For quite some time now, I’ve been trying to create a new web site on which I could publish articles and code snippets, organize good links and ultimate sell my future games on. Back in 2002, after checking out various content management systems (including PostNuke, XooPS and Joomla), I decided for Xaraya.
Now it’s 2006 and I have put a decent amount of content into my Xaraya site, even got listed in the open directory project. However, I never came around to customize its look and feel because it seemed to complicated. Somehow I simply cannot get myself to like web development. I want an almost complete system that looks good, is intuitive and fun to use. Reason enough to reevaluate the status of CMS systems out there.
Xaraya is still one of my top candidates because it’s probably the most powerful & flexible system.
On the other side, what I don’t like about xaraya is the seemingly unneeded complexity stuffed into some things that could have been made simpler. I see the same happen at my workplace (I’m a software developer) every day: Instead of making good compromises in order to be able to create an intuitive, well-understood system, where we can say “you can do this but not that”, we throw in just about everything the customer might require. Then we end up with something nobody fully understands and which cannot even be cleanly expressed in a GUI.
Xaraya presents even the web site visitor with a myriad of choices. Of course you can hide all that away by customizing a theme, but that means I’m forced to take over the work of maintaining the theme I’m modifying. There should be away to configure what functionality gets exposed to the user. If I want to attract visitors, my site needs to look clean and professional. The visitor should never feel overwhelmed by the amount of choice. In short, the power of xaraya needs to be better hidden.
The categories system in xaraya is great, thought its default category tree is plainly confusing. The document types (”publication types” in xaraya) have been recreated as example categories. So instead of listing your documents by topic, you will be listing your documents by document. Or categorize your web links by web link. Nonsense. I erased the default tree and created my own one.
The article management in Xaraya works really well. You define so-called “publication types” which define the kinds of articles you can create. For example, web links, forum posts, product descriptions and screenshots. Each publication type has a number of fixed fields you can freely configure to contain URLs, links to uploaded files, text, dates and more. Even more flexibility can be added with dynamic data, a powerful feature of xaraya that I have yet to research.
Browsing articles in the default theme again isn’t very intuitive. Imagine you’ve got a category “Math” with two sub-categories “Statics” and “Dynamics” containing some articles. When the visitor browses the “Math” category, no articles will be shown. There’s a tiny textual link saying “include children” that will do what you’re used from other CMS. I have tried modifying this overview a bit for my links section, but haven’t managed to reverse this behavior so the tiny link says “exclude children”…
I think the font for the article display in Xaraya’s default theme is not well chosen and by far too small. I have overriden the default template, removing the ugly box around the article, throught I have yet to do something about the fonts.
E-Commerce in Xaraya is still in its beginning stages. There is no unified product management module yet. Luckily, because I only want to sell downloadable software, I don’t need fully integrated shopping carts, shipping address-to-user profile association, warehouse management or anything like that.
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