Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.