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I did my Multimedia Design Diploma in 2001. One big part of the curriculum was building Multimedia Applications in Director. Our class learned programming in Lingo (the programming language of Director). With some teacher who had learned programming in Lingo and thus knew literally less than nothing about programming.
After my training I had a gig for 9 months building SAP simulations with sliced up screenshots and buckets of cobbled-together Lingo code in Director. This was such an kafkaesk thing, you'd barely believe it.

Seriously, if you want to know why Director doesn't get any praise - aside from Adobe screwing things up ... again - look at Lingo. This abysmal disaster of a PL has no equal on this planet. It's basically a programming language designed by people who couldn't really tell the difference between a value and a variable. I'm not joking.

If you think PHP is a mess, you have seen nothing my friend. Lingo takes the cake and wins the battle of bizar 'programming' languages hands down with flying flags, even with RunRevs "Transcript", Typo3s/Neos' "TypoScript" (Don't ask, you don't want to know, seriously now) and older versions of SQL joining the fight.

Director had some nice animation and prototyping/RAD concepts, no doubt. But at a certain point they should've brought some people in who knew what they were doing - you know, like with ActionScript 2 in Flash.
They didn't and Director died a well deserved death.

I'm so glad JavaScript is slowly taking the place of the universal frontend/ui language and, trust me, if you'd've seen Lingo, you would be too.

My 2 cents.

Said this already a while back on a simular problem:
It's called marketing.

In short:
If your project is (re)presented properly, you'll have people falling over each other to claim gouvernance over it.
I'd put it into a foundation - after refurbishing it's outward representation!

Example: Typo3's architecture looks like it's designed by monkees on crack, it's config language TypoScript is so bizar - in concept and in implementaion - I can't even describe it and there are a countless other strange things about this software. Yet it has a professional website, ressonable documentation and a solid brand, brandbook included(!). I doubt the Typo3 Foundation has problems finding heralds for it's project. There even are Oreilly's on it.

Hope I could help. And good luck finding a heir for your project.

There are plenty of examples of web services running on Open Source for 'enterprise' use - groupware, CRM, accounting, the works. Some of these packages are very good.

Its hard to be specific/determine what you're trying to do without knowing more specifics as to what you're looking for. Of the groupware projects I'm aware of, I know the following have a fair amount of support/use:

* Plone CMS
* OBM
* eGroupWare
* Drupal
* Typo3

Of these, I know that Plone, Drupal, and Typo3 are all "platforms" for developing, managing, and extending content. I seem to recall either eGroupWare or OpenGroupWare extend/integrate with MS Office products. No, it's not going to be the level of integration that Sharepoint stuff offers, but it's something to mention, at any rate (and isn't going to have the massive licensing costs + perpetual lock-in that a MS solution has*).

Plone, in particular, has a lot of support and corporate/"enterprise" use. From their site:

Plone is among the top 2% of all open source projects worldwide, with 200 core developers and more than 300 solution providers in 57 countries. The project has been actively developed since 2001, is available in more than 40 languages, and has the best security track record of any major CMS.
It is owned by the Plone Foundation, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization, and is available for all major operating systems.
Sources: CVE and Ohloh.

That alone is impressive enough; but also consider some of the notable companies which utilize Plone in/for a variety of purposes:

Akamai (yeah, that Akamai - the guys who load balance Microsoft web servers)

Nokia (QT Software stuff)

MyCity ("real time monitoring system for Cities, Towns, Districts or utilities. It makes use of the GPRS service offered by the various GSM network operators")

Discover Magazine

Novell, Inc. (for enterprise services)

NASAScience (public site for NASA's Science Mission Directorate)

FSF (yeah, those hippies)

universities, university science/it departments, hospitals, public/government sites... the list goes on.

Those are notable company names, and at least in the case of Akamai, Novell and Nokia, everyone in IT should know about them. They're also some fairly diverse (and expansive) implementations using the same central CMS - and they're not shackled to a single software backend, able to run on any OS and server combination they could imagine.

* The cost factor associated with MS solution lock-in is a big consideration, bigger than just a simple argument of something like "OpenOffice vs. MS Office". With a web-based, top-level technology like this, it's much, much more important to keep the technologies used "open" - because it is the top-level interface to all your data. You can not move away from a closed package on the backend without moving the entire system, at once, to something open (more often than not, with MS). You're basically stuck with that stack unless you want to start over; there's no ability to independently consider parts of the stack and replace them, as there often is with open systems.

In Germany and the other German speaking parts of Europe you'd have a hard time with Drupal too - but for entirely different reasons. Here Typo3 pratically owns the portal, intranet and CMS market. That's right. The FOSS Project Typo3 is the market leader for portal software in Germany and neighbours. The secondary market for soltions based on and built around Typo3 is way beyond critical mass and has been growing since around 2001. You have 3rd party vendors, "Typo3 Agencies" (an actual generic term - no joke!), a f*cking regular quarterly Typo3 magazine and hosters specialised on Typo3 with all the bells and wistles. Amazon.de scores around fourty (40!) hits for German books and training DVDs on Typo3 and Typo3 specific subjects. And if you're looking for a job as a web professional, it's more or less a safe bet to get into a little Typo3 & TypoScript - you'll get a gig in no time. Or at least a project or two to make ends meet. Even during this downtime there are serious job-offerings for this sort of thing.

