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

How do these compare to Squishdot?

[Bodhammer]

I have a potential content management project- How do these compare to Zope running ? Squishdot?

(p.s. do I get mod'd up for posting the first real comment?)

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.

(fruit) vs. (fruit)

[Xunker]

Comments about administration policy asside, I think that comparing the two isn't strictly fair. At least, not on absolute terms.

As a developer on both codebases, teh differences as I see them are basic: Ecore is about grouping and linking as sets, while lj is more about mass indexing of list-type data.

One of ecores main weekness is scalability, or lack thereof -- this is not a slam on teh code, but just an introspection on design. Because lj os more about this loose-linked list paradigm, it can easily scale and cluster on mutliple machine while ecore, with it's extreme data interlinking, is heaving right now with redesigns to allow that.

Of course, Ecore (or at least E2) has a much better XML interface, which is probably it's second strongest point. It's first strongest and most important is the concpet that everything is a node.

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

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.

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.

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: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.

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

The only real test for performance...

[Glowing Fish]

Okay, you can sit around with your TI-86 all night long and talk about XML parsing times, but who cares? The only real test of a site is how much it provides content, and by content, I mean a peek into the life of CowboyNeal. Using this test, let's compare:

CowboyNeal on e2

Versus

CowboyNeal's livejournal account.

Aside from technical details, which one of these gives us more insight into the delicate poetic soul that is Mr. Pater?

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.

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.