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Disclaimer: Website developer that has used Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress, not liking any of them.

I find that Silverstripe to be a pretty neat CMS for developers and clients. Find it much easier to work with than the other major players like you listed.

The New Zealand Government actually use Silverstripe themselves and they seem to be pretty happy.

Seriously though, it is actually enjoyable to work with for the variety of projects I have used it for. In time like the others, it might reach a point that it is no longer fantastic to work with and at that point, I will find the next system to adopt.

drupal is a coding mess; it was started by hobbyists, developed and added to by hobbyists with hobby purposes. and its now expected to do serious stuff. hence the mess. it wasnt created with development in mind. its an app specific issue.

here's your cms fix :
http://silverstripe.com/?v=b
and there are many like these.

People nested in corporate environments have little info on this, but linux servers pretty much dominate the server scene for shared web hosting, small to medium businesses. In the last 5 years, big corporations have also increasingly moved into linux platform, due to the immediate availability of all kinds of implements, infrastructure, modules, software available in linux for pretty much everything in regard to web hosting and service providing.

and this is mainly due to LAMP. linux, apache, mysql, php. these have come a long way, a very very long way, and they are on enterprise level for the last few years, without any denial. and most of this is due to php and mysql being exclusively used on linux and apache to develop websites. you know a lot of these - it started from personal homepage tools, moved to postnuke, phpbb, drupal, then moved on to enterprise level stuff in the last few years. ( see an example http://silverstripe.com/?v=b - there are a lot like this these days )

as a result of this, the server market is HUGE. you can get a quite powerful dedicated server for $60-70 with a lamp stack, and just sit pretty with a no cost web app, modified slightly to your needs by a random php developer you hire from the abundant crowd.

so you can guess what this does to microsoft in regard to servers. they cant sell anything to these people. they even tried having major domain registrar/shared hosting provider godaddy to have its domain parking pages park on iis servers, so that it would skew the net statistics in regard to servers - all domains appearing from iis servers as if separate sites. despite the hosting godaddy gives is predominantly on linux stacks. this was a few years ago. apparently it didnt avail, since i didnt hear it being practiced anymore.

so apparently, they couldnt sell anything on server business, and hence they are trying to - in their rather twisted mindset - to strategically reverse the situation - 'be friendly to php, so that php people will move their apps to microsoft platform' -> ending up all the small, medium businesses and people being obligated to microsoft ....

as you can understand, this is a doomed move from the start. the market is WAY too big now and way too established in lamp stacks, for microsoft to be able to do anything.

some knowledge of a particular app is inevitably necessary. after all, apps gain their own life after their codebase grows over a certain level.

but, some apps are restrictive, and require more effort from the developer to get to know them, and also make development more time consuming for them and/or restrict them, even if they are very familiar with the app.

in that drupal fails. it may have started with the best of intentions, however the point it ended up in the spectrum has been far from those intentions.

http://www.google.com/search?q=drupal+disadvantages&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a#sclient=psy&hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=vr8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US%3Aofficial&source=hp&q=drupal+sucks&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&pbx=1&fp=9bef8cda26d1a6ec

even if a bit outdated, many points in below article hold too.

http://robozen.com/technology/drupal-sucks/

zealots of drupal trumpet that 'if you are a competent developer, drupal is good for you'. i am a competent developer, that is working on many different apps and platforms on the web. if, an app requires me being a competent developer to be able to fully use it, then i understand that that app is lacking in modifyability and usability - because, a good app, would play like a flute at the hands of a competent developer. not, just work and do what other apps also do well.

it is my understanding that the drupal zealot crowd has never heard the concept of 'keep it simple, stupid'.

anyway, you will be alright if you go with anything else than drupal for average needs. joomla, wordpress may be good choices. however if your project is serious, then you may consider stuff like this : http://silverstripe.com/?v=b

I especially like the ability to monitor status into the future!

"Will traffic approach record levels? "?

Most likely!

Speaking from experience when we ran demconvention.com over the very busy Democratic National Convention week, traffic went from effectively nothing to massive spikes in hours.

All in all the website got 2.6 billion hits, 3.2 million visitors, 350,000 hours of video watched... in the four day/96 hour period of the convention!

