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

PHP

[asv108]

It would have nice if they included installs of Postnuke and/or Phpnuke. I've installed slashcode, phpnuke, and postnuke with phpnuke probably taking the cake for the easiest to install.

Re:PHP

[Fweeky]

Pfft, the least secure PHP application on earth (and one of the worst written), and another app based on the least secure and worst written PHP app? No thanks :)

Personally I've found that pretty much all systems like this turn out to be messy, badly written, poorly designed, and have URI's that would make TBL gag.

Case in point: phpNuke, long, long history of major security holes, with a hugely speghettified codebase.

Scoop, with embedded Perl and HTML thrown about everywhere in the database.

Drupal, with raw HTML everywhere in the PHP.

This pattern repeats just about everywhere. The closest I've found to an open source web application which doesn't make me want to hit something is ezPublish, which at least makes an effort to have reasonable URI's, and has a decent attempt at making itself OO (although sadly at a significant cost of performance).

Developers: mod_rewrite is your friend. Go read Cool URI's Don't Change, and maybe TBL's other Hypertext Style Guide stuff, it'll be good for you even if you don't agree with all of it.

AxKit

[mindriot]

Having looked at several CMS for a website I am going to relaunch, I needed an approach that was most general and would allow me to choose how I could store the content and separate the design. OK, the difference to the projects mentioned here is that I don't need a large system to manage things like user comments or other methods of dynamically adding pages. Currently I think I will go with AxKit, which is not really a CMS, but basically an on-the-fly caching XSLT processor. For me this provides the most flexible solution. I have designed an XML format to store my content files, and can then use either an XSL stylesheet to produce HTML or WML or whatever needed, or write an XPathScript style sheet allowing me to process the XML data while additionally using perl code to add dynamic features. The nice thing is that with AxKit you can use HTTP GET parameters to allow different style sheets (plain, xhtml, print, ...), pick a style sheet depending on browser type (lynx, netscape4, mozilla...), etc. And for a website offering mostly static content that needs to be organized in a proper way, I think separating content from layout using XML seems like a good idea. What I like to is that it's easily possible to include multiple language versions of your page in your XML data files and transform to HTML based on, say, a ?lang attribute. Plus, you could even store the XML content tree in CVS...

For websites that are just trying to be in control of their mostly static content, AxKit surely helps (provided you have access to the server box as you need to install the apache module...). Storing pure content as XML and then providing different stylesheets for layout seems a proper way to go for me.

Of course, this is not to say I don't like the LJ or E2 engines, butjust depending on what you need for your website, XML might be helpful, and AxKit might be the way to implement it.

Re:How do these compare to Squishdot?

[Yakman]

The criteria is the problem, which is why the best content management solution for an organisation is a custom built solution based on their requirements.

It's also why you never hear good things about companies who try to implement commercial CMSs like Vignette. I personally worked on a website that was being converted to use the Aprtix CMS, and basically we had to tailor the site to fit the CMS rather than building the site we wanted. Without doing it yourself you use flexibility.

At the organisation I work for now we (I) custom built a CMS on top of Lotus Domino (perfect for Workflow etc), which exactly meets the buisnesses needs.

What if it's not your machine?

[Salamander]

One of the assumption that's being made both in the story and in many of the comments is that the CMS runs on a dedicated machine over which you have total control. This assumption covers database formats and filesystem layouts that are unfriendly to multiple installations, plus custom Apache configs (even an Apache dependency is noxious IMO) to "just install mod_obscure_widget" pseudo-advice.

The problem is that the assumption is just not true for many people, who run their sites on servers owned, configured and administered by a hosting provider. Any CMS that can be installed in such an environment automatically becomes about five times more useful than one that requires total control of a dedicated machine. That's the review/comparison that would really be useful to most of us.