Do I Or Do I Not

[berto]

Been looking closely at VIVO and PHPCOW and can't seem to really make my mind up as to what would benefit me more in the future.

I currently run a very large music website which uses a ASP.net platform but want to move over to PHP which leaves me with only two off the shelve solutions VIVO and PHPCOW - Getting a developer to write something from scratch will take far too long and I have never had good experiences with freelancers so id rather just go for a ready-to-go solution.

Both PHPCOW and VIVO do not have the exact features that I require, such as multiple categories for a single article, related articles by keywords, sections and personality + custom fields... Both PHPCOW and VIVO say they will be including one or two of these features in their next release.

My question is:
How easy is VIVO to modify regarding TEMPLATES and functionality?

There is a lot of current options that I would have to remove as they do not suit my current layout and functionality specially the Sort by: [Title] [Author] [Date] in categories and specially their layouts...

Id like to show you and the VIVO dev team my current site in order for you guys to see what will be using the VIVO platform with if I decide this is the best option - I do not want to post it here for SPAMMING reasons so a PM would be fine.

Feedback, comments and experience using VIVO would be much apriciated.

Hope to hear from you all...

[Mark]

Hi,

First, thanks for considering Vivvo as your next CMS of choice. We are very interested in working with you on developing the ultimate solution to suit your needs. Please submit your URL and other info to sales@vivvo.net and our manager will gladly look into it and give you some quick feedback. If you are not in a terrible hurry, I think we might be able to offer you a more advanced solution that anyone else, probably as soon as early January.

Thanks again and looking forward to hearing from you.

[boccio]

My question is:
How easy is VIVO to modify regarding TEMPLATES and functionality?

There is a lot of current options that I would have to remove as they do not suit my current layout and functionality specially the Sort by: [Title] [Author] [Date] in categories and specially their layouts...

Good question, here's how easy is to accomplish this:

1. Open appropriate template. Full list of tags and templates where they appear is descibed here:
http://www.vivvo.net/doc/templates.html#taglist

{SORT_BY} | category_Main.tpl | Shows sort links and ASC/DESC direction template
2. Open up category_Main.tpl template (as you can see from above), and remove the entire row where this is used:

<tr>
<td valign="top" colspan="2"><div class="trWhite"></div><br/> {SORT_BY}</td>
</tr>
This is exactly the pattern how things are done in Vivvo. Hope this example helps.


Id like to show you and the VIVO dev team my current site in order for you guys to see what will be using the VIVO platform with if I decide this is the best option - I do not want to post it here for SPAMMING reasons so a PM would be fine.

Please do, you can write to our sales dept. with your site URL, and we'll gladly take a look.

[berto]

Brilliant. Will do. :)

[berto]

Any light as to when the Vivvo V4 forum will open?

[Mark]

Vivvo 4.0 forum is in works and should be launched during the first weeks of August.

[berto]

Thank you.

[Maky70]

Don't make my mistake, PHPCow looks and sounds good from their web site however, their support is all but absent. There is almost no documentation and what little there is, is very sketchy and vague.

Support is extremely slow in getting a response. They claim to have Online Support but it is always "Offline". They say you will get your license in 24 hours of your purchase. I waited three days to get mine. If they had some decent support and some documentation it could be a good script. They even haven't released an update or patched releases to version 2.0 since months.
There's only one guy called Joseph handling sales, support, etc. Moreover many functions in that script are buggy and produce errors - for example making PDF files from news or article items will show a lot of funny chars and invalid symbols in the generated file!! In my opinion it doesn't worth more than $20, and you'd better go with free CMS tools to avoid it.

I've learned 2 lessons from my experience with PHP scripts and products: 1) never buy products from vendors who don't have discussion forums where you will find the good and the bad about their products and services; 2) never buy encrypted scripts - they run slow on your site and you cannot customize them to your needs.

There's only one product that supports multiple categories for one article, but it lacks Vivvo's flexibility and simplicity, and it does not allow you to move articles between different categories, where Vivvo does it by drag & drop.

