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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?"
but you win for the best summary ever, good job... seriously, it's well written.
my site is small enough, with few enough participants that i can get by writing my own; it just provides a web frontend for editing the text files directly. this directory has the source code... if anyone is interested
In my not so humble opinion, if you want a full featured and supported open source CMS get typo3.
They have freaking instructional videos for $DEITIES sake.
Marketing page:
http://www.typo3.com/
Community pages.
http://www.typo3.org/
smeat!
"Let's not bicker about who killed who." Monty Python
As a heavy PHP Dev i'd like to note that although people might love all the CMS out there if you really want to get down dirty and know what your doing its always better to code what you need by yourself. In fact its usually better because you know exactly how it works all the loopholes / advantages and you will be able to optimize your site around it. In fact i made my own CMS called themelib with various features like dynamic plugins and static extensions so basically the cms system has all the core components any site needs and i just write extensions that plug right into it which provide the specific funtions i need for specific sites. :)
This is really only a concern if the website's for your employer or a customer or something. If it's just for you, then I'd definitely say to go with Zope/Plone. If you really want some feature you can't find elsewhere you can always (learn Python and) write it yourself.
Additionally, quite a few have a default data from the development site; you're getting a carbon copy of a site not an application. Wikis tend to be the biggest offenders. Twiki, for example, is a royal pain to configure from scratch if you want to start with a blank slate. Use the Twiki site data itself, and most of it seems to work...till you start to customize things...and it breaks again. Very annoying.
I'd treat them with a great deal of caution.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
I wonder why it returns 403 when loaded into the w3 validator? :)
I note (from reading the Zope 3 book) that Zope itself is way more general than a content management system. Here is the quote:
Of course, I've only just started poking through the documentation and so forth, but so far, Zope as a technology reminds me ASP.net, only more abstract and general.
In response to c2rtwhatever: Python is probably the easiest language I have looked at so far; a programmer who has already used other high level scripting or programming languages will find it easy to learn, even if they hate the forced indentation. This is not to say everyone should have to learn Python, but it's doable. :)
*is run over by rotten tomatoes*
Yes, PHPNuke and PostNuke both have had a bad reputation for security exploits. A better alternative is Xoops which is also a Nuke derivative but better managed and coded (not to say that it is perfect).
Of the non-Nuke portals I would say that Drupal seems to be one of the most well coded engines. Xaraya is also probably worth a look to but I have not used that one.
As someone who has been building sites based on Zope for the last 3-4 years, my personal experience is that it is extrememly powerful.
Zope Pros:
- Built in everything: Webserver, ftp, webdav, gzip, caching.
- Great products: Plone, CMF, discussions, content types.
- Everything is an object. This sounds strange, but actually lends itself to the web very very well.
- Huge, active community. Tons of examples. Tons of sites.
Zope Cons:
- Documentation, while getting better, is not at the level of other solutions.
- Python while the right choice (and better) is not as well known or supported
- Splintering of efforts in the community now. Zope X3, Zope 3, Zope 2.8, CMF 1.5, Plone. They will all come together in the next year or so, but if you are a newbie, it would be a hard choice of where to jump in (probably Zope 2.7.3, Plone 2, CMF 1.5 (included in Plone).
BZ
I've used Scoop, Drupal, and built a couple of custom lite-CMS solutions. My only experience with Wikis is installing MediaWiki. To me the biggest downside was support for inserting straight HTML.
While you can insert HTML into a Wiki entry, it isn't recommended. They want you to use the Wiki tagging language. This makes sense because the Wiki tagging is used to convey useful meta-information and separate content from presentation, but at the same time, losing the ability to use all of the functionality of HTML when entering content seems like a big trade-off.
Some of the MediaWiki developers explained that while it is easy to convert Wiki tags to HTML, it's much more difficult to convert HTML to Wiki.
I don't know that any current CMS can adequately accomplish the goals of separating content and meta-information about that content from its presentation. Storing a bunch of HTML in a database field is going to reduce the possibilities for multiple-use (e.g. non-HTML E-mail delivery, RSS and other feeds, etc.) At the same time, inserting content, including legacy content, that has already been formatted using HTML is going to be desirable by at least some users.
Drupal's ability to include not just HTML, but even PHP code within posted contents was a really powerful tool, but exacerbates this problem even more.
To me, a CMS powerful enough but easy enough to use by my company would be able to:
1- Provide a WYWYSIG editor for those who just want to add new content.
2- Allow users to cut and paste highly formatted content from (gasp!) MS-Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.
3- Allow insertion of HTML-formatted content. Given that one goal of serious CMS is to avoid storing HTML as is, this would then have to be parsed and split between content and presentation, and be able to deal with a variety of HTML standards, as well as non-standard HTML.
To me it seems like XML may provide the best hope for being able to accomplish all these goals, or they may be mutually exclusive.
If there's something out there that already does these things, pray tell...
The facts have a liberal bias. --The Daily Show
I agree with all the comments about Plone being great, if Plone existed before we started developing MKDoc then we probably wouldn't have bothered... If you like Plone but want a CMS written in Perl then check out MKDoc.
MKDoc doesn't yet have such a big community around it yet but it's only just been GPL'ed...
The PHP CMS's are great if you don't have root, if you do then the Zope, Perl and Java ones are worth checking out.
Another one that hasn't been mentioned here is Java Mir the Indymedia CMS.
Check out MKDoc a mod_perl CMS