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I haven't used Joomla!, but I'm absolutely in love with Drupal. It's very easy to administer (if you're at least a little tech-savvy) and has modules available for just about anything you might ask of it.

For example, at my personal site, I have a personalized home page with all the content I would normally have on iGoogle or My Yahoo!. If you were actually logged in as me, that page would also have my stock quotes and weather information.

I liked it well enough to convert most sites I host to it (and it has great support for virtual hosting) because I found that I was spending more time managing the management system than the content in my old setups, where Drupal just gets out of the way and makes it easy maintain. Again, I love it.

Oh, and there are plenty of nice themes floating around. I really don't like the ones that come with it any more than some of the other posts, but it's easy enough to drop in another.

Hey, I like iGoogle (but still prefer My Yahoo!). In fact, I liked it so much that I installed Drupal and its MySite module on my home server so I could have something like it that I control completely. It also supports Google Gadgets, so you're not really giving up anything by using it.

What do you do? The economics of free software interests me.

Have been doing freelance web design/development and am moving into doing custom Drupal development: if you want to see some of the market for bespoke development Stallman was talking about, check out the Drupal job board. Loads of work! People aren't afraid of pooling their resources to get a job done there either. If I remember correctly Stallman's point to that chap was: most development is bespoke, one-off stuff, having worked for a big company on some relatively obscure systems I know from experience what he's saying is absolutely right. Every day would bring changes to the system; that wasn't Free software but even if it was, the work would still have to be done.

So you see: there's no shortage of work, even if all software were Free, because there are always middle-managers coming up with new requirements. :)

But he's not the first person I'd choose as the emissary of "free software."

Well, that's not unfair. The thing that bothers me about Stallman is that he's so unhealthy! He looks awful, and seems to be heading for some bad health problems (IANAD) in my opinion. Am not saying that out of malice, just don't want the emissary of Free software to die of a heart attack! Also physical health has an effect on mental well being, right?

You missed a major WTF; HTML in the database layer and the author thinks his code is an example of good design practice. Ugly too When I'm logged into a server and need to diagnose a problem, lines that wrap on an 80 column term quickly become unreadable. Hell, I have to scroll sideways to read it in my fucking web browser.

Having contributed code (the mysqli layer) to the Drupal PHP CMS, I can say that its code quality surpasses that of most other PHP projects, and is an example of good PHP workmanship.

In particular I am interested in large user applications using modern C++ libraries and techniques like exception handling and RAII."

This fulfills none of your requirements, but I am constantly hearing that Drupal is the final word in excellent code for PHP...

BTW, I got those instructions for installing Drupal from cvs from here. cvs -d:pserver:anonymous:anonymous@cvs.drupal.org:/cvs /drupal checkout -r DRUPAL-5 drupal

My CMS can kick your CMS ass :-P

The sample source code in many cases could benefit from more use of whitespace -- particularly for the PHP code.

I haven't read the book, so I don't know which direction they have gone, but this either means that they are following or breaching the Drupal conventions for code formatting. Drupal has an entire document on coding standards, and someone who HAS seen the book could perhaps comment on whether the examples follow the standards or not...

I shure as hell hope so. Before this post and after making the changes to FTP quotas, I had 41 hits from that page and have not been hacked again.

I did make one other change: I moved the install.php file out of my web directory. However my statistics (AWStats) do not show any access to that file for the time period.

I was able to recover well enough with some decent backups (mysqldump) and some help from the Drupal forum.

If I have any more updates on this, I'll be posting them in the drupal forum.

DrupalEd is a new distribution of the Drupal CMS. While I haven't used it in an educational environment, I have at one time or another used all of the contributed modules included in it. Installing DrupalEd -- as opposed to installing the Drupal base and then all of the contributed modules -- saves somewhere between 10-30 hours, depending on the skill of the person installing it.

Drupal can be made to do just about anything you want, so adding more functionality like ERP, PubCookie, LDAP integration, etc. isn't a problem. CiviCRM is, in my opinion, a must-have for most organizations and small- to mid-sized businesses.

A discussion about DrupalEd's release and what it's all about can be found in the Drupal forums and at the DrupalEd working group. More about distributions and install profiles can be found at the Distribution profiles group.

