Slashdot Mirror

Joomla has a horribly confusing interface. There's extensions, mods, addons, bots... What's the difference? Who knows. The admin interface is way too complicated. There's different ways to get to the same admin section. It's super unintuitive. Blech... Joomla is based around the concept of publishing "articles". But how many of your website customers need that feature at all? Like 5%. Joomla is more of a blog than a CMS for building websites.

If you'd like to check out a much simpler, easier to understand, CMS that will enable you to quickly build the kind of sites your clients need (and simple enough for them to administer themselves) then check out Xoops.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with xoops in any way. Just a guy who's installed a bunch of different CMSs.

Or join a smaller one, one that doesn't have a zillion developers. Know php? check out http://www.xoops.org/ - they'd be happy to have a developer I'm sure. Just surf around on sourceforge and find one you like and would be valuable to with not a whole lot of developers, and jump in. The worst that can happen is the project dies or it's dead and nobody responds. (I don't have anything to do with Xoops beyond being a user - although I do have some input at http://www.winpackman.org/ where I'm positive they would love to have you =) )

its open source and supports ldap or 3rd party authentication, object oriented, supports page caching, database abstraction, error handling, module functionality, smarty based templating system and good community...what else you need..

ofcourse right now xoops supports only php4 so dont expect php5 stuff in it...once php5 goes mainstream they are gonna release php5 as per their roadmap http://www.xoops.org/modules/wfchannel/index.php?p agenum=14

XOOPS has released an updated version and patch on July 2'nd.

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.

For a while I've been looking at different CMSs to use with my site, and the one which consistently came to the foreground as the easiest and possibly the best option for a community-driven (i.e. with forums and other means of user activity/feedback) CMS in discussions, is XOOPS.

Just now browsing through the Drupal site, I'm left totally unimpressed by the forums and general features their own site seems to offer, not to mention that the screenshot gallery appears to have some CSS issues with Firefox.

XOOPS should be what you are looking for. It is modular, and you can easily add content, or have people not too computer savvy do so.

Also check out the School module, put together for a school by one of the core dev's - Mithrandir.

It is written in OO-PHP, uses the Smarty template engine, has an extensive community for support, is very simple to install, GPL licensed, and is under constant development.

...by the way, I'm affiliated with XOOPS, in that I am a community member, mod developer, and translator :)...

http://xoops.org/

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. ;-)

try xoops

I have just recently set up wordpress and it works great. Lots of features. Real easy to set up as that is has been ported to be a module to http://www.xoops.org/

My blog will be an account an atempt to make a living at online Texas Holdem check it out here at Texas Holdem Poker Blog

Anyway just wanted to let folks know that wordpress is a solid blog

Yes, PHPNuke and PostNuke both have had a bad reputation for security exploits. A better alternative is Xoops which is also a Nuke derivative but better managed and coded (not to say that it is perfect).

Of the non-Nuke portals I would say that Drupal seems to be one of the most well coded engines. Xaraya is also probably worth a look to but I have not used that one.

PHP-Nuke was pretty rife with exploits and although PostNuke tried to do better it still wound up with a few exploits. However some of the other Nuke forks are quite good. I am partial to Xoops. Another similar system that is much better designed than the Nukes is Drupal.

A merit of http://www.opensourcecms.com/ is the
categorization : it's important to distinguish generic ("portal") CMSs from just weblogs engines,
and other variants. Though -of course- there's no clear cut-off.

I've been making some research recently.
I wanted an open weblog engine (perhaps with some light cms features), in php+mysql (for ubiquitousness), with good internals (decent code and developer docs).

Among the heavyweigth CMSs -escaping from the horrible mess of PhpNuke and sons- I looked at Mambo, Xaraya and XOOPS ; all of them are really interesting; but too complex beasts for my needs.

Drupal (a generic CMS with weblog included) deserves consideration: nice developer docs, carefully organized coding base and very active. But I dont like the concepts it uses ("nodes","taxonomy"), the templating strategy and the focus in general (a CMS too abstract, I feel).

On the other side, on the KISS weblogs engines, Wordpress has gained a lot of attention. And I liked it overall.
BUT: the code is rather immature and poorly organized and the docs are terrible. Lots of poor software design choices, both at maintainability and performance aspects(yes, guys; I know it's just PHP, but even then... lots of globals, nearly no classes, plugins bad integrated, etc)

I finally choose Nucleus. It beats WP largely in software design and documentation. A minus: it's weak activity (compared with wp and others): a year from the last stable release (2.0). But it's alive, has a decent forum, 3.0RC released this month; and going in the good direction IMHO.

In theory, I strongly agree with what you're saying. In practice, however, having set up my own Zope/CMF/Plone side on Debian unstable (yes, unstable) and Apache, I'm gonna have to disagree.

It took me a while to set up Zope/Plone. There's a nasty bug in Debian's distribution of Plone, but thankfully there's a super easy workaround in the BTS. It also took a couple visits to #plone@irc.gnu.org to set up an actual Plone instance, but in retrospect it wasn't that hard. I got the Apache passthrough working too. Now, Plone's setup phase is done. Anything I need to change is done via GUI, and the Structured Text system is perfect for marking up content without obfuscating it. Oh yeah, and the Structured Text was the only thing I actually had to look at the Plone docs for. It's probably even easier when you use them start to finish.

I've used e107, PostNuke, XOOPS, Slash, Scoop and probably a few others. They're all neat, but I've had way more problems with them all, from just plain failure to strange errors to lack of features. e107 does have a TON more themes available, though.

