Vivvo CMS Review
Today we're going to take you through our Vivvo CMS Review. Vivvo is a commercial offering from Spoonlabs and is a well priced article publishing CMS primarily used for News, magazine or other sites where you publish large amounts of articles with pictures and other media.
Vivvo has been around for a while and has a very solid community and excellent support. Let's examine the install process and look at a few key elements of this system. We're going to review the Professional edition which was graciously provided by Boris @ Spoonlabs for review purposes.
First off, I'm unsure if this is a software concern or my host but when I first accessed our test URL, I was not greeted with the
installer page.. instead I had to append it with /installer to get the installation going. Not a major concern but just something I wanted to point out. It would be best if it auto redirected on it's own.
I was then greeted with:
Once you've selected your language, you proceed to:
Looks like everything passed inspection. If you have anything come up with a red X it would be a good idea to get ahold of your hosting provider before proceeding.
Accept the license and continue:
Fill in your database details here.. make sure you append a database table prefix if you are using the same database as something else. Make sure you input your license number as well (you can get this by logging into your account at vivvo.net and you will see the license listed).
Plug in the obvious information like your website name, admin info. One thing I thought was a nice touch here was that the system will not let you choose an admin password of less than 6 characters. This is a nice touch.. I think it would be even better if it enforced some rules to password conventions to help new users secure their installation a bit more.
Now comes the fun part. Let's click on the View website link and see what our fresh install looks like:
Looks pretty nice! We have a login section, some featured article examples and you can see there is a sidebar with some nice tabbed
boxes. Vivvo also has a decent selection of themes which are available for purchase from their site as well as some free ones which are available at http://www.vivvo.net/resources/. There are some free layouts for content as well as plugins to incorporate some other features into the system.
Let's take a peek at the admin section:
Well laid out, easy to find what you need and well labelled.. just the way I like it. I also like the embedded statistics to give you a
quick overview of number of visitors.
I wanted to point out the above screen has a very nice simple feature.. Meta description and Meta keywords. This is a nice feature to
let you quickly edit these to help your SEO score without having to manually edit the template files directly.
This screen is another nice feature, you can preset the image sizes directly! That's very handy and gives you a ton of flexibility, again,
without having to edit files directly. Nice touch!
The above screen is the final one I wanted to show. This lets you easily edit SEO functions for each article. This is a really nice option and isn't often seen in a CMS where you can manually control your SEO options with ease. Good work Spoonlabs.
Overall, Vivvo is a really nice system. They've made it very easy to maintain a nice search engine optimized site with excellent content management and article publishing flexibility. The overall price of this system is very reasonable as well. Coming in at around two hundred dollars to start, which is very reasonable for this type of system. If you are a new startup looking to break into the world of article publishing or starting up a magazine or newspaper.. this system would be a very good selection.
There's an excellent community as well and support is prompt and efficient. What would help this system out a bit more is a wider
variety of plugins and more free themes… personally, I'm not fond of buying themes for premium systems, as I think more free themes would make the investment a bit more appealing for some.. but some people may not have an issue with that. The cost of the average theme is on par with most other premium theme options for other systems (ie: wordpress and all).
Vivvo works well, has a nicely laid out and user friendly admin section and just seems to do the job well for the price tag they are
asking.
Our ratings:
Community 9/10 (Solid community with prompt support.)
Expandability 7/10 (It needs more plugins and can't easily be used for much other than article publishing)
Themability 8/10 (Not bad. Some free themes and some paid ones but could use more free.)
Useability 9/10 (Very easy to use. 10 in my books due to the added functionality with SEO editing)