DrupalEd is a new distribution of the Drupal CMS. While I haven't used it in an educational environment, I have at one time or another used all of the contributed modules included in it. Installing DrupalEd -- as opposed to installing the Drupal base and then all of the contributed modules -- saves somewhere between 10-30 hours, depending on the skill of the person installing it.

Drupal can be made to do just about anything you want, so adding more functionality like ERP, PubCookie, LDAP integration, etc. isn't a problem. CiviCRM is, in my opinion, a must-have for most organizations and small- to mid-sized businesses.

A discussion about DrupalEd's release and what it's all about can be found in the Drupal forums and at the DrupalEd working group. More about distributions and install profiles can be found at the Distribution profiles group.

DrupalEd is a new distribution of the Drupal CMS. While I haven't used it in an educational environment, I have at one time or another used all of the contributed modules included in it. Installing DrupalEd -- as opposed to installing the Drupal base and then all of the contributed modules -- saves somewhere between 10-30 hours, depending on the skill of the person installing it.

Drupal can be made to do just about anything you want, so adding more functionality like ERP, PubCookie, LDAP integration, etc. isn't a problem. CiviCRM is, in my opinion, a must-have for most organizations and small- to mid-sized businesses.

A discussion about DrupalEd's release and what it's all about can be found in the Drupal forums and at the DrupalEd working group. More about distributions and install profiles can be found at the Distribution profiles group.

DrupalEd is a new distribution of the Drupal CMS. While I haven't used it in an educational environment, I have at one time or another used all of the contributed modules included in it. Installing DrupalEd -- as opposed to installing the Drupal base and then all of the contributed modules -- saves somewhere between 10-30 hours, depending on the skill of the person installing it.

Drupal can be made to do just about anything you want, so adding more functionality like ERP, PubCookie, LDAP integration, etc. isn't a problem. CiviCRM is, in my opinion, a must-have for most organizations and small- to mid-sized businesses.

A discussion about DrupalEd's release and what it's all about can be found in the Drupal forums and at the DrupalEd working group. More about distributions and install profiles can be found at the Distribution profiles group.

1. Install drupal with the image, image_gallery, gmap, location, and gmap_location modules enabled.
2. ?
3. Profit! (okay, you might need the ecommerce module for this step.)

This combination will allow you to upload images, organize them into galleries, and display them with location information.

The locations of nodes can be plotted on a map (links to demos can be found from the gmap module project node) just so.

That guy's solution provides a niftier image browser popup, but the overall functionality is available through drupal without having to write any code.

1. Install drupal with the image, image_gallery, gmap, location, and gmap_location modules enabled.
2. ?
3. Profit! (okay, you might need the ecommerce module for this step.)

This combination will allow you to upload images, organize them into galleries, and display them with location information.

The locations of nodes can be plotted on a map (links to demos can be found from the gmap module project node) just so.

That guy's solution provides a niftier image browser popup, but the overall functionality is available through drupal without having to write any code.

Assignment Zero is an attempt to crowdsource journalism which has a great deal of long term potential. Crowdsourced journalism won't replace paid journalism but it will develop compelling content less influenced by corporate advertising dollars ... it's partnership with a for profit company might change this over time. In contrast, NewsCloud is a crowdsourced editorial site like Slashdot's Firehose effort i.e. aggregation by the people. Members pick and rank stories assembling the news of the moment in real time - again less influenced by corporate money. While it's unclear yet whether Internet users want to participate in editorial or journalism tasks, aggregated editorial is a lighter workload for casual users whereas sites like Assignment Zero will require more intense commitment, more so than Wikipedia. It's cool that both Assignment Zero and NewsCloud are open source platforms, former is based on Drupal, latter is based on its own emerging OS platform.

The site was built using Drupal.

Thanks for the excellent answer.

I'd actually like to steer clear of too many comparisons with Sharepoint, a clone will always be directly compared to Sharepoint, always living in it's shadow. Although most of your points are important though, a FLOSS product must provide an easy transition from any other system. Working with MS Office will be essential (although to get a feel for how the workflow will operate I thought OpenOffice would be best).

The current working title is: OpenDocumentPortal, how does that sound?

