March 17, 2010 at 12:32Cogear: an amateur look
I first learned about CMS Cogear on Habré, and it happened absolutely by accident. However, the accident turned out to be very appropriate, since recently I was thinking about transferring the site of my project to another CMS. It should be noted that Wordpress, for all its convenience, turned out to be very voracious, and the simple desire to learn something new grew into a serious need: systematic surges in traffic, including the habraeffect, left me no other choice. By the way, even if the need had not arisen, I would still have started switching to another CMS, because I want to realize the idea of a significant expansion of the project.
In the course of analyzing free CMS, I came to the conclusion that today the most promising are two of them: LiveStreet and Cogear. After carefully reading the public opinion, a little googling and trying all this in practice, I made my choice in favor of Cogear.
The reasons for making a choice are extremely subjective: IMHO, and Cogear, and Livestreet are good CMS, just like that circumstances. All the pros and cons listed below are extremely subjective.
At first, if you call things and people by their proper names, then I am an amateur. I can edit something in CSS, but this is where my skills completely end. In this sense, Cogear is very pleasant - the design of the full-time template is very good, I edited everything I needed for 10 minutes. Ahead of possible questions, I’ll say that LiveStreet is certainly no less complicated, but Cogear has a very convenient admin panel from which you can manage almost everything you need.
Secondly , compared to Wordpress, Cogear significantly less loads the server. For me it is very important: the site is on shared hosting. I believe that the story with the Habraeffect will not be repeated, and Cogear will be much more resilient.
Thirdly, really like the little things. The integrated jevix typographer, easily disconnectable and plug-in modules (here they are called “gears”) make the transition from WP very, very simple.
The “gears” supplied with the CMS, by the way, cover about 85 percent of the requirements of a not very demanding user: unlike WP, there is no need to put something like “All-In-One SEO Pack”, “TweetMeMe Button”, “Sitemap Generator” , “Comment Notifier”, “OpenID”, etc. - Complete gears easily do the same. Here I want to express to the creators of Cogear and personally Dmitry Belyaev a huge respect.
Are there any downsides? Undoubtedly. Cons can be called characteristic for all CMS, which can not boast of worldwide recognition, namely, offensively few "gears" of third-party developers, and there are practically no additional templates. However, all this is partially offset by the fact that the regular Cogear template is very good, but something needs to be done with the number of plugins.
Were there any problems during the installation and operation of the CMS? Not one: if you carefully follow the instructions that can be found on the official website of Cogear, then there will be no difficulties. It’s nice that the small but friendly Cogear community is eager to meet the newcomers and helps with some issues related to the installation and operation of the CMS.
As an amateur, I can say that such a category of unskilled users like me, an analogue of the WP-plugin “Contextual Related Posts” is vital, which displays at the end of each record the necessary number of similar ones. However, in any case, Cogear leaves a good impression, and I definitely will not return to WP.
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UPD : I ask actively minusers in detail to express their opinion on this issue in the comments.