This was about double the website traffic that the Republican convention (gopconvention2008.com) got.

It will be interesting to learn what sort of infrastructure and platforms are used to support the major election coverage news websites. DemConvention.com ran on just a few servers running the LAMP (Redhat) stack with the PHP5-based SilverStripe open source CMS...

"Will traffic approach record levels? "?

Most likely!

Speaking from experience when we ran demconvention.com over the very busy Democratic National Convention week, traffic went from effectively nothing to massive spikes in hours.

All in all the website got 2.6 billion hits, 3.2 million visitors, 350,000 hours of video watched... in the four day/96 hour period of the convention!

This was about double the website traffic that the Republican convention (gopconvention2008.com) got.

It will be interesting to learn what sort of infrastructure and platforms are used to support the major election coverage news websites. DemConvention.com ran on just a few servers running the LAMP (Redhat) stack with the PHP5-based SilverStripe open source CMS...

... in just 4 days.

I wonder how much of that was due to this slashdotting? Seemed to hold up fine...go LAMP!

http://www.silverstripe.com/demconvention-3-2-million-visits-in-4-days/

In addition to Silverlight, DemConvention.com uses Redhat: searchdns.netcraft.com/?position=limited&host=www.demconvention.com

And it runs on SilverStripe open source CMS/framework, which requires PHP, MySQL, Apache.... (Just do a view-source of the homepage, or check out silverstripe.com/powering-4-days-of-political-history-dnc-2008/)

Source of demconvention.com has: <meta name="generator" http-equiv="generator" content="SilverStripe 2.0 - http://www.silverstripe.com/" />

In addition to Silverlight, DemConvention.com uses Redhat: searchdns.netcraft.com/?position=limited&host=www.demconvention.com

And it runs on SilverStripe open source CMS/framework, which requires PHP, MySQL, Apache.... (Just do a view-source of the homepage, or check out silverstripe.com/powering-4-days-of-political-history-dnc-2008/)

Source of demconvention.com has: <meta name="generator" http-equiv="generator" content="SilverStripe 2.0 - http://www.silverstripe.com/" />

Silverstripe http://www.silverstripe.com/ built the demcon site. You could do worse than try asking them. They're a pretty decent bunch of guys. Disclaimer: I don't work for Silverstripe, but my friend does.

Well it's not running BSD but is probably running redhat at level 3 communications.

http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.demconvention.com

And do a view-source of www.demconvention.com homepage; it is powered by the SilverStripe open source CMS.

http://www.silverstripe.com

Also, note that the DNC team did make decisions to run substantial elements of the website with open-source/linux technologies.

The demconvention.com website is running on the SilverStripe open source CMS/platform, which is written in PHP and MySQL, so probably running on an Apache/Linux server...

In our case, our CMS was closed-source for the first seven years as we built websites for clients. In fact, we never set out to build a CMS, really. We were building sites and needed a way for site owners & content editors to change content on their own sites. A year or so ago, we open-sourced and are very glad we did.

Our company has 16 staff and we make money by customising our open source offering on a case-by-case basis for our clients. We have no shortage of work coming in and our community is growing. We offer a number ways for people to contribute to our project and we provide free support to our community via forums, IRC, and in general, however we can.

Again, scratch your own itch! Make your software useful (profitable) to you first. You may be able to open source it simultaneously, but keep in mind there is the maintenance / upkeep of the community to consider.

Good luck to you. -- Brian Calhoun (b r i a n @ NOSPAM s i l v e r s t r i p e . c o m)

Well it was CmdrTaco who mentioned building stuff during High School, but come to think of it, had Google extended the newly launched High School contest even further, to grade/elementary/primary school I could have entered, but that would have needed to have been launched before Google got big :)

Back in my day I wrote a large number of QuickBasic (compiled as soon as they got to a certain size) and Borland C programs; which would cover the spectrum of multiplayer addons to games like Doom (and later Quake), all manner of small utilities, and some nostelgic Screen 13 (VGA 320x200x256 colour) games which used assembly on the tighter loops. I was sad to say my real only access to a LAN at that time was our school, fitted with low-end 386s, meaning I never really finished my IPX networking code because it was infuriatingly slow in comparison to my trusty 486DX2/66 at the time.

