Appraising Craft CMS - newbie questions

Question

I am looking into the idea of porting my first site into Craft CMS. It is the site of a friend/client who has a railway engineering consultancy, and it's currently running on another CMS (TidyCMS). Before I dive in and look through all your documentation, I would appreciate some help, just so that I don’t run into a design roadblock further down the road.

There are really only two areas where I am concerned about porting to Craft CMS :

Actualités (News) page : http://www.study-technologies.com/fr/actualites.html These are news listings on the page (image + date + title/text), which point to individual article pages when clicked. Can this be done in Craft?

Project pages : http://www.study-technologies.com/fr/projets-ferro.html These are project galleries which are dynamically populated as individual project pages are created. An image in the project page is chosen to appear in the gallery grid. Can this be done in Craft?

A few other questions :

• Can Craft CMS handle bilingual sites?

• Is the Craft CMS admin available in French?

• Can my client set up different user permission levels?**

I hope you can answer all of these, and if so, I’ll be diving in right away! I have other clients that I’d like to port over, but this client has the most complex design, so I’d like to use it as a test case.

Thanks, Ric

Answer 1

Craft is the perfect CMS to handle everything you just pointed out.

Can Craft CMS handle bilingual sites? YES.

https://craftcms.com/docs/localization-guide

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Is the Craft CMS admin available in French? YES.

https://craftcms.com/support/cp-languages

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Can my client set up different user permission levels?** "YES".

Depending on your use case this will be doable. Then its just a matter of "how" your client wants to be able to do this. Craft supports dynamic user permissions creation so whatever your use case is I'm sure Craft will handle it with ease.

Answer 2

In addition to naboovalley's great answer...

Actualités (News) page: These are news listings on the page (image + date + title/text), which point to individual article pages when clicked.

Sure can. Basically you'd setup a new section in Craft to house these entries. Craft already has the title and date fields built-in so you just need to add an Asset field so your client to add a featured image. If you want to have a different image for the thumbnails and one of the main page, you can do that too.

Unlike other CMS where there might be a one-to-one map of the image, Craft allows you to reference the image a client uploads, then put some transforms on it (scale, crop) to exactly fit your design (while keeping the original intact).

Project pages: project galleries which are dynamically populated as individual project pages are created. An image in the project page is chosen to appear in the gallery grid. Can this be done in Craft?

Similar case as above. This is also great fit for Craft's relationships. Craft allows you supreme power to relate basically anything with anything else.

There's lots of ways to pull this off. You'd create a projects section that houses the actual projects (the data). You might have a main projects "index" page that the client can choose which projects are featured (and which aren't). Doing that is as simple is putting in an Entries relational field that allows the client to choose just which projects should be featured.

On the actual project pages themselves, I noticed you have a block of text (on the left) and an image on the right. These types of layouts could easily be made with Craft's Matrix.

... just so that I don’t run into a design roadblock further down the road.

This is a common concern. If you think of Craft as basically just a big interface to a database (in a sense) with a really nice user interface, you're just putting in the data in the right spots when you design your templates. Craft allows you easy access to any piece of data inside the system.

Unlike other CMS where they impose design limitations on your design (say by including jQuery automatically in the output or going through some kind of loop... seriously WordPress?), Craft keeps the front end up to you.

The thing that trips most new people up with Craft is Twig, the templating language that Craft uses. Once you get the hang of it, though, it's easy to use, yet powerful.

Check out Craft's Happy Lager demo site. It features many of the same concepts... relations, images, etc.