For the backend I've been looking at WebDAV with SVN and autocommit, for the frontend I'd like to create a Drupal Mod. The ideas here a great food for thought of course, I'm very interested to hear how others would do this project.

Why not use a lovely PHP FrameWork then? Like, um, say, Drupal?

- - - -

You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.

Not troll food my friend Drupal's development practices are driven by one guy and he's no Linus.
From the Drupal site,

http://drupal.org/node/11521

"Drupal is currently lacking some test suite to be run by developers before submitting important patches. The simpletest module shows some great promise but it is unfortunately not widely adopted yet and there aren't many tests written. See here for a tutorial on how to write tests for your module.

The following setup isn't really a test suite but it is a start to avoid the most embarrassing errors."

Wow. No wonder Dries pops now and then.

One really anoying thing with PHP/MySQL Solutions is that there's so many of them. And a lot are so crappy it's unbelievable.

Here's my breakdown of systems worth mentioning and that I've worked with/administrated/looked into:

Typo3 - the scariest heap of PHP code ever. 7 years of historically grown code mess. Don't even think of looking at the current data model. The operating system of OSS CMSes, the first to sport a proper GUI and an own configuration language and heavy Ajax use in the backend (before it was called Ajax). Large community. Despite the mess it is, its performance requirements and it's notably difficult install process, it is a very powerfull, flexible, secure and stable system. Usefull extensions number in the thousands and it is one of the bridgeheads of OSS into the corporate world and powers a notable amout of large scale / high profile / heavy traffic websites. It's extremly popular in web agencies throughout the german speaking world (probably because it had a german backend from early on) and basically has allready grown beyond critical mass in Europe. Reddot regularly pee their pants when they hear 'Typo3'. The Webagencies using it as their prime tool are actually called Typo3 agencies sometimes. You can make a fair living as a Typo3 expert in Germany. There's a regular magazine on Typo3 (some articles in english as free PDF available: http://www.yeebase.com/home/ ) and 20+ german books about it.

If you want to dive into an OSS CMS for good it's not the worst choice. If T3 doesn't have it, you probably don't need it. However the learning curve is steep and it's a german-style overengineered monster, despite being initially built by a danish guy. You have been warned.

Note: The T5 team (a subgroup of the core T3 community) is currently rebuilding an entirely new architecture from scratch and plans to be finished with the new branch (Typo3 5.0) in about 2 years. Which actually keeps me interested in the project.

EZ Publish - same league as T3 yet smaller community. Backend less scary. Probably less features.

Joomla - descendant of Mambo, factually it's successor. My and many others favourite. The first turnkey OSS CMS that doesn't look like shit. Hence the raging success. Installation is a breeze. Considered a strong competitor to Typo3 in Germany, despite lacking a German backend. Which means a lot, because Typo3 owns Germany (see above). 1000+ Extensions and Plugins and many German books on it and a magazine aswell - which went broke after 3 issues though :-) .

PHP CMS - yes it's called that way. Very small, simple, no DB needed. My first. Not very big but good enough for small sites.

Drupal seems to much between the above and the Wordpress/b2evolution Blog-park to be of interest to me. I've heard alot about it, he community is very active and a lot of people in the T3 and Joomla Camp accept it as one of theirs. However, there's only so much systems you can look into before it get's pointless. Drupal may be worth a try aswell for those who are interested.

From their FAQ:

Why does Dries, and not the Drupal Association, hold the domain name?

Dries has always retained access to the domain name, and has a proven track history of being responsible with its care. The Drupal Association as yet is unestablished, and would represent a great risk to place something so important to the community in its hands, at least at this stage.

In my limited experience with non-profits and owning/running a website that goes along with them, it is in the best interest of everyone that the holdings be owned by the association rather than individuals tied to the association. Simply put, regardless of how someone has dealt with the ownership in the past, if anything goes south, the first response is sometimes to spite them and yank the holdings and then you're screwed.

Operating the business behind the domain is one thing but having full ownership of it is another. If the group is serious about this being the face of Drupal, I suggest that they go into it the entire way before something similar to the recent ESR drama and they pull out after years of support.