Now if only T3 wouldn't be such a bizar behemoth operating system of a PHP CMS, I'd be really happy. But since it's open source, I guess there's not that much to moan about.

I'm a Joomla guy btw. I've seen the fucked up appmodel reverse enginered of a T3-DB of Typo3 4.0 and thus will not look at T3 again until the entire redo is finished in Version 5.0. :-)

Bottom line: MS and other proprietary vendors are a minority in this field in Germany and still businesses are thriving around the prime software solution which is FOSS. I don't see why this shouldn't happen other places aswell. It's not like German businesses are particularly known for their recklessnes or their lack of sense of quality.

It is hard to give you advice if you don't point us to the site. That said, I am trying to do the same thing for my company's site... it still has a long way to go.

The first thing I will tell you, though, is forget about trying to write it in html/php. Get a good, free content management system like typo3 or phpwebsite. Develop a good template and let the other employees fill in the content. That will save you a lot of time and enable your company's on line presence to continue to function once you leave/go on vacation.

As for what to put on your front page, why don't you just look at what other people in your niche are doing and try to improve on it?

Does anyone know of other similar open source projects? In specific, I'm curious if there are other projects like SugarCRM. I know about all the different Wikipedia projects.

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.

For the last 2.5 years I've been anouncing every major release of Blender on /. (this is more of a minor one) and no one cared. Now it's posted before I even noticed that 2.43 is up - and I've checked every day the last 2 weeks. Now the site is overrun and I can't get my copy. .. Wonderfull.
BTW:
1.) The new website (a new template for Typo3, their CMS, looks cool but it's way to wide and/or inflexible.
2.) Blender seriously rocks and is closing in on the big players in 3D quickly in terms of usability and featureset. Amonst the new ones: The integrated compositor now has alpha blending and pass rendering which has me ditching my video tools. No need for Final Cut Pro for Renders anymore.

Support the team. And thanks to them for yet another great Blender release. Can't wait to lay my hands on the 2.43 final.

Typo3 is quite possibly exactly what you are looking for. It is enterprise-grade quality, it was designed to be multilingual from day one, it has a sophisticated caching system and check out TemplaVoila for templating/theming (the video is very short and may not give you a sense of its power). Security awareness has gone up recently as extensions are now audited for security holes.

A quick overview of features and tutorial videos may help you get a feel for what Typo3 can offer in a CMS.

As with most things, the more power and flexibility you have the steeper the learning curve and Typo3 is no exception.

Typo3 is quite possibly exactly what you are looking for. It is enterprise-grade quality, it was designed to be multilingual from day one, it has a sophisticated caching system and check out TemplaVoila for templating/theming (the video is very short and may not give you a sense of its power). Security awareness has gone up recently as extensions are now audited for security holes.

A quick overview of features and tutorial videos may help you get a feel for what Typo3 can offer in a CMS.

As with most things, the more power and flexibility you have the steeper the learning curve and Typo3 is no exception.

Typo3 is quite possibly exactly what you are looking for. It is enterprise-grade quality, it was designed to be multilingual from day one, it has a sophisticated caching system and check out TemplaVoila for templating/theming (the video is very short and may not give you a sense of its power). Security awareness has gone up recently as extensions are now audited for security holes.

A quick overview of features and tutorial videos may help you get a feel for what Typo3 can offer in a CMS.

As with most things, the more power and flexibility you have the steeper the learning curve and Typo3 is no exception.

Enterprise-grade functionality. Many mega-companies like Dassault Systemes in France and Volkswagon in Germany use it. Very powerful, very flexible and very complex. If you like Firefox because of extensions then typo3's (thousands) of extensions will appeal to you.

It's very popular in Europe and is getting some legs here in the US. Check it out at http://typo3.org

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?

Calling this guy a publisher is stretching it a little, imho. The website looks somewhat shoddy and homegrown.

There are other publishers using OSS exclusively that deserve the term. For instance T3N, a regular german magazin on Typo3 uses the CMS Typo3 as publishing tool. They generate the digital prints by Typo3 driven PDF generation. And the bi-monthly 80 Page magazin - available at every larger Newspaper dealer - , albeight having a slightly 'technical' 2-column layout, is a full-blown professional publication, and not just some fanzine. That's what I call OSS driven publishing.

Oh, and, btw, if your wondering why in heavens name someone would have the wacky idea to publish a magazin on Typo3 like others publish magazines on, let's say, PHP or Java, you might be interested to hear that T3N is just in it's 3rd issue and is growing *fast* and steep in print run volume. That is because in Germany _*EVERYBODY*_ uses Typo3. Everybody. Which is unfortunate for me because I'm trying to make a living in Germany doing web developement and don't like T3 that much. ... Ah, well, it's open source, so it's not that bad. Allthough I'm beginning to suspect that Typo3 is some brigdehead for a Danish Invasion of Germany of some sort. I recall we had some kind of war something like 110 years ago or so. Must be that there's still some stuff not settled yet. And Kaspar Skarhoj probably is some secrect agent of the danish crown. :-)

Interesting, since I work in Higher ed. Hold on while I check Protege which I use to map our enterprise. Oh, I see that over 80% of our logical servers are running Linux, either Debian, Red Hat AS or Cent OS. It appears that we are using typo 3 for our CMS. It also looks like we are using uPortal for our web portal and CAS for our Web ISO. Looks like we're using Nagios for monitoring, plus other open source projects in various areas. I also see heavy dependance and use of PostgreSQL and MySQL.

