Slashdot Mirror
$5000 Award for Open Source CMS
The Citizen writes "Packt Publishing has released details of an award scheme for open source Content Management Systems to enter and win a $5,000 prize. From the article: 'The Packt Open Source Content Management System Award is designed to encourage, support, recognize and reward an Open Source Content Management System (CMS) that has been selected by a panel of judges and visitors to PacktPub.com.' They're asking for people to submit nominations for their favorite open source Content Management System now."
because everybody likes Mambo. It's got a good UI but the backend frankly kinda sucks - simple things become extremely cumbersome.
WordPress is a very competent open source CMS.
I'm not a developer on the project or anything...but can I go ahead and submit Drupal :)
;)
It really is a great open source CMS...just not mine
Error 407 - No creative sig found
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Open_source_ content_management_systems
from 606! open source CMS systems to choose from
http://www.cmsmatrix.org/
dont ever think that OSS doesnt give you a choice
and choice is good right ?
The summary made it sound as if this is a bounty for producing an OSS CMS according to some criteria. But reading the award rules, this is just a popularity contest. Nominate one CMS which you think should win some money for doing nothing and the rest is up to Packt.
What CMS will they be using to manage all the information coming in from the voters? Can one consider it being a biased vote then?
why $5000?
I had to review something like a dozen of these for work last year (the technology incubator I work at went on a blogging kick and tried to pitch the idea to all of our client companies). Xoops was far and away my favorite, mostly because it was one of the only ones I could get working in under an hour. It also had an attractive layout out of the box and had modules for blogs/forums/news posts, which were essentially everything our clients had on their wishlists. Installing RedHatCMS, by comparison, is painful enough to be the subject of a Japanese game show* except the episode would have to last about three weeks.
* "HAHA! Stupid contestant, your version of Tomcat is incompatible! Your punishment is having to wipe your machine and start over!" Which would be bloody close to what kept happening in real life, too, since after you botched an install of the thing the quickest way to get the next install working without causing compatibility issues was to reinstall Linux from CD.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Many CMSes (both open and closed source) fail on issues that really matter, like:
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
..that I actually liked
.. saying that, +1 Drupal. Well designed, nice architecture, decent documentation and great user-base, the four horseman of a decent CMS.
As a professional, I've very rarely seen clients who want a CMS ever actually use them the way they're intended. They either contract back to the developer to maintain their own projects or they spiral into development hell.
To often, the idea of a CMS far outweigh's their reality, simple HTML/CSS with a few lessons in the basics of editing often end up cheaper and more effective than deploying and maintaining the cheapest OSS title
<? include ('signature.inc'); ?>
FTA: "If you're a fan of a particular CMS or if you're part of a CMS project team, then we're looking for your nominations."
What's more curious is, from the rules: "3. The five open source Content Management Systems with the most nominations will go through to the final 4. The top three will be voted for by a panel of three judges. A final fourth vote will come from the results of a public vote on www.PacktPub.com."
So it seems the number of nominations matters a lot in case of this award, which doesn't necessarily promote quality over popularity.
I also wonder if slashcode itself should be amongst the runners. Slashcode isn't really widely used for various reasons (e.g. installation, perl development, features) and it's not like if 5000$ would make any difference to slash developers (I'm wrong?). Which makes me ask what are the requisite features a CMS must have to be considered a CMS. Agreeing on some definitions would be useful for such a contest.
Animoog.org
I have been pleasently surprised by Drupal. It is very easy to manage and extend, you get tons of functionality by using well developed modules, customizing its themes is easy and it has great i18n support. Drupal lately seems to have become the favorite open source CMS on the market and thereby increasing the number of developers working on it and people who can help you out.
If it's so good, then slashdot should start using it.
I hope the contest rewards documentation! A CMS is not a simple beast, yet the systems I have examined (I remember Joomla and its predecessors, in particular) were not well documented. The best docs I could find for Joomla was some tutorial posted by a user in a phpBB forum. A great CMS isn't too useful if it can't be figured out because there are no docs.
Penny - plain text accounting
http://www.xaraya.com.
There you go!
