Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

How To Choose An Open Source CMS

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the focus-on-the-problem dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Content management specialist Seth Gottlieb has written an easy to understand how-to on selecting an open source CMS. Gottlieb is also responsible for the whitepaper 'Content Management Problems and Open Source Solutions' which summarizes 15 open source projects and distinguishes between open source CMS and proprietary software selection."

4 of 191 comments (clear)

  1. Hm, an OpenSource CMS? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://www.opensourcecms.com/

    1. Re:Hm, an OpenSource CMS? by Black+Perl · · Score: 4, Informative

      While this does seem to be the obvious answer, at least in name, this site is not what people expect. It is NOT dedicated to open source, and it does not have anything other than PHP apps, some of which are not CMSes.

      If you know in advance you must be using PHP, and you're not sure whether you want a portal, CMS, weblog, etc, then this is a good site.

      However, if you have other languages in mind, or are open to a good CMS in any language, you should check other sources. One good reference site is CMS Matrix. Another good source of CMS information is CMS Watch; even though it concentrates on the entire spectrum of CMS systems (including commercial ones) it occasionally has very good articles or pointers to articles about open source products (like this one which I just found).

      --
      bp
  2. For Java Freaks by ckmajor · · Score: 4, Informative

    There are quite a few Java based open-source CMS like Magnolia (http://www.magnolia.info/en/magnolia.html), Apache Lenya (http://lenya.apache.org/ etc. An exhaustive list of Java based open-source CMS can be find here:
    http://java-source.net/open-source/content-managme nt-systems

  3. Determine Criteria Before Selecting Tool. by naelurec · · Score: 4, Informative

    A CMS by definition is a content management system. As a result, it is crucially important to determine the content you want the system to manage and how you want the system to manage the content.

    A few starter questions:

    1. What content do I have or expect to have? (web pages? documents? discussion forums? image galleries?)

    2. Where does this content come from? (departments? users? myself? Internet sources? databases? third-party apps?)

    3. How should the system manage this content? (workflows? editors? fine-grained access control?)

    4. How should this content be displayed? (xhtml/css? pdf? print/paper? cell phones? xml? rss?)

    5. How much separation of content and design do you require?

    6. How extensible should the CMS be? (in-house development? modular? out-sourced development? completely opensource?)

    7. What are the administrative requirements? (*nix? mysql/postgresql? apache? php? python?)

    8. What is the anticipated load and can the CMS manage that? (quite different from a 5,000 hits/day site vs 20,000,000 hits/day)

    9. What is the estimated lifetime of the website? What changes to the site are forseeable and should be considered?

    Assuming your doing something more than a personal blog site, most likely pre-existing workflow processes and organizational resources already exist and those should be analyzed when making a CMS choice.

    Don't get overly focused on initial setup times. The cost of administration, development and resources will far outweigh the initial setup costs on all but the smallest of sites.