Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
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
Open Source CMS
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.
Mainly dealt with the blogging engines here, since most of the sites are content-driven without the need for many additional modules.
MovableType - fast to setup, easy to deploy, live community with hacks and what not around it, but since the move to the paid distro in 3.0 the activity died off a little bit. Never upgraded to the paid version, couldn't justify the license money with WordPress having so many similar features. It's a Perl+MySQL or Perl+flat file set up, so theoretically nothing more than cgi-bin is required.
Which brings us to WordPress - extensible, lively community, very easy to install and setup. The engine itself is a bit immature at this point for some advanced stuff, but if you know PHP, you'll find your way around it. Has a link manager and mass edit for comments (very useful for spam treatment), extensible as far as design, not too modular though.
pMachine - easy to set up, easy to use, but not too flexible. Coded in PHP and uses MySQL, many tweaks available, but limited functionality for the free version. The authors have since moved on to a different project, Expression Engine, and the community is a bit abandoned.
The above links are going to my sites which run the said engines, not the engines themselves, a simple google search would take you to download pages for the engines.
Just my two cents on the subject.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Hi,
... no idea.
... We'll again what do you want? If you want a community portal Drupal and PostNuke are popular. If it's a small content based portal then I'd have to same mambo is the best. But if you're going for a larger installation then I'd recommend Type3 or Phone.
All of the above execpt Phone can be checked out at opensourcecms. As for php vs perl. We'll php is so much easier to install because most of the perl ones require CPAN packages which users don't have the right to install on most hosting servers. On the other hand some servers on support perl so it's really up to you. If your not planning on changing it the lanuage is very important.
Here's a quick summary.
First of all you can check out a live version of almost all of the CMS at opensourcecms. This is a very good place to start.
First of all what do you want?
The main types are:
* Portals - Think slashdot + forum + gallery etc. * Wiki - Think wikipedia
* Blogs - Need I say more.
* Groupware - Think Sourceforge.
For wikis the main one I like are:
* PmWiki for an easy to install persoanl wiki.
* Media Wiki for a large company wiki.
I don't do blogs so
I've tried a couple but none of them have really worked yet in my projects.
Portals
Slashcode produces horribly mangled non-standards-compliant HTML (and it claims to be HTML 3.2). Consider something else besides it. :)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
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?
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.
(\(\
(^.^)
(")")
*This is the cute bunny virus, please copy this into your sig so it can spread
It's a freaking security nightmare.
Once you get on the defacement lists, expect to get hit with every new 'sploit as soon as they're out. Francisco Burzi may be a nice guy, but he doesn't know shit about coding secure PHP. If you're going to run it, you'll at least need one of the secure releases or better yet...
Use drupal. Very solid, safe, secure and easily configurable. The toughest bit is figuring out taxonomy or categories that the various entries (blogs, forum topics, stories, etc.) adhere to. These things are all 'nodes', btw. But once you have your categories down, you're done.
You can even search for a script to do the conversion from phpNuke to drupal, and no drupal doesn't require any special directories. Give it a whirl.
And if folks are whoring sites, then I'll whore mine.
Brew-Masters
I have the throttle hooked up, so hopefully it won't get slashdotted, but then it doesn't look like this thread is getting a lot of comments.
The opposite of progress is congress
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.
- who your content-providers are and their technology strengths (and tolerance levels!!)
- who your end-user community is and how "involved" they will be in the site (forums? community-driven content? story submission?
...) [don't get caught in the "needed feature" vs. "cool factor" trap!]
- who your admins are and their technical strengths/weaknesses (are these the same people who will be configuring the system? are they coders or do they only work from white-books and red-books ?, etc...)
- how much time is devoted to adminstration of the system?
- a single look-and-feel template for the whole site or different sections get their own template(s)?
- do you want to separate development, test and production?
- how much time is devoted to enhancing the system?
- what skillsets are available for enhancing the system?
Once we listed out these, we found that a number of the CMSes I see people talking about here fell off our list.We don't want to have users "logging in" to our company website. We don't need/want forums/blogs/galleries. We need a simple-to-use content-provider interface for people with little-to-no webskills. We want separate servers for development, testing and production. We have a very skilled set of admins, but they don't want to be tweaking the system every day.
Based on our evaluation period, we believe we are going forward with Bricolage. It is not an easy system to get into, but its power and flexibility is fantastic and it has a fairly supportive community.
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.
Jilles