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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?"
Take a look at Zope and/or Plone. Zope is an application server written in python. It is very, very modular and has its own object oriented database built in (ZODB).
Plone is a product on top of Zope that provides something a bit more CMS-like, offering very flexible workflows, custom object types, etc. It is easily 'skinnable' meaning with very little work you can change Plone to look very different (e.g. www.warwickshire.police.uk).
Plone uses a system called Archetypes that allows you to rapidly developed custom content types. There is a produce ArchegenXML that allows you to draw your data model in a UML editor (e.g. ArgoUML, ObjectRealms, etc.) and automatically generate the base code for you.
Some say that Plone is slow, this is relitive, as it is actually doing a lot behind the scenes, and the rapid development more than makes up for this. You can scale Zope/Plone very large -- we are helping a large bank run a Plone-based intranet for 15,000 users. It runs over a cluster of linux and solaris boxes, data is on an EMC storage array and mirrored via fibre to an identical hardware stack on the other side of the city.
-Matt