Right. It will go to support the infrastructure of Drupal.org (and related sites, like http://groups.drupal.org/ events, marketing and infrastructure. The Association may also sponsor Drupal related development (to improve the release system, or make a new Drupal.org theme, for example), but the Association is *not* involved in the development of the Drupal software. This is an important distinction and is legally binding. What it means is that the Association Board of Directors won't be voting on which features make Drupal core, or whether we should support Sybase but not Oracle etc...

You forgot to provide the actually relevant information, which is that if you want to use it to create a site with user-definable portals, you will need the MySite module.

I've been using drupal for a short while now (since 4.6 - since then there's been 4.7(.x) and now we're up to 5.1 already - drupal's versioning scheme was recently changed to be more stupid) and while there are some dragons there it's easily the most full-featured free CMS that won't make you cry trying to set it up. In fact 5.x made the installation and administration processes substantially easier.

I'm running two sites on drupal (and soon, I hope, my employer's website, which currently is some homegrown asp/jscript with a mssql backend) and I've been pretty happy in general. There's tons of modules, and most of them even work :)

Incidentally IBM just contributed a DB2 module for Drupal, a highly popular PHP-based CMS. It now supports mysql, postgresql, and DB2. AFAIK the module is for the version of drupal now in development, which has a database abstraction layer unlike 4.7.x (the current stable version) in which all modules do their own database access and thus all your modules must have support for your chosen RDBMS.

Microsoft's Answer: display as a normal website with prettier formatting - and advertisements.

I've no idea if there are any off-the-shelf, open source 'podcasting' packages available (any suggestions, anyone?)

playlist.module

Podcast (RSS), XSPF, PLS, and M3U feed generation is taken care by this module.

Features:
1) iTunes podcast/xspf/m3u/pls feeds generated on the fly, with full metadata support
2) album artwork can now be integrated (through URL)
3) xspf flash players for each feed, including popup players for each
4) audio browser, similar to iTunes, used to search audio tags and find the audio to add to playlists
5) upload new audio files to playlists on the fly with an inline uploader
6) listening station: an xspf flash player block that has a dropdown select to listen to different playlists on the site
7) Cut n' paste HTML and javascript includes for integrating the flash player on other sites
8) lots of customization options

I've no idea if there are any off-the-shelf, open source 'podcasting' packages available (any suggestions, anyone?)

playlist.module

Podcast (RSS), XSPF, PLS, and M3U feed generation is taken care by this module.

Features:
1) iTunes podcast/xspf/m3u/pls feeds generated on the fly, with full metadata support
2) album artwork can now be integrated (through URL)
3) xspf flash players for each feed, including popup players for each
4) audio browser, similar to iTunes, used to search audio tags and find the audio to add to playlists
5) upload new audio files to playlists on the fly with an inline uploader
6) listening station: an xspf flash player block that has a dropdown select to listen to different playlists on the site
7) Cut n' paste HTML and javascript includes for integrating the flash player on other sites
8) lots of customization options

I've no idea if there are any off-the-shelf, open source 'podcasting' packages available (any suggestions, anyone?)

playlist.module

Podcast (RSS), XSPF, PLS, and M3U feed generation is taken care by this module.

Features:
1) iTunes podcast/xspf/m3u/pls feeds generated on the fly, with full metadata support
2) album artwork can now be integrated (through URL)
3) xspf flash players for each feed, including popup players for each
4) audio browser, similar to iTunes, used to search audio tags and find the audio to add to playlists
5) upload new audio files to playlists on the fly with an inline uploader
6) listening station: an xspf flash player block that has a dropdown select to listen to different playlists on the site
7) Cut n' paste HTML and javascript includes for integrating the flash player on other sites
8) lots of customization options

If you do not mind hosting your own solution, the look into installing Drupal and the GeSHiFilter module.

You can also get a pre-hosted account at Bryght, but it is not free like other blogging services.

Disclaimer: I am a contributor to the Drupal project.

If you do not mind hosting your own solution, the look into installing Drupal and the GeSHiFilter module.

You can also get a pre-hosted account at Bryght, but it is not free like other blogging services.

Disclaimer: I am a contributor to the Drupal project.

Check out how code highlighting looks in Drupal.