Vivvo is the best CMS tool when it comes to customizing templates and adding extra PHP/Javascript stuff it its templates. Vivvo 4 is very promising with many cool features and updates. I'm currently feeding my Vivvo's database with articles and news, but waiting eagerly for version 4.0 to use it for my website after importing V3.5 database ;)

I suppose Boccio and the team are working on some eye-catching templates for Vivvo 4, which should look similar or better than PHPCow ones :p

Stay tuned for Vivvo 4... the killer news & articles CMS tool :D

[berto]

Thanks Maky70, I am now a Vivvo client, decided Vivvo is what we need.

[Capper]

I've been a customer of PHPCOW for 18 months or so, and have shared my thoughts about them and their program on Digital Point.

[Maky70]

Thanks Capper for sharing your experiences with us about PHPCow and ArticleLive. I believe the increasing number of negative feedbacks and reviews on PHPCow would soon kill this product.

I'm also ArticleLive NX 1.7 user (after years with Joomla & Drupal), but decided to go with Vivvo for many reasons. While AL is a powerful publishing script with several cool features, but customizing its templates is horrible and time consuming: there are Panels, Snippets, PHP/HTML pages, CSS files... and you have to jump between many sections for a simple customization, not to mention the poor documentation on AL templates! Whatever you try hard, AL is not - and will never be - a total news or media publishing platform. VB integration is one thing that AL customers have been asking for years with no serious action. As you said, it's good for blogging and articles-based websites.

Out of the topic talk: I can see, and I assure you, that WordPress 2.x is taking over the majority of most blogging & article-based tools like AL with its free license and the tons of so powerful & stable plug-ins for WP, not to forget the important features that will be included in WP 2.3 this month ;) I've even seen many sites developed with WP that don't look like blogging sites and supersede AL in functionality and look.

With all my respect to everybody's opinion & feedback, Vivvo is currently the best news & media publishing CMS with a reasonable cost, and what you believe is now missing (like multi-page articles) are going be added in the coming release, or maybe a later one.

Thanks again for sharing your thoughts, and keep visiting this forum :D

[pcoskat]

I'm also ArticleLive NX 1.7 user (after years with Joomla & Drupal), but decided to go with Vivvo for many reasons. While AL is a powerful publishing script with several cool features, but customizing its templates is horrible and time consuming: there are Panels, Snippets, PHP/HTML pages, CSS files... and you have to jump between many sections for a simple customization, not to mention the poor documentation on AL templates! Whatever you try hard, AL is not - and will never be - a total news or media publishing platform. VB integration is one thing that AL customers have been asking for years with no serious action. As you said, it's good for blogging and articles-based websites.

I couldn't agree more. I had to abandone my AL site because working with AL was simply too tedious.


Out of the topic talk: I can see, and I assure you, that WordPress 2.x is taking over the majority of most blogging & article-based tools like AL with its free license and the tons of so powerful & stable plug-ins for WP, not to forget the important features that will be included in WP 2.3 this month ;) I've even seen many sites developed with WP that don't look like blogging sites and supersede AL in functionality and look.

funny you should bring this up. I'm in the process now, of debating which platform to use to re-launch what was my AL site, and it's between WP and Vivvo. I'm seem some really rockin' sites that had WP as the backend. (One looked like a fully featured SNS...but it was WordPress...)

[Maky70]

Looks like we both had wasted a lot of bucks on a bunch of CMS tools and extensions, pcoskat :p, If I want to develop a new articles or news based website then I will definitely go with Vivvo 4 as a first choice and then I'll consider WordPress 2.x! Ford auto shows (http://autoshows.ford.com/) and Barganews (http://www.barganews.com/index.php)are great examples of few sites that were developed with WP 2.1 and a couple of free WP plug-ins!

However it's not fair, and still too early, to say that WP is better than Vivvo as a news & media publishing CMS platform for many reasons, mainly for security & site traffic load related issues, as WP cannot handle high traffic/load on large websites, and the WP-cache plug-in is still immature.

[Capper]

After posting my thoughts on PHPCOW at the Digital Point forums, I was verbally attacked by a couple of their employees and hosting partners......it was an ongoing problem with them, a product that had a lot of potential hamstrung by some guys with seriously poor people skills.

