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Content Management Systems For Linux?

Posted by Cliff on from the does-this-exist? dept.

zoneranger asks: "I've recently been for an interview with part of a large global news company (naming no names)... I'd been sent for jobs in Linux Sysadmin, but found out shortly after arriving that they only used Solaris. Enquiring more deeply, they were basically using Netscape Web Server (mmm...) and Net Gravity, with an unnamed RDBMS in there as well. They also said that instead of taking out maintenance on the boxen, they would just buy another one if problems occurred, and roll it out. It occurred to me therefore that the only reason they weren't using Linux on whatever hardware was simply down to software availability, so my question is: Are there any CMS's for Web Development/etc. under Linux that the 'big boys' would use? Are people using Zope, etc., out there to enable just about everyone to submit content? "

6 of 18 comments (clear)

  1. A review of content systems out there ... by mrgrumpy · · Score: 3
    This is an email I sent to some friends on this exact topic ...

    After having slaved away for several weeks building an per/xml based content engine (Kumera), I started having a look around to see what else was out there, and got suddenly depressed.

    The only saving grace was that is Australia, the cost of running a dedicated server is way too high, and so there is still space for a cgi-bin perl based system.

    Although you may not be interested in all of this, I'm doing it for my own sanity and clarity ...

    In my wandering I have found ...

    http://slashcode.com/ - the content engine that slashdot is based on. Runs in mod_perl (or cgi-bin I guess), very sofisticated. Has daemons that run to collect content for the slashboxes and everything else we know and love about slashdot.

    http://www.zope.org/ - not sure, I think it's a python based application server that has some content systems built around them, including (just to confuse you) http://squishdot.org/ which is the slashdot code ported to zope (I think)

    http://frontier.userland.com/ - is a news system/engine that has a thing called manilla, http://manila.userland.com/ which is a front end to editing and so on. Frontier isn't free or open source, but very popular.

    http://java.apache.org/jetspeed which is a portal based engine built on top of turbine which is an applicate framework for building applications. There is a content engine and discussion group system that are developed by someone else, who are expecting to open source the discussion groups, and provide source and binarys for a low cost of the content engine.

    And there are a few more application systems, which are not exactly content management systems as such, but could be used to build some ... like cold fusion, active server pages, java server pages, php3, and the list goes on and on and on ...

    The more I look there more there is ...

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    -- Huh, what?
  2. Midgard by jlaporte · · Score: 2

    You might also want to take a look at Midgard. I just installed it a couple days ago as my first foray into application servers. It runs on top of apache and a patched version of php3. You can check it out at http://www.midgard-project.org

    It currently only supports MySQL, but with the forthcoming 2.0 version all ODBC compliant databases will be supported.

    As for whether or not the "big boys" would use it, I don't know, you could probably answer that better than me. My guess would be that while it only supports MySQL the answer would be no, but once the ODBC support is integrated the answer might change.

  3. Zope, Squishdot, and the PTK by webmaven · · Score: 2

    Squishdot is not a port of the slashcode, it's a clone of some of the basic Slashdot functionality that was produced long before the recent release of the slashcode. It currently lacks features such as self-registration, member pages, post ranking, member pages, etc.

    Nevertheless, it is an astonishingly useful product, and can be set up on a working Zope installation within about 5 minutes.

    Some sites running Squishdot include:
    Technocrat.net
    Gnotices, Gnome developer News
    70South
    eBiquity.org
    91.266A - Numerical Methods

    and my own FIAWOL site.

    There is also a big project underway to build a 'Portal Toolkit' (PTK) for Zope. You can find it here. The features of the PTK include self-registration, member pages, wizards for member contributed content, a review mechanism for member contributed content, multiple integrated sources for user authentication, most portal content 'discussable', etc.
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    The real Webmaven is user ID 27463. I don't rate an imposter, because my ID is such a lame-ass high number.
  4. openCMS by JEL · · Score: 2

    It seems to me that opencms could be a system for you although I didn't succeed in installing it. As far as I understood, there is a news function, folders, workflows and other things making sense in CMS. I don't know if it's already really useable but you could give it a try.

  5. Zope Documentation by webmaven · · Score: 2

    The following information sources are usually a bit more productive that the current manuals:

    The Zope Documentation Project

    The mailing lists

    The How-Tos
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    The real Webmaven is user ID 27463. I don't rate an imposter, because my ID is such a lame-ass high number.
  6. Zope by bko · · Score: 2

    I've had a chance to use Zope recently, and it's a great piece of software. I expect that in a year or two everyone who's doing this stuff will be seriously interested in it -- it will let you do just about everything from the web, it should start getting tool support to make integration with tools more transparent, and it will be documented.

    However, until that time, the documentation is a significant source of headaches.

    As an example, in trying to write some DTML (Zope's dynamically generated HTML variant) to do some coding, I spent several hours trying to figure out what syntax was needed to reference a variable. This was WHILE reading the manuals, looking at every faq possible on the Zope site, etc.

    I consider myself a good figure-outer of things that are poorly documented, as I'm willing to experiment mercilessly, but this was ridiculous.

    That said, power isn't lacking in using Zope. The web front-end makes using it easy for non-full-time developers, the versioning makes it easier to recover from mistakes (it keeps a complete revision history for all of the files in Zope), the software is Open Source and Free Software (BSD-licensed), and you can extend it with a real language (Python).

    But the documentation will be a killer until the first O'Reilly book comes out, I expect... :(