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Custom CMS - advice needed

by oliva
5 replies
In the beginning of 2010 I bought PR4 gaming website with custom CMS (SQL/PHP based CMS integrated with vBulletin/forums) which turned out to have a sloppy code. Since than I was paying endlessly for bugs fixing, changing editor, upgraded ($400) to vBulletin Publishing suite and so on. It did not solve any problems. So I was told by a programmer I was working with at that time it's better to re-write code which will cost me min $3000. At the same time I was told there is another solution - switch to standard CMS like Wordpress or Joomla. I am not that tech person and I don't want to repeat my mistakes again so I decided to ask advice of the professional/experienced people - what will be the optimum solution in my situation?

- re-write code of custom CMS (too expensive)
- switch to standard CMS - which one will be better, how much it may cost?
- in a case of switching - how to make sure site will not loose PR, backlinks and so on?
- where it's better to hire a person who can do that professionally?

For any case my website is psbeyond.com. Right now I've got new strange bug that causes all "n"s to be replaced with line breaks and made majority of my articles unreadable. It looks like that:

"style="fo
t-family: 'Times New Roma
'; fo
t-size: small;">Not o
ly is Tumble o
e of the best Move titles, but it is o
e of the best games I have played I"

I will greatly appreciate any advice.
#advice #cms #custom #needed
  • Profile picture of the author copypilot
    I would suggest switching to a Drupal with a custom theme, not sure how much it will cost but it should be about a few hundred for the theme and Drupal of course is free.

    If you do everything quickly you shouldn't have any problems with your SEO, just make sure to keep you domains the same and try to keep all your links as similar as possible, with any luck it will be mostly unchanged.
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  • Profile picture of the author theIMgeek
    Sorry to hear you're having such bugs.

    I hope you have a back-up. I worry that one of these bugs actually corrupted the content text in the database, which would make it more difficult to fix.

    Just at a glance, I would have assumed your site was powered by Wordpress, as it has a very Wordpress-y look to it. I think it may be a good solution for you.

    As for keeping PR in a switch, the two keys would be making sure URLs remain the same, and keeping the page layout as similar as possible. With that, search engines wouldn't notice (or care) what was used to generate the page.

    It would be a bit of a job to mirror-match WP and transfer content. I would guess the work involved there would be about the same as fixing bugs in the original CMS... so probably a toss-up. But the big bonus to WP is you're all set for the future.

    -Ryan
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    Ask the Internet Marketing Geek     <-- Happy to help with technical challenges
    MiniSiteMaker.org <-- Free software to make your mini-sites fast and easy
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  • Profile picture of the author AlTheGr8
    I mostly agree with people who replied here. WordPress, Joomla or Drupal would be your obvious choices. WordPress is the easiest to learn, Drupal is the most powerful but not so user-friendly for a non-techie. Joomla is right there in the middle, in my opinion it's a better choice for majority of the projects out there. Although WordPress will work just fine in your case. It looks like your home page has a PR4 but most of the sub-pages have N/A, and only a few have PR0 or PR1. I am not sure whether you will be able to mimic your current URLs such as PlayStation Beyond - Previews - LittleBigPlanet since it's pretty non-standard but for URLs like PlayStation Beyond - Cheats you should be able to. Even if you can't keep URLs the same on all the pages I wouldn't worry about it because most of the pages don't have PR do begin with.
    Good luck.
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  • Profile picture of the author joomlawala
    Let me help you out of this situation with my professional touch. Email me. Thanks.
    Signature

    Masud
    Email me at: masud@softsubstation.com
    [to start PSD-to-XHTML/CSS $70; PSD-to-Joomla/WP $150 only]

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  • Profile picture of the author oliva
    Thanks a lot for all your advice dear Warriors. The bug is already fixed, but speaking of the future (Thank you Ryan) it looks like better to switch to WordPress. Or Joomla? Still not sure.

    And thank you AlTheGr8 for the valuable advice on sub-pages PR. We have some PR 1-3 articles - so we should focus on it in a case of migration, which will be easier than all the articles.

    Thank you Joomlawala - we'll email you.
    Signature
    PlayStation Beyond
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