PHP can be entered with <?php to start, other languages can be wrapped in <code> with codefilter. I haven't tried GeSHIFilter, but parent is right that it seems to add highlighting to the rest of the languages.

Drupal and the codefilter module will do a good job of supporting basic code entry in any arbitrary language. If you want robust support for highlighting for multiple languages, take a look at GeSHIFilter.

http://drupal.org/
http://drupal.org/project/codefilter
GeSHIFilter: http://drupal.org/node/65961 and demo: http://www.ubisum.com/node/27

Drupal and the codefilter module will do a good job of supporting basic code entry in any arbitrary language. If you want robust support for highlighting for multiple languages, take a look at GeSHIFilter.

http://drupal.org/
http://drupal.org/project/codefilter
GeSHIFilter: http://drupal.org/node/65961 and demo: http://www.ubisum.com/node/27

Drupal and the codefilter module will do a good job of supporting basic code entry in any arbitrary language. If you want robust support for highlighting for multiple languages, take a look at GeSHIFilter.

http://drupal.org/
http://drupal.org/project/codefilter
GeSHIFilter: http://drupal.org/node/65961 and demo: http://www.ubisum.com/node/27

This sounds a lot like something that Drupal has built in, called a news aggregator. You can set the same thing up yourself very easily by installing drupal and enabling that module.

Here's an example of how it can look:
http://911source.org/aggregator

Or you can browse by category:
http://911source.org/aggregator/categories

The captcha module for drupal, which admittedly produces the ugliest captcha I've ever seen, will also produce text captchas if you value accessibility. They are just simple math problems that could certainly be solved by computer but you COULD implement a captcha that would prevent a computer from easily snapping them up.

For example, you could have a list of animals and their characteristics, and you could pick some animals at random, then figure out which of their characteristics are unique to them out of your random set; put the animals (with alt-tag names of course) next to the simple math problems. Then your form field says "please input the answer to the math problem next to the animal with a long nose" or what have you.

Of course, this too can be scripted eventually, but if you're always adding new animals then it becomes the same old arms race; just stay ahead.

This is probably more of a solution for people who are already using drupal.

The drupal CMS, has a Light CRM module which may provide an adequate helpdesk.

I suppose you could build an assett management system with drupal's flixinode module.

This is probably more of a solution for people who are already using drupal.

The drupal CMS, has a Light CRM module which may provide an adequate helpdesk.

I suppose you could build an assett management system with drupal's flixinode module.

This is probably more of a solution for people who are already using drupal.

The drupal CMS, has a Light CRM module which may provide an adequate helpdesk.

I suppose you could build an assett management system with drupal's flixinode module.

For the last two years, I've been looking for a Unified Content Management System (I've even tried to submit questions about finding one to ask.slashdot.org but they've been rejected). The specifics of our site is that we need a News Blog which supports user comments and slashdot style moderation, a discussion forum, a wiki, an events calendar, email lists management, and a shopping cart/e-commerce software. All of this needs to have a unified login and unified graphical design. So far we're forced to use MoveableType (which lacks the slashdot style moderation and user submitted stories and has a really awful comment system), Ikonboard (which last time I check had ceased to be published due to some legal issues between the developers), MediaWiki (which has some serious performance problems), PHPCalendar (which works great but is difficult to fix the graphic design), mailman (which also works great but again is difficult to fix the graphic design), a home grown shopping cart (which really isn't very good). All of these have their own login system and graphic design issues. It looks like there are 6 different sites on our 1 site. Of course there is no chance of getting any kind of workflow set up for proper approval of visitor submitted information or for monitoring the editors by an admin.

The closest I've come to something that is a Unified Content Management System is Drupal. However, it lacks the slashdot style moderation. It also seems overly complex to install, setup, and admin. Finally the biggest problem is that all of its pages are dynamically generated. If they would use static html pages like MoveableType it would dramatically reduce the server load and we'd scrap most everything in favor of drupal.

Drupal.

I hope they factor in the practical flexibility of a given CMS. I've tried Drupal, Typo3, and Mambo/Joomla. With all of them, you can usually tell which CMS a site uses, e.g. a Drupal site looks like a Drupal site. This is less true for Typo3 and Mambo/Joomla, I think, but admittedly I no longer have any Drupal sites set up (just Typo3 and Mambo, as far as OSS CMS software goes).

