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At least Apache Software Foundation and the Midgard Project have a decision making process where specifications and major changes are voted about by all committers (i.e. stakeholders in the project).

Migard will do this too. you can find it here.

I will be installing it this week for testing

Dreamweaver is an impressive behemoth of a tool, no doubt whatsoever. Back in 1999/2000 it was the only possible way to edit and manage websites on a professional level. Dreamweavers wysiwyg power with the older browsers and it's HTML editing features are unmatched. The template engine completely abstracts changes to a website in your developement directory and automatically keeps track of anything you what across multiple documents. If DW doesn't crash and screw up your template dir that is - which does happen more often than you like. It's the best thing you can use ... ...if you don't have a CMS.
Which gets me right to the point:
Sorry, but it's like five years since the early dot-bomb days where dynamic server side stuff was considered exotic and people got payed for klicking static websites together. You may haven't noticed, but the world has moved on. There are something like fifteen bazillion open source content management systems out there. One better than the next.
Who the fuck needs DW nowadays? You don't want DW! DWs concepts are ancient by todays standards. The last time I used it was about 4 years ago in some project where the system team couldn't get their stuff together and set up a halfway decent JSP framework and we had to hack the webdocs by hand in record time. And my web productivity has tripled by now, since I exclusively use content management systems (as every body else does), and be it "only" to generate the html docs offline and publish the output to static webspace.

Honestly now: Ditch DW allready, it's nothing but a huge waste of time these days. Trust me, I make a living with this stuff. And take a look at one of the frameworks above. To save your time, I recommend checking out one of the following: Plone/Zope, Callisto CMS, Mambo, Typo3, Mason, Slashcode, or (forgot this one above) Xoops. Save yourself half to three quarters of webdev time in the long run.
Oh, and welcome to 2005. ;-)

Heavy-duty Open Source CMSs like Midgard handle their DB connections in the back end instead of in PHP (or some other scripting language.

As an example, Midgard's DB connections are opened once per each Apache process instance instead of once per connection.

/Bergie

For other institutions considering implementing their own "opencourseware" there are several open-source CMS options. At this point, MIT OCW is monitoring six: Zope, Red Hat, Midgard, OpenACS, OpenCMS, and Bricolage. By 2004, most experts agree that one CMS provider will become the clear, open-source leader in this industry sector. MIT OCW will track the progress of key open-source CMS providers during this accelerated maturation. This will contribute to MIT being able to share its experience and understanding of these CMS options with other institutions. The hope is that utilization of open-source model CMS products could lead to less expensive implementations of opencoursewares on other campuses.

I don't mind so much the fact that you can't have servlet-like objects which handle entire sections of your URLspace (as opposed to one URL -- how very un-spider-friendly. Most choke on a ? in a URL and rightly so)

Midgard will do this for you using the Active pages concept.

/Bergie

I don't mind so much the fact that you can't have servlet-like objects which handle entire sections of your URLspace (as opposed to one URL -- how very un-spider-friendly. Most choke on a ? in a URL and rightly so)

Midgard will do this for you using the Active pages concept.

/Bergie

I agree very much with Randolpho's post. Ditch PHP if you really want an elegent architecture. If you really need to stick with PHP, try out Midgard. Otherwise, you really ought to at least look at the alternatives. Zope and OpenACS are probably the best open source web application systems/environments/architectures, whatever you want to call it. I prefer OpenACS (there's just something about using a system that was built primarily by highly intelligent MIT and CalTech alumni...).

OpenACS is based on AOLServer (probably the best, and first application-oriented web server out there, which was GPL'd by AOL thanks to Phil Greenspun's nagging. it's multi-threaded, it has database pooling, a healthy set of modules/plugins, and a wonderful community.), Tcl (you'll get used to it, really ;), and either Oracle or PostgreSQL. Thought it was designed for use with Oracle, and was ported to PostgreSQL, the architecture in OpenACS permits you to easily swap in support for other databases. Though, you'd have an extremely tough time getting it to work in MySQL as it relies on numerous high-end and complex relational databases features, most of which MySQL does not support.

OpenACS is highly modular, built entirely out of smaller packages, with its own package management system. There is a core package, the ACS Kernel, ACS Tcl (which contains most of the utility code, etc.), and there are various packages built on top of that which provide both specific application functionality, but also services that other packages can use. The documentation is built into the code and is available online in every OpenACS installation. Higher up packages include web page creation, bulletin board systems, blogging, content management, etc. You can "mount" these packages at various locations in the site map for your web site / application. E.g., you could mount an instance of the bulletin board at mysite.com/forum, and add a second one at mysite.com/techsupport. You can create subsites, such as mysite.com/internal/. There is an extensive and incredibly powerful permissions system so you can completely control access to every part of your system. There is also a built-in templating system which provides a simple separation between logic and display code, as well as theming capabilities.

I'm sure there's a lot that I've neglected to mention here. But I think you can get the point. OpenACS is a very mature platform that's be in development and production for many years now (hell, take a look at what Ars Digita was able to accomplish, they were making millions selling this system, and they gave the code away for free under the GPL). Don't take my word for it, go to the website and read about it. The only drawback to it that I see is that it does have a high learning curve. It took me a few months of reading and experimenting with it to really understand how the system works, but it's definitely worth it. There are a few hosting providers out there (Acorn Hosting and Zill.net) that offer affordable hosting packages, but it's also easy to setup your own server. OpenACS also has the ability to run multiple server boxes in a load balanced environment, so if you need to scale out, you can. Oh yeah, this is also a descendant of the same ACS system that RedHat's Enterprise Applications are descended from (RedHat got that technology when they bought the remains of ArsDigita.

