (happy to be corrected if wrong), there’s no way to enable to pretty permalinks or set a unique meta description or browser title per blog post.
It seems like some devs just don’t consider SEO when building CMS stacks, especially blog stacks. For those not worried about the technical side of the CMS or SEO, GoCMS looks like a really good deal.
I’ve recently greatly reduced the number of new stacks I’m buying. I used to grab most everything that was launched, but now I test it (if possible) to see how it performs on a web page before buying.
Yabdab confirmed that everything runs off your server. Also looks like you can set meta title and description. The post title is used for the titles and there is a field to use for descriptions. So this post at https://www.yabdab.com/demo/go-cms/blog/?post=morning-camp-coffee creates the following:
No adverts here, just want to mention that I put quite some time to get all aligned in Poster Stack (thanks Paul for pushing! I don’t know if you have a user account here 😉)
In the new version the password is stored in the go-cms-key.php file that has to be kept in your resources. You can edit the file and change the password for each site. I don’t know if it dials back to their servers but since you don’t have to ask the developer to change the password on their side I presume not.
I have been testing it for the last couple of weeks and although the changes since the first version are few, it does add ordered and unordered lists and can be used on as many sites as you want! It might not be as adaptable as TCMS or Pulse but it is so simple to use and build into a site.
That’s the real proof. Yabdab confirmed it doesn’t call home.
I see it as the only low cost, unlimited domain, onscreen editable solution available for RW. The Modern 'ghost" blog list layout is well executed. It is really quick to setup too.
On desktop you can add single images, light boxed images and slideshows. You can also limit the file size that can be uploaded from 1 to 9Mb. You can also have multiple editable areas by dropping the GoCMS content stack into various elements on a page and they will all be unlocked and editable when you enter your password. It is certainly the easiest of all the CMS I have used (TCMS, Easy CMS, Pulse, Armadillo plus others). It might not have the most features (Total CMS wins for that but is time consuming to set up) but it covers 95% of what most users would need. Drop the base stack onto the page add content/blog stacks and once you have added the included php file into your resources and edited the password you are away.
Yes, Yabdab has taken over GoCMS and will continue to develop it according to Mike. No limits and no phoning home makes this a good choice for a cheap, quick CMS that incorporates a nice-looking blog.
It looks like an interesting addition to the RW CMS stable. I guess the first thing to accept is that RW isn’t a CMS platform, or really built to be one, but, that doesn’t mean with the right tools it can’t be levered as such. it’ll never replace a proper CMS, but not everyone wants/needs that.
I tried playing with the live demo but it fell over a bit, most likely though because I jumped in with no RFTMing and most likely broke it. There is a free demo, so that’s worth a download.
Before I do though, anyone used Go & Armadillo? How do they compare? They seem to do much the same thing, but that’s based only on a quick flick around the site.
EDIT: Just read that Go doesn’t use a database! How is the data added stored then? Flat-file (or whatever it’s called)? If so, for me it’s a shame. I don’t trust CMS systems that store data like this. It’s too suspectable to data loss.
