Review of MURA CMS and FCKEditor

I launched a site this morning.It is a site that I created with CBTechInc's taff using a CMS of their choice: Mura.  It's a MySQL/ColdFusion based system that is free.  Mura runs on CF7+, Railo and OpenBD application servers. It also supports the following databases: MySQL, MS SQL and Oracle 10G.  I like most of the software.

The WYSIWYG editor needs some tweaking. Mura incorporates FCKEditor and it has known bugs that no one seems to fix.  The FCK Editor issues lie in the fact it removes code, adds in <p> tags where you didn't ask for them and makes other decision for you. It is also lacking an image resizer tool, so the end user clients have to either resize their images using Photoshop Elements or similar or loading HUGE images and squishing them down to distortion, killing the load time of a page.

The good news is it can be customized and tweaked.  My team has done this for Commpro's CMS that is used on the City of Brea's site, Laguna Woods Village, South Orange County Chambers , NRBA and others.  We are experts and twisting FCKEditor into shape to behave as it should, remove tools that clients don't want their admin users to have, as well as tying it their CSS files to make formatting of text easy and consistent with the rest of the website that is run by CSS.

Mura's product is friendly to add "components" to, giving the end-user clients a lot of freedom to insert chunks of content with a few clicks to any page or section. The only other negative I see in the navigation layout and limitations. It's not intuitive and you are not able to have drop-down menus if you make the wrong selection for a navigation item type.  This took a lot of rethinking the site layout.  This particular client didn't want to invest in the time for my team to change the navigation and give them more freedom, but they know it can be done.

Comments

[Sean Schroeder]

Susan,

Thanks for the review of Mura. I'm curious to know about the things you found challenging regarding the layout and navigation. Would you mind elaborating a bit?

[Tony G]

Mura is not "PHP/MySQL/Cold Fusion".
It runs on ColdFusion (it hasn't been "Cold Fusion" -- two words since 2001, I think) and can run on MSSQL and Oracle databases, not just MySQL. It doesn't require PHP in any way.
The credibility of your review suffers when you can't even get basic info like this correct.

[Susan Finch]

Thanks Tony, for taking the time to comment and bringing my attention to the two errors I had. My apologies. It has been remedied. I spoke to Blue River AGAIN to ask them to review it AGAIN.

We had a few conversations over the WYSIWYG and other items. Neither of us caught it. I should have. Again, thank you for the time you took to post.

Susan Finch

[Alex]

Hi Susan,

Mura CMS no longer uses FCKEditor and has been updated to use CKEditor and CKFinder as the core Editor and File Browser, respectively.

I realize this post is a year old but thought I'd add an update for anyone who finds it via Google as I did.

Also, I too would be interested to learn the challenges you faced with navigation layout. Any insight is welcome as it may help myself and others building sites with Mura CMS.

Thanks! - Alex

[Susan Finch]

Hi Alex,

Thank you so much for the update regarding the editor.

The navigation layout assigning the 'sections' as different types to get the proper display result and subsection options was not intuitive. We had to do a lot of experimenting to figure it out and come up with the navigation structure choices to meet our goals. Once we got in the groove it was fine, but I haven't worked on that site for a year. If I go back to it, I'd have to refresh my memory as it made no sense at the time.