The Midgard application server could easily be used as a groupware server -- MySQL backend, Web Services interfaces, replication, etc.

It already has storage APIs for most of the groupware stuff -- contacts, group calendaring and hierarchical data storage ("topics and articles"), all which support additional metadata and file attachments. Some nice web interfaces already exist for the calendaring and contacts stuff.

Midgard provides a PHP API for managing all that data and is available under LGPL.

/Bergie

You might have a look here. That's a (Free Software|Open Source|Whatever) CMS (licensed under GPL), very professional, and with a host of features. It's very promising (although a bit oversized in contrast to simple blogs like SlashCode or DaCode : you'll need a library, an Apache module, etc.). Still, I haven't had enough time to test it correctly, so I won't comment on how well it fares...

Oh yeah, and it's PHP4, so if you only know Perl, you'll need an adaptation period. But I don't think it really matters: PHP is damn easy to learn, especially if you already know another programming language (really! Two weeks were enough for me to build working sites, and saying I'm not a genius is an euphemism :-)

This is not ment as a flaimbait. This is now we did it. YMMV.

First you need to decide what you want to do with your system, then how much you are willing to pay for deployment, and then how much you want to pay for maintanence and expansion.

We evaluated a number of CM systems back in 1999. arsDigita requires Oracle (expensive), OpenACS was not ready for real world deployment, CMS based on JBoss is relatively expensive due to cost of programmers. Zope uses its own programming language which translates in to problems with finding qualified programmers.

We had one more requirement. We wanted to have human-readable URLs

We ended up choosing Midgard. It's a GPL-ed Apache+PHP-based CMS running on top of MySQL. It has its share of quirks, but three years after deployment we do not regret the choice. Midgard is suitable for running a small to medium-size web farm. It's based on PHP, thus the programming has the same limits as any programming in PHP. Another shortcoming is exclusive use of MySQL.

I'll forgo my moderator privs to mention that the Midgard development team have selected Ruby as the Scripting Core of the next generation of Midgard, which is (in part) a Content Management and Web Database deployment system based on PHP.

I'll forgo my moderator privs to mention that the Midgard development team have selected Ruby as the Scripting Core of the next generation of Midgard, which is (in part) a Content Management and Web Database deployment system based on PHP.

Midgard is a GPLd application server that has APIs for calendaring and contact management. Replication is naturally also supported.

/Bergie

Midgard is a GPLd application server that has APIs for calendaring and contact management. Replication is naturally also supported.

/Bergie

Midgard is a GPLd application server that has APIs for calendaring and contact management. Replication is naturally also supported.

/Bergie

Good to see this on Slashdot!

I can't resist a plug: come see me talk about Midgard, a kick-ass content management system.

I'll be focusing on the upcoming version 2.0, but version 1.4 is stable and works great for content-rich web sites. That means anything where you have a lot of content that changes often.

I think you are confusing Zope with Midgard.

Zope uses Python as its underlying language. Midgard is the one that is built in PHP.

Both are worth a look, if only because they are Open Source and Free, so costing nothing.

Most of the large players have either built their own tools or contracted with integrators to have tools built for them.

Platforms such as Midgard (based on PHP) and Zope (based on Python) make it radically easier to develop such tools.

There also are any number of open-source Slashdot-like environments such as Squishdot; some browsing around in Freshmeat.net will churn them up quickly.

Not only when it comes to translations, but context-layout in general. PHP is nice and dandy, but for somehow it is really hard to seperate content and layout, or content and language support/translations for that matter.

You might want to check out Midgard then. It is a Web application server that uses PHP as its scripting language. While it isn't that much better in internationalization, it at least has good support for separating layout, structure and content into different components.

/Bergie

--

We've been using the method of storing strings that need to be translated into arrays successfully with some sites. An example here would be StoneJobs.com.

There strings used in either the layout or applications are handled in the following way:

$welcome[0] = "Tervetuloa!";
$welcome[1] = "Welcome!";

echo $welcome[$lang];

We're using Midgard (the PHP-based application server) there, so content is easily separated into languages by using an extra database field.

There have been plans for creating a better system for handling localization within Midgard, but we're still waiting for ideas on that.

/Bergie

--

You might also want to take a look at Midgard. I just installed it a couple days ago as my first foray into application servers. It runs on top of apache and a patched version of php3. You can check it out at http://www.midgard-project.org

It currently only supports MySQL, but with the forthcoming 2.0 version all ODBC compliant databases will be supported.

As for whether or not the "big boys" would use it, I don't know, you could probably answer that better than me. My guess would be that while it only supports MySQL the answer would be no, but once the ODBC support is integrated the answer might change.

For those of us who have been working with Perl a long time, but like the idea of a strong Web content management system, there is an alternative to learning Python. Midgard is a powerful open-source Web content management system that combines MySQL and Apache with the scripting power of PHP3. Definitely worth checking out, if you can get through the challenging installation. (As a hint, try using the Monster RPM under Linux, it's much easier.)
--
Paul Gillingwater

If you like PHP, check out Midgard. Midgard extends PHP to offer built-in user-, layout- and content management.

You might want to look at midgard for similar features to what your are describing.

Comparing Zope to PHP is apples to oranges. You should compare Zope/Python to Midgard/PHP. Although Zope is more advanced, Midgard is moving fast... check it out at Midgard Project. - Paul N.

If you're a big PHP fan, you should check out Midgard (at www.midgard-project.org). It provides some sweet content management and administration features (very similar to some of Zope's capabilities), but is based on a slightly-modified version of PHP. They have experimental ODBC support, and that should be solidified very soon.
--JRZ