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Other users already pointed out that you probably can't say that Drupal is the leading open-source CMS. It's one of several leading FOSS PHP CMS products, along with typo3 the upcoming xaraya and a few others.
Then there are all the Java-based CMS', which are not used by the masses because they are usually a little more resource hungry and your next shared webhosting plan doesn't include server side Java applications support.
And forget about *nuke like portals (I wouldn't call them CMS). They play in another league.

cmsmatrix.org gives a nice overview. And if you are interested in PHP-based products, you can test a lot of them on this site.

Just take a look at http://www.opensourcecms.com/ and see if any of those fit what you like.

Use a content managment system, that has modular extensions, such as Mambo, XOOPS, Drupal, or the like.

I don't know of a particular module out there, that would fulfill your requierements, but I do know that a combination of modules would definetly achieve it.

You can always create your own module, by extending an existing. I believe this will be your best bet.

That's because it's a COM, not an ORG. opensourceCMS

PHP and MySQL are two pillars of open source, there are a lot of resources on them. I would choose a CMS/app framework using PHP/MySQL and build the class around accomplishing tasks in that framework, where each student ends up with a complex website. The framework code can serve as a corpus of examples/best practices and illustrate app design, while the coursework focuses more on user interface, content design, and data management.

A fairly complete list of frameworks can be found at http://www.opensourcecms.com/, with reviews and user comments. My preference is Xaraya, but Xoops or Drupal would be good too. Stay away from the Nukes.

I was heavy into Drupal, until it was hacked. But I suspect it was a php security hole not Drupal. I decided to try e107, and so far I'm really impressed. Also has a good forum built in, and many themes which drupal didnt have.

http://e107.org/

Also, to compare Drupal with other sites and a ranking of popular CMS software, check out http://www.opensourcecms.com. Its good to know what each CMS software offers, and they had a trial section where you could log in as admin and see what the admin section was like. Thats very impressive.

I think it could mean more people will begin to use Mambo and other free CMSs to put up a website.

I suspect that the target audience of this book are the authors of every code offering on OpenSourceCMS.com

I agree with you. Same goes for shopping cart sites and blog sites. Check out SourceForge for a gazillion more php/mySQL applications like bug trackers and portals.

Then check out Nuke Cops to read up on the perils of mySQL/PHP in highly visible sites. They have logs of plenty of known exploits due to coding problems.

I am the webmaster for the Davenport West Beak 'n Eye. I was going through the same problem about a year ago. I used http://www.opensourcecms.com/ and tried out almost all of them and none of them would quite do what I wanted. Mambo was the closest. I started using it and I loved it. I did have to modify it to include a second deck and to include captions underneith the pictures, but those modifications weren't too difficult. Mambo has a lot of great features and it will be really easy for someone to take over once you graduate. I recommend Mambo all the way. If you have any questions about the modifications I made, please e-mail me, webmaster at beakneye dot org. Take a look at the modifications here: http://www.beakneye.org/ Tyler

Yes, Bricolage is an excellent CMS for news organizations (NO's, e.g., newspapers or magazines), but it has a well deserved reputation for being difficult to install, even on Debian, where an un-official Debian package is available to help ease the process. Even Bricolage's chief architect, David Wheeler, concedes this point.

The poster might be better off with SPIP, which is (I understand) equally powerful and possibly easier to install. One caveat with respect to SPIP is that, at one point, its interface and some of its documentation was mostly in French, but that may have changed by now. Otherwise, SPIP enjoys an excellent reputation.

Other CMS's that are designed for specifically for NO's include Cofax and Props, both of which have reputations for being immature as compared to Bricolage and SPIP.

Finally, this issue was discussed here on Slashdot about 17 months ago in a story whose title was "A College Online Newspaper Suite as Open Source?" Another relevant discussion took place on OpenSourceCMS.com just three months ago.

You can try Mambo or Typo3. They are both great.

