Open Source Content Management Discussion?

Media Girl asks: "As someone considering the vast array of GNU/open source CMS systems out there (and right here), what have been the experiences, insights and opinions of developers on the various programs out there, such as Slash, Scoop, Drupal, PHPslash and the various Nukes? CMS Matrix has a nice comparison grid of features, but there seems to be a lot left between the lines, and the Perl powerhouses are left out of the matrix. How do the typical components (blogs, articles, comments, karma) compare? What about modality, security and speed under heavy loads? What about the quality of ongoing development and activity of the app's community? What's leading edge and not bleeding edge? And what about the Perl/PHP debate? Can we take a snapshot of this realm of open source web development applications and hash it around a bit?"

Comments

Community V. Content

[idiotfromia]

There's way too many content management systems out there that focus too much on the content aspect. I found it hard to locate quality open source CMS that wasn't trying to be Slashdot-like. Many people just want some for easily organizing lots of pages in a quick and easy manner. They don't all want to have forums, user profiles, galleries, news, or blogs built into the system.

Keep it simple, stupid.

Zope and Plone

[Earlybird]

Zope and its CMS framework, Plone. Take Plone for a spin. It's a breeze to install. The entire system is web-managed down to the core, with a flexible role-based security architecture.

Zope is written in Python, so you avoid the PHP stack and its evils. Unlike PHP, Zope is designed around object-oriented concepts such as encapsulation.

For example, to interface with a database you typically create (again, through the web) a connection object, then an SQL method describing the data (a pure SQL script with a few special HTML-like tags for specifying parameter slots) and finally a page template which calls the method.

The upshot? You just decoupled the data from the presentation in a very elegant way, and you decoupled the data operators from the data source. Abstraction is the key.

Plone, in turn, abstracts much of Zope away to provide an elegant, extensible GUI for managing user-oriented content. It has a workflow system, a component system, WYSIWYG article editor support etc.

(The workflow system allows complex flows such as "both John and Jane must review and accept the article before it can be published, and after they've reviewed it, spelling wizard Bob must look over it before it for typos; but users Jack and Jill are trusted users who don't require John or Jane's approval to post articles.)

Unlike most other CMSes, Plone/Zope have no external dependencies -- no MySQL needed, for example.

CMS mailing list

[Matt Perry]

There used to be cms-list.org before it went down in early 2004. People used that mailing list to talk about what you are asking and more. You can find archives online (search on Google). This site is supposed to be the new incarnation of the cms list so you might want to subscribe and ask there. I'd have a list of your requirements in hand before you ask questions on the list. Since the term "content management system" is so generic asking what's the best CMS isn't going to get you far until you figure out what kind of content you need to manage it and how. That will dictate which CMS products you'll consider and from there you can look at the technical aspects to see what works best.

Just my two cents on the subject.

Slashcode considered harmful

[FooAtWFU]

Slashcode produces horribly mangled non-standards-compliant HTML (and it claims to be HTML 3.2). Consider something else besides it. :)

Not a surprise, but why not a wiki?

[Noksagt]

Blogs were the first and are the most deployed apps to use CMS. HTML-savvy people wanted to provide the rest of the world an easy way to contribute content. I'm aware of very few apps meant to make a web developer's life easier by allowing online editing as if it were an online Dreamweaver or what not.

If you want KISS & need to add a lot of content, what is lacking in wikis?

Re:PHPNuke

[a.koepke]

PHPNuke has gotta be one of the most poorly written PHP apps available. Run the code with the error level set at E_ALL and watch the amount of notices you get for undefined variables and improperly used array references.

commercial ones are better at the moment

[jilles]

I work for a company (www.gx.nl) that sells its own cms. Let me just summarize that we are more worried about other CMS companies than open source alternatives right now. OSS CMSs are just not that competitive right now. The reason for this is that there's more to a cms than installing the software on a server. That is the really easy part. The difficult part is actually developing the site to the customers specification (look and feel, dynamic functionality etc.), migrating his old content and integrating with backend systems. Then you also need to make it really easy for them to edit the content & layout and on top of that you need to continue to support their installation.

This requires expertise and technical solutions. We provide both. Most of our customers do not actually care about what the software is or how it works. They just give us specifications and expect a working site that they can add content to effortlessly: that's what they pay us for. They neither have the expertise nor the desire to hand tailor some OSS system. License cost compared to development cost is negligable so most cost conscious customers will gladly cough up the license fees if they are convinced that it will cut down the total cost, especially if a nice support contract is bundled.

Often we find that a customer is actually using some tailor made system (sometimes based on OSS components). Usually the reason they are coming to us is the lack of flexibility, soaring maintenance cost of their existing software.