Slashdot Mirror

their logo bears a striking resemblence to Vignette's

See this page. They used to have this sign on their front page that said something like "Productivity is a place, we'll take you there." *eyeroll*

"Microsoft was kind of pushing Passport for a problem that didn't exist..."

The problem of single sign on (SSO) does exist, particularly in the corporate world. Vendors implimenting Web Portals (MS SharePoint, Sun Java System Portal Server, BEA WebLogic Portal, Vignette Portal, etc...) have a particular interest in SSO and identity management via Identity Services to present a single interface to various systems in an enterprise.

My main problem with MS Passport is that it's Microsoft's version of a standard rather than a community standard. Applications can connect via MS's SDK rather than publishing the standard. Using Open LDAP, Sun's Identity Server, etc... will generally follow open standards and have better compatibiltiy to other open source/standard applications.

It's the market leader for a reason.

Of all of these, I like OpenACS the best, mostly because of its developer community. There are a lot of great people involved, and there's a high signal to noise ratio on the developer forums. Even though OpenACS probably has the least of what you're looking for, it might be the easiest to develop. OpenACS runs on top of Postgres or Oracle, and is written in Tcl.

Redhat CCM is basically a Java rewrite of the original OpenACS. Its CMS modules are supposedly more mature. It runs on a Redhat version of Postgres, and I think Oracle too.

Zope is a whole lotta product, and probably has most of what you're looking for. However, I find it kind of murky, difficult to figure out. YMMV.

These three are the most promising in terms of developer community. This is a bigger undertaking than it might seem at the outset. You'll need all the help you can get, and getting involved with these communities will spare you from trying to reinvent the wheel.

Of course, I'd love to have you guys use and extend the OpenACS toolkit, and share your efforts with the community!

Is that enough time to call something a subsidiary? :) (I wonder if the deal has even been completed yet. I know the paperwork has been signed, but things like that still tend to take time.)

The only option is to use load balancing and PHP, as that is the only way that efficiency can be effectively offered to the typical user, which most sites are not using.

• Sun's support (with a SUN/GOLD => repairs are to occur during the working day)
  
• Sun's hardware (really stable with a nice hardware-monitoring from the OS => we can detect a Power supply failure before it has some productive consequences)
  

Brent Simmons' Law of CMS URLs:

The more expensive the Content Management System, the crappier the URLs. Compare, for instance, StoryServer's weird comma-delimited numeric URLs to Radio UserLand's human-readable (and guessable) URLs. Then compare the prices--orders of magnitudes of difference. So, at least in this respect, there's an inverse relationship between price and quality.

An example of one of these content management systems would be mason, http://www.masonhq.com, and mason apps such as Fuse CMS and Bricolage. I find Mason to be just as powerful as multi-thousand dollar applications such as StoryServer

www.vignette.com

A client of mine uses a product which ships a binary-only plug-in. They haven't qualified a plug-in for Apache 2.0.x, so that's that. Vignette's software is pretty popular. Add in products like Websphere, Oracle iAS, and all the other proprietary tools that flocked to Apache and you've got a solid chunk of the market.

Personally, I haven't upgrade either of my personal servers, because I fail to see any real benefit from doing so. Both are on seperate 128Kbit links with adequate horsepower to serve pages behind them, so why mess with a new mod_perl?

Counter-example: Netscape Enterprise Server (which unlike the browser, was intended to be a profit center) -- steamrolled by Apache.

Steamrollered? Don't think so. Fewer installs, perhaps, but is the number of installs really the only significant factor? If you're a Netscape shareholder, would you rather have the same number of Apache installs if it meant that you never made any money on it? I'm sure that giving away NES (and variants) was an option considered, but decided against.

Netscape Enterprise Server was just too costly and never offered anything over Apache.

Too costly for whom? If you're putting together a $200m programme, of which $60m is software licensing, if one of your strategic components won't work with Apache, then a few NES licenses is small beer.

Next time you're looking at the Netcraft survey, just take a look at who's using NES...

That's pretty much the case for most general purpose CMS (rather than something site-type specific like Slashcode, PHPWebsite or whatever). Whether you're talking about Zope or Vignette, you're still essentially getting a high-level toolkit, with some nice APIs to handle stuff at the level of user authentication, workflow capability and so on.

You're still going to have to put something on top to run your site, whether it's a higher-level still toolkit like CMF (Content Management Framework, note) for Zope, or Multisite Content Manager (previously known as Enterprise Application Portal) for Vignette.