Sadly somewhere all that sourcecode was lost, although I'm some of may lurk around old Geocities homepages etc :P

But never mind, I still get to benefit from the program because I went off to co-found the SilverStripe web platform/CMS project, one of the open source projects involved in this high school contest... ;)

Well, except for a few countries (Cuba, etc), and the reason for that is I believe Google is sanctioned against including those due to US law? (Being one of the entities involved, but from New Zealand, I am not certain on US law restrictions)

I would advocate all three, together with our own Google Summer of Codey-licous SilverStripe platform :)

My main point is that there are far more variables that need exploring, and then you can find the right too.

For instance, one decision would be: Is it a small team of people working on this project, who want to rapidly work together in a closed application (e.g. building a software as a service application)? If so, then Ruby on Rails could work better, but on the other hand, if your website/project is going to be open source, or needs a community of people to look at it, then PHP might be better.

I think sites like opensourcecms.com could do better at seperating the tools out with questions like that!

And yet, PHP and ROR are like scattered lego blocks on the floor, waiting to be patiently assembled. If someone asks me "to build a website", I would use a system that is much closer to a working website, and tweak it.

The comments in this read about "building a digg" etc, are in my opinion, not what people generally think of "when building a website". Digg is a custom-built application that cannot leverage from existing systems as well as a website can. It probably could have just as well been done in perl or ROR. There would be different challenges, and a different number of servers and staff, but fundamentally it would have been successful enough to pay people to figure out how to overcome those challenges.

I would advocate all three, together with our own Google Summer of Codey-licous SilverStripe platform :)

My main point is that there are far more variables that need exploring, and then you can find the right too.

For instance, one decision would be: Is it a small team of people working on this project, who want to rapidly work together in a closed application (e.g. building a software as a service application)? If so, then Ruby on Rails could work better, but on the other hand, if your website/project is going to be open source, or needs a community of people to look at it, then PHP might be better.

I think sites like opensourcecms.com could do better at seperating the tools out with questions like that!

And yet, PHP and ROR are like scattered lego blocks on the floor, waiting to be patiently assembled. If someone asks me "to build a website", I would use a system that is much closer to a working website, and tweak it.

The comments in this read about "building a digg" etc, are in my opinion, not what people generally think of "when building a website". Digg is a custom-built application that cannot leverage from existing systems as well as a website can. It probably could have just as well been done in perl or ROR. There would be different challenges, and a different number of servers and staff, but fundamentally it would have been successful enough to pay people to figure out how to overcome those challenges.

Great to see books like this emerge around an opensource product like Drupal. We powered our main blog on Drupal for a couple of years and found it pretty cool, and built heaps of sites in Joomla, and they're both cool, Drupal is a bit hard on non-technical end users though, but over the last 6 months we have moved over to a pretty cool AJAX filled Opensource CMS Silverstripe http://www.silverstripe.com/. Silverstripe has only been opensource for about 9 months, but its hit the OSS shelf as a clean code base which is very easy to use as its come out of a cool young web company who were sick of there being thousands of CMS's and every web company having there own.

There are definitely heaps of 3rd party modules available for Joomla and increasingly for drupal, and that was a big part of the attraction for us moving to use them, but we found in the end you find that many of them aren't quite right, they're great to get you inspired and have something to play with in 5 minutes, but projects need to be completed just right, so you often still have to develop something from scratch.

If you're into Drupal and the best open source CMS's then SilverStripe is definitely worth checking out.

I'd only heard of SugarCRM, but I guess that doesn't preclude these apps from being innovative.

This article was more pushing companies who are financially successful. Actually, on second thought, perhaps more to do with successful investment rounds (the funding section only talked about the fact they wowed Investors, so we should assume not all of them have wowed enough customers to make profit)

If the article was actually about innovation (And had to concentrate on recent, so sorry, RMS doesn't count) then it should look at more diverse areas. Sure, have some enterprise app. Have some collaboration app. But there is a one heck of a lot of interesting stuff going on the web, and while SugarCRM is a great CRM (we use it for our work/open source project), and I don't necesssarily think it should be removed from the list, it seems to be missing some peers.

