Hi

I'm currently using Anchor CMS for my blog. To visitors, it looks fine, but I hate using it. It's ugly and way too simple, lacking many features. But since it looks nice for visitors, I've sort of been ok with it.

I recently came across October and it looks absolutely stunning. I was also born in October so this seems like a natural choice. Then there's Ghost which is super popular and many people swear by it.

I'm wondering how they compare. Specifically, I'd like an answer to these questions:

1. I was able to customize Anchor to look exactly like my main website. I'm a big fan of consistency so to me that's a big selling point. Is that possible with October? How much leeway do I have in terms of design?

2. I have disabled Anchor's built in commenting system and installed Hashover and I'm very happy with it. I don't know what kind of commenting system October has, but in case I don't like it, is it flexible enough to let me use an external JS package that loads PHP?

3. Perhaps most importantly of all, my existing posts. Is there a way to import them into October with the proper date/time stamps without needing to redo everything from scratch?

4. Anchor is open source, free and self-hosted. So there's no cost, privacy concern or ads. What about October? I saw the github repo, but the October website has no mention of pricing (or being free) anywhere. Plus there's a Black Friday banner, which is the reason I'm asking.

If anyone has used any combination of these options, I'd love to hear about your experiences and which you prefer. Thanks in advance.

Hi Cotb, thanks for your interest in October CMS. I will do my best to respond.

1. October CMS has zero opinions on the public appearance of your website. There is complete flexibility in themes so you should be able to reach a consistent outcome.

2. If you search the Plugins section for "Comments" there are several plugins that provide this functionality.

3. October is a framework, so it is relatively easy to build a migration program to move the data across in to the new format. If you are familiar with MVC patterns and basic ORM, it should be a breeze. Otherwise, I suggest taking a look at the Database section in the documentation to get familiar, there is a small learning curve but nothing too daunting.

4. October is free software but some of the plugins and themes are paid products.

Have fun!

daftspunk said:

3. October is a framework, so it is relatively easy to build a migration program to move the data across in to the new format. If you are familiar with MVC patterns and basic ORM, it should be a breeze. Otherwise, I suggest taking a look at the Database section in the documentation to get familiar, there is a small learning curve but nothing too daunting.

Thank you for your quick response. I think I am somewhat familiar with MVC but not ORM.

I looked through the Database section of the documentation and found nothing related to importing existing posts. The only mention I found of importation was in the Backend section, but that seems unrelated.

I found a (paid) plugin that claims to handle importing existing blog posts from other CMS's, but I'm not really on board with the idea of buying a plugin just to try out a CMS.

I did find a few other "plugins" on github that claim to do the same, but only from Wordpress and apparently they get imported as "October pages and not October CMS blog pages", whatever that means.

Would it be safe to simply install it and then, during setup, point it towards my existing blog's database? Or could that damage my existing database?

Last updated 4 years ago

Pointing your database to the old one may work. Ultimately you need to define 1 model for each database table, the model describes the data that exists within the database. So you won't find a specific solution to "importing posts", more so you'll find information on how to define what a post is. This is the part where studying an ORM, such as Active Record, will be useful.

In a transition circumstance, I would define two databases in my configuration, query the old one using a raw query, such as Db::connection('old_database')->table('old_table')->get() (see Queries) then use that raw data to import in to my Post model (see Models). All of this would be defined within a custom CLI command (see Console Development) that I can run to perform the migration.

If the data is blog posts, then the RainLab.Blog plugin would be useful to study, since it comes with a Post model already.

Hope this helps!

Last updated 4 years ago

This turned out to be the least of my worries. The blog plugin has an import feature by default. It's a bit screwy but that's because the CSV output of my database isn't very accurate and keeps cutting off the first post. Nothing a bit of trial and error can't fix.

The real problem is the syntax of the CMS. It doesn't recognize HTML, CSS or PHP. That would be the real learning curve.