There are heaps of these bloated systems. For a while, Vignette's system (formerly called Story Server) was a leader. Many outfits build their own, for example, based on Oracle. A colleague has recently installing Microsoft Content Management Server for a large government client, and he has been remarkably impressed.

Wow, two rare words in one sentence - and they are actually names of two competing products. I wonder if chromatic is an affiliate of both of them :-)

1. Better suited to "internal" applications than external ones. I would love to use this to serve up charts of web server log analysis, instead of using WebTrends (*spit*). I'm sure the bean-counters would adore the ability to "fly through" the charts. ;)
2. Mentioning Tcl and CURL in the same posting is likely to cause nasty twitches in those of us who're programming in Vignette V/5 (which is Tcl-based and has a CURL command) at the moment. :)

I work for a company that develops software and tools for Internet sites. You may be interested to hear that the proportion of our ".com" customers as opposed to "old economy" customers has reduced substantially recently.

The general consensus in the company is that while many companies will fail, those who turn out to become the leaders in their fields will flourish. It's survival of the fittest out there and you must be very discerning before joining any company.

Any self-respecting, qualified tech person should consider at least two offers before changing jobs, placing each in their own perspective. It can be difficult to try to juggle three offers and move the interview and selection process along so that you can consider offers simultaneously, but only then can you really make a considered and well judged decision on where your pay cheque should come from.

Just my 2c

Aside: How many active users read Slashdot? I see user ids are in their hundreds of thousands now...

Totally agree. Before everyone on Slashdot goes crazy about how there is all this prior art from CVS, Zope, and wiki, read the actual press release.

What eMedicine has here is a full content management system. This is not version control. Most importantly every product mentioned as prior art in the /. posting is missing one thing: workflow processes. The ability to automatically enforce some asset be edited by this person, approved by 2 of these 3 people, then moved to staging, approved after UA testing, and moved to production seems to be a key part of what eMedicine has.

This has certainly been done before though not by any of the products mentioned above. Interwoven's Teamsite and Vignette's V/5 Content Management Server are 2 examples of products (and there are a number of others) that seem to do everything mentioned in the press release.

But true content management and workflow support are things that neither CVS, Zope, or wiki have. Slow down Slashdot.

AMZN is not the only one doing this. Personally, I do not have a problem with it -- done in the bricks and mortar world more than most people realize. However, I am interested in the tech. NetPerceptions is arguably the market leader with their GroupLens technology. ZDNet has a good explanation/review of this technology and here is an ABCNews video (realvideo) reporting the technology. Essentially the application learns your likes/dislikes of products/services (my profile) so that products/services based on these likes/dislikes are recommended to you. Moreover, and this is the part I find fascinating, information is pulled from demographic data/others who have similar likes/dislikes of the same products/services I purchase and very different products/services are recommended. For instance, maybe The Godfather is my favorite movie and, therefore, there is a 90% likelihood that I would like cigars. The site would actively present the sale of cigars to me.
AMZN actively pricing its product based on a specific user and his/her profile is part of this technology --- your profile also dictates prices (higher or lower). Incidentially, other companies with such technology/recommendation engines include: BroadVision, Art Technology Group (ATG), Vignette...

Think of what RedHat, Caldera, or whoever could do with a single package now. RedHat 7.0, webserver addition: includes your end to end large scale site solution, web services by Apache, Content Management by GO.com. With a good ecommerce suite, that could be one hell of a package if it all came preconfigured.

The go.com stuff provides you with the tools to build a website - it'll never be an out of the box solution.

CMP released their perl-based CMS a while back - Mason. It looks very nice, it's used on some high-volume sites, and has a feature site suprisingly similar to Vignette's StoryServer (which is TCL-based, and grew out of C|Net).

None of which will do anything magical out of the box.

Inside.com recently had a decent article about CMS pros and cons, but I can't find it. Anyone got the URL?

...j

Zope Vignette

There are others(possibly asp, coldfusion, jsp, etc...), but these are the ones I know a bit about.

I work at Dell Computer Corp at the headquarters in Round Rock TX. We've donated lots of money to lots of charities. We have another one coming up here in the very near future that we're taking a big part in that is sponsored by Vignette (another austin based tech company). Not that I particularly care about this stuff, but we do do a lot for the charities.. just my 2 cents..