I've been asking for help from AL staff since purchasing the program on Friday, and to be perfectly honest, at least PHPCOW answered questions and emails.....basically every AL question has been answered along the lines of "heres a link to our documentation", or "heres a link to the template customization guide". Personally, when spending this much money on something, i expect it to be as easy as possible, and for me to focus my time and energy on content. I'll probably ask AL for a refund tomorrow.

I really wish there was some kind of multi-page feature here, it would put Vivvo at the top of the heap, but without it most serious news publishing and writing sites can't even consider it.

Now i just really need to find a program that can handle my site, that won't break the bank, and that has some sort of migration script for 200+ articles.

[Mark]

Sounds to me like you should give Vivvo a try :)

If you are not too impatient, you should wait for few more weeks for the new release of Vivvo, I think you will not be disappointed. We believe that it will set a new set of standards for online content management solutions.

Good luck in any case!

[Capper]

Sounds to me like you should give Vivvo a try :)

If you are not too impatient, you should wait for few more weeks for the new release of Vivvo, I think you will not be disappointed. We believe that it will set a new set of standards for online content management solutions.

Good luck in any case!

Mark, I would absolutely love to give Vivvo a try, but I don't have a couple of weeks.....in fact i need to find a new CMS asap. If I were just starting a site, that'd be one thing, but this is a pretty well established site that has a lot riding on it.

As such I can't wait. I spent $289 on Article live, and am about to give up on them, the support is lacking, the program is a pain in the ass to customize, and a week after buying it I still can't use it for my site. I needed to be moved two days ago, but am no closer to being up and running than I was a week ago.
If you guys could work with my on the multipage article issue, I'd switch, its a non-negotiable requirement.

[Capper]

Can you guys promise the pagination feature will be added in v4.0? Honestly, I've tinkered with Vivvo, and really like what it has to offer, but pagination is a must, as some of our articles are 8-10 pages long....way too much for a one page article.

As far as templating, I've looked over the PDF, and thinks it alright, but can you upload your own templates? Meaning can I keep the basic look of my current site?

Edit:

Looking over a couple of the sites that wrote reviews of Vivvo, i see multipage articles......what gives?

[Capper]

Alright, we'll take the plunge and give vivvo a shot.

[Maky70]

Welcome - in advance - to Vivvo world :D If you're unhappy with AL, simply ask for a refund before a month from your date of purchase and the guys there will process it without a question. I did it once and I just lost $30 (bank/transaction processing fees), at least better than losing $289 or whatever ;)

As Mark said, you won't be disappointed and you'll never regret. It requires just a few days to get used to Vivvo customization and usage, and you'll get all support & assistance from everyone here until your new site is up & running.

The majority of important and requested features will be available in the coming release with more advanced yet simple template customization options. Just be patient for a while, and good luck with your next project.

[Capper]

Yeah, I'll be purchasing Vivvo as soon as I get my refund. Vivvo was my first choice, but the lack of multi page articles is a real problem, one we still have to figure out (I'm baking on that being a feature of v4, or there being a mod for it).

The biggest problem with Article live was the templates. My site is almost 2 yrs old, with 200+ articles, so its hardly new.....and the issue with templating meant that we would either have to learn CSS and their templating system, or go back and hand edit every page of every article.....neither were appealing, and in the end a deal killer.

I saw a couple sites on the "Testimonials" page with multipage articles, so there has to be a way

[boccio]

Alright, we'll take the plunge and give vivvo a shot.
Welcome to the club, hope you won't be disappointed :)

and the issue with templating meant that we would either have to learn CSS and their templating system, or go back and hand edit every page of every article

Errrr... with Vivvo you will also have to struggle with CSS and our template system :)

[pcoskat]

If you guys could work with my on the multipage article issue, I'd switch, its a non-negotiable requirement.

What's the verdict on this? Any chance of getting it as an option?

[Alex]

What's the verdict on this? Any chance of getting it as an option?
Not a chance in 4.0 release, I'm afraid. We are aware on importance of this option, so we shall definitely make this happen in next major release, although we're all aware it won't be too soon...