But before making a decision, you can check OpenSourceCMS for demo of diferent CMS'. Another great comparison site is CMSMatrix

WEB Based business tell them to try mambo or try oscommerce or if neither of those seem to work have a look at this site. I do not spend any time or money at a site that looks as if it is thrown together by Uncle Joe Bob.

Hi,

Here's a quick summary.

First of all you can check out a live version of almost all of the CMS at opensourcecms. This is a very good place to start.

First of all what do you want?
The main types are:
* Portals - Think slashdot + forum + gallery etc. * Wiki - Think wikipedia
* Blogs - Need I say more.
* Groupware - Think Sourceforge.
For wikis the main one I like are:
* PmWiki for an easy to install persoanl wiki.
* Media Wiki for a large company wiki.

I don't do blogs so ... no idea.
I've tried a couple but none of them have really worked yet in my projects.

Portals ... We'll again what do you want? If you want a community portal Drupal and PostNuke are popular. If it's a small content based portal then I'd have to same mambo is the best. But if you're going for a larger installation then I'd recommend Type3 or Phone. All of the above execpt Phone can be checked out at opensourcecms. As for php vs perl. We'll php is so much easier to install because most of the perl ones require CPAN packages which users don't have the right to install on most hosting servers. On the other hand some servers on support perl so it's really up to you. If your not planning on changing it the lanuage is very important.

Hi,

Here's a quick summary.

First of all you can check out a live version of almost all of the CMS at opensourcecms. This is a very good place to start.

First of all what do you want?
The main types are:
* Portals - Think slashdot + forum + gallery etc. * Wiki - Think wikipedia
* Blogs - Need I say more.
* Groupware - Think Sourceforge.
For wikis the main one I like are:
* PmWiki for an easy to install persoanl wiki.
* Media Wiki for a large company wiki.

I don't do blogs so ... no idea.
I've tried a couple but none of them have really worked yet in my projects.

Portals ... We'll again what do you want? If you want a community portal Drupal and PostNuke are popular. If it's a small content based portal then I'd have to same mambo is the best. But if you're going for a larger installation then I'd recommend Type3 or Phone. All of the above execpt Phone can be checked out at opensourcecms. As for php vs perl. We'll php is so much easier to install because most of the perl ones require CPAN packages which users don't have the right to install on most hosting servers. On the other hand some servers on support perl so it's really up to you. If your not planning on changing it the lanuage is very important.

Open Source CMS

Both sites are probably built from the same popular Content Management System Geeklog".
You can play with a number of them at OpenSource CMS.

You are affected by reading too much RIAA, SCO and Microsoft coverage: not everything looking similar is theft or ripoff ;-).

1. You know, Microsoft has done an incredible number of crappy things, and they deserve most of the flak they get, but I don't understand why we can't just once acknowledge them for taking a positive step without making some cheap jab like this.

I don't think it's a cheap jab. Other articles about non-Microsoft projects/products offer comparisons to other non-Microsoft projects/products. (Example: Anything about the latest MP3 players.)

That said, Microsoft is fundimentially untrustworthy. The list of sneaky tricks they've pulled over the years does not make me want to jump at what they offer without looking very closely for yet another trap. (I have first hand experience as an OEM rep with Microsoft and OEM purchases.)

As for source code, unless they follow thier own advice and put the code under a BSD licence, why would I want to look at it?

1. "Microsoft released something as open source -- but let's all assume that a non-MS alternative is better even though we haven't made an actual comparison!" How immature can you get?

Better or not has little to do with it. That said, there are quite a few open Wikis and CMS programs out there already -- and similar programs you might be familiar with already.

What makes Microsoft's offering worth examining at all? There are so many others that have been out for years and cover just about every spot from small/light/easy through to complex/flexible/corporate. Does Microsoft offer support for the new open source Wiki like other companies do, or are they looking for someone else to do the enhancements and fix the bugs?