Let me check what services have given us the most trouble. Oh, I see it's our closed source applications.

But, I guess they know best. So I had better shut all of this down.

Well, the CMS I've been missing here so far is Typo3. I think its safe to say its aimed at enterprise level due to its extreme versatility. There is hardly nothing you can't do. If you wish to code your website then its possible; Typo3 uses typoscript which allows you to do just about anything. Loops, if/then, variables, you name it. But ofcourse you can also html based templates to set something up, nothing stopping you there. And the best part, in my opinion ofcourse, it can appeal to everyone. An enduser/customer will happily use the build-in enhanced editor to add a piece of text to his page, while a more technical aimed person is bound to like the option to add whole HTML/XML snipplets into the page.

All in all, I think this is the best around as it adresses many problems and offers many solutions. And well, its modular build and expansion options are great too. You can find documentation as well as the download options here.

If you want strict control over the layout and function of a web site, then you would probably want to switch from a content management system to a content management framework. Content management frameworks are an order of magnitute more complex to setup, but with that complexity comes absolute freedom of functionality and layout.

I started out using CMS systems like Drupal and Mambo, but have switched to building CMS systems with Typo3 and haven't looked back since. There is very little you can't do in Typo3, and there is no 'default' look for a Typo3 created site. You have absolute freedom in layout. Typo3 has a learning curve measured in weeks, but the rewards are definately worth it.

I suggest you look into typo3, it changed my opinion about php cms'

So you were hired to work on a team because they felt that you were well versed in Python and Zope, but you intend to waste their time and money rebuilding it in something else you like?

I said small university. I am the team.

What would you recomend?

A few of them there know Zope but not Python. Since Plone doesn't cost anything I'm not wasting their money. If Python is good enough for Google and ILM, it's good enough for me. I'm not wasting their time. They already have a history with Zope. Plone wasn't my first choice, but after looking at a lot of PHP/MySQL solutions, none had the robustness or security or XML support I felt was needed. The only PHP/MySQL solution that came close was Typo3 and it doesn't have the documentation, community, or support that Zope does. I'm still gonna use PHP/MySQL solutions other sites I maintain.

But, they are going to be at a strict disadvantage in data retrieval and pushing operations-- which is, incidentally, exactly what most servers, such as a file, web or database server, need to be best at! What kind of servers *ARE* these??

Servers you can find in the render farms of ILM. One of the demonstrations was a realtime ray tracing of a landscape. The resulting jpegs were streamed to an Apple G5, because the Cell-based blade server had no high end graphic board.

There are thousands of other applications for such a kind of server. The Earth Simulator is also not a file, web or database server.

On the other hand, even a web server can profit from a Cell server. Look at all the computations a PHP server is doing nowadays. A content management system like relies heavily on ImageMagick to generate the images on-the-fly. Look at all the content servers, like video and audio (mp3) download sites. Some of them are rendering thumbnails or converting uploaded content on the webserver itself.

Database servers are not only looking up entries in an index, they are also doing heavy calculations.

SIMD (like SSE) helps a lot in different areas. A file server could do real-time encryption...

I'm currently in the process of converting my school's site to Plone. It's easy to install and use. However, it is its own server, so if you just want to run a php application on top of Apache, I would reccomend something like Mambo or Typo3

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. ;-)

Grrr replying to myself...

Sorry about the second link, looks like the www subdomain is not set up for typo3.org.

Correct link:
http://typo3.org/

smeat!

In my not so humble opinion, if you want a full featured and supported open source CMS get typo3.

They have freaking instructional videos for $DEITIES sake.

Marketing page:
http://www.typo3.com/

Community pages.
http://www.typo3.org/

smeat!

Well, being a geek and all, why the hell is he using PHP-Nuke? It probably has the worst security history of any CMS ever made.

I highly suggest for everyone using a Nuke based site to switch to Typo3. The security history is solid, and it's just damn nice to work with. It has way more features too.

Maybe he could even do a spot on his show about it.

Click here

Read here

This CMS already uses it, I bet others do as well

Shoot with cannons on pidgeons but if you'd like to have a look at full-blown CMSs give the OpenSource Typo3 a look - after looking through all these phpNuke* siblings which (usually) lack a reasonable user management or real user-definded templates I found typo3 to be scalable, user-friendly and loaded with tons of "extensions" (they call it) for e.g. implementing awstats and such. The learning curve is quite steep but worth dealing with...

-nerbas.

are now able to work on some XML-to-HTML transformer that matches closely what the average office user is spending his time creating

are now able to work on some XML-to-HTML transformer that matches closely what the average office user is spending his time creating

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!