And let's talk about average users and training. The Typo3 interface is very frustrating to most of my end-users. Mambo, on the other hand, is much simpler and more streamlined. It doesn't have quite the flexibility of Typo3, but it also doesn't require learning a whole new scripting language (TypoScript) just to get simple things done.

So, though it may be construed as n00b and insufficiently geeky for Slashdot, I'd vote for Mambo... or perhaps Joomla but I haven't upgraded yet.

Admittedly this is not exhaustive, but... all of the open source CMSs I've tried have too many "community" features that need to be disabled for use in a professional environment. This is just frustrating. Is there an OSS CMS that just focuses on kick-ass content management and doesn't care about letting users contribute stories, or running discussion forums, or the like?

I'm not a developer on the project or anything...but can I go ahead and submit Drupal :)

It really is a great open source CMS...just not mine ;)

Well, you can still roll your own layer, or manually install one that is implemented in pure PHP, check Drupal's DB layer for example.

If you are going to go the route of hosting a CMS somewhere there are a number of other open source, CMSes that are also free, and are not limited in the same way Community Server Express is.

My favorite is Drupal, as I've had lot's of experience using it, and I find it gives you the biggest feature set for your effort. The number of plug ins (modules) are extensive, and the end user experience can be whatever you want it to be. There are many Drupal hosting sites available that are fairly inexpensive, and have the shell of your community already configured. You just drop in your customizations and away you go.

Mambo is also quite useful if you're looking for an 'out of the box' 'set it up in 20 minutes and walk away' solution. I don't prefer it as much as the extensibility seems limited to me and it has some interesting quirks that seem a bit counter intuitive, but that may just be my inexperience.

There are many other CMSes out there, these are just two I have used/contributed to.

One additional comment : i find that picking a platform and setting up the technology is the easiest part of a project like this. The harder part is getting your family to use it!! ;)

If you are going to go the route of hosting a CMS somewhere there are a number of other open source, CMSes that are also free, and are not limited in the same way Community Server Express is.

My favorite is Drupal, as I've had lot's of experience using it, and I find it gives you the biggest feature set for your effort. The number of plug ins (modules) are extensive, and the end user experience can be whatever you want it to be. There are many Drupal hosting sites available that are fairly inexpensive, and have the shell of your community already configured. You just drop in your customizations and away you go.

Mambo is also quite useful if you're looking for an 'out of the box' 'set it up in 20 minutes and walk away' solution. I don't prefer it as much as the extensibility seems limited to me and it has some interesting quirks that seem a bit counter intuitive, but that may just be my inexperience.

There are many other CMSes out there, these are just two I have used/contributed to.

One additional comment : i find that picking a platform and setting up the technology is the easiest part of a project like this. The harder part is getting your family to use it!! ;)

If you are going to go the route of hosting a CMS somewhere there are a number of other open source, CMSes that are also free, and are not limited in the same way Community Server Express is.

My favorite is Drupal, as I've had lot's of experience using it, and I find it gives you the biggest feature set for your effort. The number of plug ins (modules) are extensive, and the end user experience can be whatever you want it to be. There are many Drupal hosting sites available that are fairly inexpensive, and have the shell of your community already configured. You just drop in your customizations and away you go.

Mambo is also quite useful if you're looking for an 'out of the box' 'set it up in 20 minutes and walk away' solution. I don't prefer it as much as the extensibility seems limited to me and it has some interesting quirks that seem a bit counter intuitive, but that may just be my inexperience.

There are many other CMSes out there, these are just two I have used/contributed to.

One additional comment : i find that picking a platform and setting up the technology is the easiest part of a project like this. The harder part is getting your family to use it!! ;)

Try a CMS like Drupal (http://www.drupal.org/), gives you users (including security and roles and allowed actions), photo galleries, video upload, articles, tagging, mailing lists, google maps integration, etc, etc...

I've set one up for my brother to post photo's and videos and news and stuff for his new-born twins, works well, and keeps everyone happy as no-one gets missed from sending out stuff.

John.