That can actually be used by non-tech users, easily?

I've played with most of them from opensourcecms.com and I've not liked them much. Plone seems alright, and Wordpress is perhaps the finest blogging tool in the world, but what else is there?

It must be able to produce XHTML that validates.

Checking out OpenCMS, I see

All the forums are gone. Two years worth of posts gone in an instant. My backup of the database was corrupt (how's that for irony) so they're just gone forever.

Older and unsecured versions of PHP-Nuke being defaced and data manipulated via SQL injection are a fairly common occurrence. However, most of the time these people don't delete data. I'm actually shocked at the maliciousness of this attack.

This doesn't bode particularly well ...

Try out wordpress

Wouldn't you know it? I just spent much of the weekend converting my site from my own homegrown weblog codebase to pMachine. Here's the new version (with an entry about the change), and the old version for comparison. According to the table, b2evolution and WordPress would be equally good fits, perhaps even slightly better because they support assigning an entry to multiple categories like my old code but unlike pMachine Free, but when I tried them all out at opensourceCMS that really wasn't the case. I strongly recommend that you check out candidates there, because a lot of the small things make a difference. Here are some examples:

• What kinds of markup is allowed in posts? In comments? Is it plain HTML, or a stripped-down square-bracketed subset like bbCode, or both, or neither? Which are you comfortable with? How about your users who leave comments? If it's real HTML, how are various cross-site scripting and other exploits prevented?
• Are commenters allowed to register so they can have persistent profiles? Are they forced to register? Either/or?
• Does the post entry format allow things like saving drafts, posting to the future, setting expiration dates?
• Does the system have things like time offsets (between where you are and where your site is hosted)? Are the paths that it uses configurable, so you can make it work with different directory structures? How "tunable" are things in general? This can be a huge headache if you get halfway into your transition and you find something that just won't work properly in your environment without hacking the code.
• Do you really like the way the templating system works? You really won't know until you try some customization, so fiddle a bit with the layout. Move stuff around, add links to other parts of your site, etc.
• If you're converting from another system, are there automatic conversion tools? How well do they really work? Again, you have to try to see, and not just on opensourcecms either. If there are no converters, how hard would it be to write one? Does the database schema (and/or file layout) make sense to you? Is it similar conceptually to what you have now? Does it require complex relationships between tables/fields that would be hard to maintain as you suck in your old content? Is there any information in your old content that there's no place for?

These sorts of things, none of which are covered in a mere checklist, really matter when you actually take the plunge. Trying stuff out on opensourcecms is a great first step, but then you should actually download the real thing and really try to run a test version of your own site on it for at least an hour or so, to see if you can truly tweak it to your liking. Only then will you be able to make a decision that will really satisfy you.

Though it's aimed more at CMS's rather than blogs, it's definatley a great place to try out multiple CMS's before installing them.

Check it out - OpenSourceCMS

My current favorites:
Mambo
Wordpress
E107
and last but not least Geeklog

I have tried out most of those and, of those you list, my favorite was WordPress. I always avoided MT because it is Perl based and I am only useful with PHP.

However, I found one that was even better than WordPress... Serendipity. This is an oddly unkown piece of blog software that is simple to set up (uses the same MySQL and PHP setups that most blogs use) simply rocks and is, of course, free.

Also, for an objective look at a huge range of free blog and portal software, check out Open Source CMS.

If you're comfy with Perl and want to hack extensively, MT is the natural choice. You can make it do damned near anything you want without hacking, of course (via plugins), but sometimes it's fun to mess around under the hood. Oh, and you can avoid the comment-spam problems you mentioned via a number of plugins.

If you prefer PHP, I'd say try Mambo (with a nice polling function built in) or Wordpress (which gets props because it produces valid XHTML/CSS and is clean, clean, clean on the admin interface.