You say Zope is going in the wrong direction, but I fail to see how. With Zope, you can build webapps into your Plone site - just don't ask me how. With most PHP-based CMS's you still have to install an SQL server of some flavor, and I doubt if you can build webapps in. You complain about Zope/CMF/Plone being three-tiered, but really CMF is just an addon to Zope - it doesn't add complication. And I think it's pretty sweet to be able to manage all your Zope stuff through one interface - including all your Plone sites and whatever else you've got going. You also complain that Zope is a "closed world" because of the object database. Yeah, it's about as "closed" as any other website that has an FTP backend - i.e. NOT.

And as far as speed, I haven't noticed a bit of difference between Plone and e107 (the only other CMS I've ended up using for real). I'm not pretending I get any real traffic, though. But to balance that, I've got a horrible setup - at the moment a P4-1.4 with 256/RAM and a cable modem with an upload cap of 256Kb.

In short, Plone rules. Not sure how it does it, but it does.

Two years ago I made a bet with a friend that Macromedia would release at least
one member of the dreamteam for linux. Obviously I lost the bet and now owe him
an icecream (cream, sauce and crunchy topping and all).
But I didn't lose because linux hasn't gained importance as I thought it would
have. On the contrary. Linux did gain importance, only macromedia has lost it. The
dot-bomb is long ago, all those wannabe dreamweaver-clickers are flipping burgers,
browsers actually support css now - a thing _nobody_ _ever_
thought would happen 3 years ago - and content management is the *only* way to
go for webstuff today, rendering dreamweavers impressive template engine
pointless. Impressive still, but yet pointless anyway.
As someone who has been doing web and internet design and programming
professionally for quite some time now I'd like to get some things straight in
the pro and con macromedia dreamteam flamewar:
1.) In the days when css was synonym for the crappiest implementation of
cross-plattform standards ever, Flash was the *only* way to make a good visual
appearance and be truly cross plattform. In fact, you'd be more compatible and
accessible with Flash than with anything beyond "table" and "href". That has
changed since then, with the appearance of NS 6.1 came a whole bunch of browsers
that manage css in a way that is fairly acceptable. Flash isn't needed for
professional design anymore. And since the macromedia people are the biggest
idiots in the entire universe when it come to building usable programming
plattforms and put an exceptional effort into keeping Flash MX and the
ActionScript object model just as crappy as ever one can almost rest ashure
that Flash will eventually fade into oblivion, just as Director is
(Praise the Lord!) doing now.
2.) Back in the we-don't-give-a-f*ck-about-webstandards time Dreamweaver was the
_only_ tool that would make webdevelopement possible. And I'm talking about real
webdevelopement - a concept argueably only grasped by the slashdot crowd on very
rare occasions. Actually Dreamweaver was the tool that would make sites
accessable for Linux. Nobody would handcode anything for NS 4.7, trust me on
that one. And dreamweaver still has features that strike an unexpierienced DW
user (read: less that 1 and a half years of DW usage) as perfect. Think of the
drag linking, it's ability to *not* touch hand edited code what so ever and the
template engine that was the only way to go when dynamic web application stuff
wasn't available. Yet most of these things are taken care of by the bazillion
server side technologies (and PHP CMSes) out there, so I - and all other
professionals I know of - haven't been using DW for 2 years or more.
Summary:
Flash and DW are both impressive apps (exclude anything that has to do with
programming in Flash/AS) - no matter what VI zealot keeps bullshitting about on /. -
but the bottom line is that they've both had their great time and it's doubtable if it will ever come back.
They've been outrun by JMF (that programming think that macromedia horribly failed at), OSS Content Management Systems and by
editors that blast DW/Homesite to chunky
kibbles.

Wrong on some counts....

I agree with your statement that php lacks namespaces and certain other things.

But you can make a nice clean seperation between application and data with php.

As for a clean/well coded project take a look at xoops.

Think:

Real time audio streaming of town meetings, city council, public court hearings. You've got the bandwidth to setup and sustain a few hundred streaming realplayer connections.

Keep a consistent interface. I would suggest a web-based initiative, because you can find content management systems (I use this one, but there's more of them, where you could setup a simple username and password interface to let everyone logon, use web-based email, get local alerts etc.

Think of seeing the pictures of a wanted suspect everywhere in the neighborhood in seconds. Grab a mugshot, scan it in, and boom, thanks to integrating your phone service through this (which, if you don't, you'll look at yourself in 10 years and really kick yourself) the guy won't be able to go anywhere near a residential neighborhood without getting tagged. A phone call (or special ring?) will alert you to an "emergency message" provided via email, instead of having to hear about it through the TV (and all the rigamarole that entails, compared to just sending out an email). Think of weather alerts in this same vein. A blizzard coming and you need to warn the masses?

Keep wireless access points around town. I mean, if its in the city limits and you're going to go, go all the way. That way if their notebook has a wireless card, they can still sit in the restaraunt and eat quietly while surfing the net.

Everyone gets an email address that is not spammed and can only be used for city business and contacts. This is a peculiar idea consider, but it would assure that you would never, ever, get spam from this address. This one you can throw away, but I thought I would throw it in the mix.

Teleconferencing intra-city. With video. Nuff said. (Think X-11 or something. You can push the bandwidth.)

If you integrate your phone service through this line, the shared cost would be more than enough to keep a techie or two onhand for support, a few DNS/Web/FTP servers running, etc etc.

Just a few ideas. There is no way this cannot help your town, and I congratulate you in your efforts. Good luck.