Big Medium for Fimcap

A while ago I mentioned Big Medium as a possible CMS for the Fimcap site. Today I finally had some time to lurk on the Support forum to find answers to some of my questions. Already after reading only a few messages I found out that Big Medium is not what I was looking for. 🙁

  • The user interface of the produced site has some hard-coded English texts; so internationalisation (I18L) is out of the question;
  • Big Medium only supports two document levels: the category and the subcategory. Only with an ugly hack it is possible to go deeper. This is also by design, and won't be solved in the near future;
  • The text editing area is too much a ‘guestbook’ styled page and not enough a text processor. For use by people without any HTML knowledge it is absolutely necessary that the interface has the buttons to change the text properties (bold, italics, headers,…);
  • There currently is no search feature; so I'll have to implement a separate search script. It is a big pity that you can't search directly in the BM database;
  • To edit a document you'll have to go to the management interface and look up the document. I would prefer to have an ‘Edit’ button right on the page if my machine contains the BM cookie with the appropriate rights;
  • Another thing I miss is the plug-in flexibility of Movable Type. Since BM does not support plug-ins, I'll have to wait for a new release to have extra functionality.

Most of the point mentioned above are on the roadmap, but in general I miss the flexibility of systems like MT.

Jeroen Sangers @jeroensangers