Best advice: go to Open Source CMS and play around. They have default installs of a lot of CMS/blogging systems, and even let you play with the admin interfaces. Very helpful, all in all.

Mandatory plug for my MT-based weblog, here.

Plone is not the only one open source CMS around. Tikiwiki, Typo3,Drupal and a lot more are open source, some even with commercial support (i.e. Typo3, comparing with it could be a bit more fair) if eWeek want that "feature" over every other possible functionality they could have.

Skip the *nuke open source content management systems (i.e. postnuke, phpnuke, etc.) and try Drupal. More secure, less buggy, easier to develop on.

Or, better yet, use the great research already done at http://www.opensourcecms.com/

The resources for you to do it yourself are readily available. Apache/PHP/MySql for the server are extremely easy to work with, even for most newbies (did it when I was a noob).

Design is a little more difficult. Windows users can benefit from expensive web editors such as Frontpage and Dreamweaver. However, if you're willing to learn HTML, XML, etc. (which doesn't take long), you can use a standard text editer (anything but notepad). I use UltraEdit.

For page design, I like to use Xara WebStyle. For PHP scripts, Hotscripts.com is the place to go.

Need a content management system? Check out the ones provided at opensourceCMS.

Welcome to opensourceCMS.com

This site was created with one goal in mind. To give you the opportunity to "try out" some of the best php/mysql based free and open source software systems in the world. You are welcome to be the administrator of any site here, allowing you to decide which system best suits your needs.

The administrator username and password is given for every system and each system is refreshed on the hour, every hour. This allows you to to add and delete content, change the way things look, basically be the admin of any system here with no fear of messing anything up. I hope opensourceCMS.com is useful in your quest to find the right software system for your needs. If you're looking for hosting, OpenSourceHost supports every system here. OpenSourceHost will even install the system of your choice for free when you sign up for an account.

opensourceCMS.com has working installations of many php/mysql content management systems, so you can try before you install.

I'd also like to echo others' recommendations of Six Apart's TypePad and Apple's .Mac for beginners. They're not cheap, but they're (nearly) idiot-proof.

When Google bought Blogger, I expected to see a .Mac-like service develop, but it hasn't happened yet (and may never happen -- at least not until after their IPO).

- opensourceCMS.com
- TypePad
- .Mac

Mambo isn't bad. It's certainly pretty simple to use. opensourceCMS has an example of it.

It's been said a couple of times here all ready that you should make sure you're using the most appropriate tool for the job (a good philosphy in general). If you wanna check out some of the open-source CMS (Content Management Systems) out there to see what suits you best, you can visit OpenSourceCMS it has live demos of various CMS solutions that you can get a feel for--you can even log in as an admin and check out its admin interface. These are all free, but they're also all php/mysql based. I don't know if there's a similiar sites for other CMS/blog systems (MT uses Perl, for example), but Google probably has a pretty good idea. ;-)

I'm a bit partial to e107 myself, but I'll admit that I haven't tried a whole lot of them. ;-)

Happy blogging!

I've been evaluating similiar solutions myself and found that TUTOS and dotproject (both from souceforge) were too incomplete to really meet my needs.

So instead I've been evaluating Content Management Frameworks or Content Management Systems which can easily be adapeted for this use. So Far I've looked at:

Mambo Open Source Which I have found to look and feel great, easy to use, modify, but too lightweight to really meet a project portals needs without significant modification.

Zope
and the CMS based on Zope called Plone
Which I found can fit the bill, but the learning curve is extremely high and may have too much complexity for easy extension development or modification.

Currently I am looking at
Typo3 which seems to fit the bill for both sophistication yet ease of use and extension. However, it doesn't have an extension yet (that I'm aware of) for CVS or a similiar version control system (Would be interested to know if there is one?)

Great resources to check for Open source project management/CMS solutions:
Open and Free Project Management tools
Open Source CMS - Try before you by! with lots of online demo sites available.

Good luck! Follow up with what you decide to use please!