E2 and LJ, Comparing Content Management Systems

Anonymous Noder/LJ'er writes "Linux.com is running a story written by Slashdot's Krow, one of the authors of Slash comparing the LiveJournal site engine to the Everything2 engine. He went over the installs of the two engines and talks a bit about customizing both. I really like both sites so it is interesting to see someone talk about what makes them tick."

Comments

Have you considered Wikis for content management?

[stephanruby]

If you like to keep things simple, sometimes a Wiki might be the only thing you need.

Here is the original WikiWikiWeb: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WelcomeVisitors
Here is a Wiki you can easily install on your own machine: http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/swiki/15
Here is a free Wiki farm that let's you start your own on a shared server: http://www.seedwiki.com

Re:How do these compare to Squishdot?

[corz]

Be sure to check out plone. Built on top of Zope+CMF, its definately worth a look.

Re:How do these compare to Squishdot?

[jeorgen]

Zope is great, I'm using it for e.g. euliberals.net, but Squishdot is very simple and does not have that many features at all. It's more of a one-trick pony and does not play in the same league as Everything. Even though I prefer Zope I've never found a place for Squishdot; it's still too primitive: Last time I cehcked you were supposed to enter your name for making a comment and there is no moderation, just to name two things. Take a look at perlmonks to see what a site based on Everything can do.

cheers,
/jeorgen

Re:PHP - PHPwebsite

[Epeeist]

Another PHP based CMS that shows a lot of promise is phpwebsite. Easy to install, lots of modules, licenced under the GPL.

The major downside to it (which seem to be common to most things in this area) is a lack of documentation.

Check out Typo3

[peted20]

I've been playing around with the Typo3 CMS lately, its really pretty amazing. It can do some pretty impressive dynamic graphics generation, especially in terms of graphical navigation menus and rescaling and optimization of images. I've made a couple dynamic sites with it and it has proved to be very well thought out and extremely well documented (IMHO).

www.typo3.com

Some really cool features: (Stolen directly from typo3.com)

• Navigational menus are automatically created - even if the menu is made graphically - perhaps even with background-images, dropshadows on text and roll-over effects!
• Images uploaded and used on pages are automatically scaled to the correct size (no HTML-scaling!) and stored on the server with a minimum filesize. Even non-web image-formats can be used! (TIF, AI, PDF, PCX and more). And you can without further knowledge just upload your digital-camera pictures and they'll be scaled automatically.
• Headlines and other graphical elements with shifting content is also automatically generated.
• You can differenciate the website-design by creating variations in the templates based on the client browser, IP-number or number-range, operating system, countrycodes, userchosen parameters eg. printing-friendly versions of no-frames versions.You can have multiple templates on a site.
• Pages can be timed to be shown on a certain date, be hidden on a certain date or just temporarily hidden.
• Typo3 has a build-in password-protecting option on the pages. Thereby protected pages are only visible for users from a certain usergroup.
• Typo3 supports search in SQL-databases.
• Redesigning of a website at once is a question of creating one single new template.

I've started to use it for a couple sites in the last six months, and its really made web development fun.

-Pete

Look at mod_auth_mysql

[Wee]

Currently, I use a combination of AuthUserFile/deny/allow in .htaccess to limit who can make changes. I need to implement a better system, but can't decide the best way to go about doing this.

If you are into rolling your own, then take a look at the Look at mod_auth_mysql Apache module. It's basically .htaccess file kind of access control except the user info is in a MySQL DB. So you can do updates/inerts/whatever on the database via your perl and get close to what you need as far as access control without having to write files in the docroot.

You might not be able to make it fine-grained enough, but if you have a thing where each user (for instance) gets their own directory or something then it might work pretty well for you.

And if you are not into rolling your own anymore, check out Moveable Type.

-B

MS Sharepoint Portal Server

[DGolden]

MS Sharepoint Portal Server is the a next round in MS's binding of the corporate office bureaucracy to them. It's basically a Web CMS and DMS that fully integrates with the rest of MS Office.

It's a pretty damn poor Document Manager, and a really abysmal Content Manager in most respects (except for - again a killer feature - WYSIWIG page editing inclusive of component embedding), but the MS Office integration is the key. And of course, no-one can integrate with MS Office better than MS.

If there was a decent "Open Office Portal Server" then things would be just dandy - but, as it is, Sharepoint will act to lock people into another round of MS-dependency. Sharepoint Portal Server has been used by people talking to me as an argument to stick with MS Office even with the existence of open office and star office.

Re:AxKit

[Matts]

There are a few options for content management systems built on top of AxKit.

First if your needs are really simple you can try the AxKit wiki, which is the only wiki out there that allows you to enter data in either XML (sdocbook), WikiWiki text, or Perl's POD format. Although right now the wiki is extremely simplistic (no versioning or user management), it's quite extensible.

Next up the ladder of complexity is CallistoCMS which is has a really cool online editor component, basically allowing you to do almost WYSIWYG editing of XML content live in the web browser (all just uses pure HTML+CSS+JS+DOM, no ActiveX or Java plugins involved).

Finally there's XIMS, which is basically what you might consider as a full blown CMS, including versioning, metadata, workflow, etc etc.