I haven't scoured for what lives in the open source world, but we have sites and companies like delcious, digg, flickr, google maps/spreadsheets and all of that. An interesting article about innovation would brougt to light at least one open source offering of that sort of style, i.e. interesting technology to DO something cool and innovative on the web. (e.g. Zimbra, but my point would be I want NEWs, stuff I don't know yet...? :)

DreamWeaver is a nice tool for many things, (such as rapid prototyping or completing web design) but using it for templating is a nightmare. Its also a stretch to get it to create Pure CSS designs. Biased ofcourse, as I helped create the project, but using SilverStripe alongside a WYSIWIG or raw-html editor is your best bet. It seperates the HTML, the "templating", CSS, and content, and among many other advantages, makes it easy to generate forms, and re-use ("repurpose") content. The content, and the ability to add pages, etc, is all handled by a content management system. This is how the process of building and maintaining websites is going to evolve --- no longer do we need to deal with spagetti messes of HTML, textual content, Javascript, CSS, and server side scripts such as PHP, ASP, or Perl all being tangled. Instead, they will each be neatly seperated with seperate access controls that suit business owners, designers and programmer/scripter's needs and skillsets. Check out silverstripe.com for details... (and yes, to please the slashdot massses, it is a server technology that runs on linux servers exclusively)

DreamWeaver is a nice tool for many things, (such as rapid prototyping or completing web design) but using it for templating is a nightmare. Its also a stretch to get it to create Pure CSS designs. Biased ofcourse, as I helped create the project, but using SilverStripe alongside a WYSIWIG or raw-html editor is your best bet. It seperates the HTML, the "templating", CSS, and content, and among many other advantages, makes it easy to generate forms, and re-use ("repurpose") content. The content, and the ability to add pages, etc, is all handled by a content management system. This is how the process of building and maintaining websites is going to evolve --- no longer do we need to deal with spagetti messes of HTML, textual content, Javascript, CSS, and server side scripts such as PHP, ASP, or Perl all being tangled. Instead, they will each be neatly seperated with seperate access controls that suit business owners, designers and programmer/scripter's needs and skillsets. Check out silverstripe.com for details... (and yes, to please the slashdot massses, it is a server technology that runs on linux servers exclusively)

Yes, things definately have soured in the MySql camp from an ambush of Postgres Users. I find it kinda funny that no one has actually responded, much less with objective results.

Yes, I agree, we're not going to see a bank run on MySQL. We're also not going to see a professional magazine written in Word. But Word is installed, understood, and helpful for millions of people. Ie, MySQL it has its purpose and that a rather impressive and large one at that.

The wonderful thing, in my opinion, MySQL based applications tend to be installed very easily, on different platforms, and this includes examples that I am personally responsble for (http://www.silverstripe.com/ ). It has had windows support for a while now, which has been good for out of the office development or 'stick on your salemens laptop to power an appplication' purposes.

I also agree with you that scaling systems requires a shift away from over utilisation of the database, for example, a content management system, no matter the database, is going to run a whole lot faster through caching html files, most likely to disk in a simple directory structure, rather than pulling content from a database. I presume this is how Slashdot holds itself up.

Regarding feature/fault type stuff - I have only experienced faults with disk problems caused by harddisk failures, and out of space conditions. Both caused problems with both databases, and we can hardly blame the databases for corrupting on that. Both managed to come out of the problems easily enough, and with very little lost data.

Postgres has caused me alot of stife in installation, and their dump/restore scripts to this date still seem unreliable, which sure, may be due to that Debian Stable still being on 7.2 and I've never had the necessity to try out more recent releases.

However, there's many very cool things I hear you can do with it - I simply don't use them :P I also think that the fact that postgres and mysql both compete is great - it motivates both teams to continually improve. In summary, I have found MySQL to work perfectly in creating a leading edge content management system (http://www.silverstripe.com/); one where the development, selling and implementation of it has created jobs and forms a whole business. But I'm sure if Postgres had walked in the door four years ago and I had a more positive experience, I'd be touting that over Mysql in the same subjective vein.