I hope they factor in the practical flexibility of a given CMS. I've tried Drupal, Typo3, and Mambo/Joomla. With all of them, you can usually tell which CMS a site uses, e.g. a Drupal site looks like a Drupal site. This is less true for Typo3 and Mambo/Joomla, I think, but admittedly I no longer have any Drupal sites set up (just Typo3 and Mambo, as far as OSS CMS software goes).
And let's talk about average users and training. The Typo3 interface is very frustrating to most of my end-users. Mambo, on the other hand, is much simpler and more streamlined. It doesn't have quite the flexibility of Typo3, but it also doesn't require learning a whole new scripting language (TypoScript) just to get simple things done.
So, though it may be construed as n00b and insufficiently geeky for Slashdot, I'd vote for Mambo... or perhaps Joomla but I haven't upgraded yet.
Admittedly this is not exhaustive, but... all of the open source CMSs I've tried have too many "community" features that need to be disabled for use in a professional environment. This is just frustrating. Is there an OSS CMS that just focuses on kick-ass content management and doesn't care about letting users contribute stories, or running discussion forums, or the like?
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
I have a project I'm working on and need a Perl based CMS.
Basically, my problem is:
I have a bunch of Perl scripts that do various things. I need to be able to control access to those scripts to registered (paying) users and I need to be able to pass some kind of userID to my Perl scripts so that what one user does is separated from what another user does - and so they can maintain their own data.
The system needs to be able to display a bunch of HTML forms so the users can select options to feed to the scripts, and then display both text and graphical results.
My scripts are pretty flexible, all built in Perl and very easy for me to maintain. I don't really want to bother writing and maintaining my own web gui, user management, advertising management, user account management system. I figured a CMS would do the job.
Also, on this site, I'd like to be able to house a bunch of articles, but I'm pretty sure all the CMS options can handle that.
I'm tinkering with WebGUI, Scoop and Twiki at the moment to see if they might fit the bill. Does Slashdot have any other suggestions for me? Is there a Perl CMS guru out there who can help?
Thanks!
I nominated e107, for being the coolest usable CMS not many people
know about.
...the one you write specifically for the project you're working on. It has all the features you need, doesn't have all the bloat of the stuff you don't need, and is easily tailorable to the usecases required in your spec.
Bob
Listen to my latest album here
For a light weight PHP-based (ugh, I know, but every hosting service supports it and it's really easy to whip up plug-ins) wiki, it's hard to beat PMWiki. Their default template is XHTML too, which is nice.
If there's a security issue, you need to upgrade. So I would put ease of upgrade first on the list. Dumped drupal after a failed upgrade. Of course, the fact that it was overkill for my needs helped a lot in that decision.
eZ Publish, it's difficult to learn, and don't have a lot of bling bling included.
But it's one of the moste powerful cms / cmf out there, so you don't need to hack the code to get things done.
Cripes. What more do you need?
I hope they require it to work adequately in a high-performance clustered environment in order to win the prize. Every open source CMS I've worked with falls apart in such environments. Moveable Type, for example, requires some nasty rsyncing, generates several times as much backend traffic as it does front-end traffic and won't perform its read-only actions against a separate replica database server. Its performance blows chunks.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
I went through a bunch of these for a client last year and disliked Magnolia least.
That said I ended up implementing my own - none of the CMS systems I looked at actually did what I wanted and customising the open source actually looked harder than writing my own.
because it is the basis of some of the most popular websites in the world.
> To often, the idea of a CMS far outweigh's their reality, simple HTML/CSS with
> a few lessons in the basics of editing often end up cheaper and more
> effective than deploying and maintaining the cheapest OSS title
We've got an OSS CMS installation within our university that's publishing 480 sites comprising 80,000 pages developed and maintained by 1,200 staff - about 23% of whom are employed in non-IT roles.
Mileage clearly varies.
Cheers
Grant
I'd love to nominate this CMS but the author
has kept it anonymous!
From that page:
"It didn't take too long for Bryan to figure it out. Being a Web 2.0 system, the CMS used JavaScript that dynamically loaded JavaScript that dynamically loaded XML that was dynamically transformed into proprietary commands that were parsed to dynamically execute JavaScript to dynamically load content."
For the last two years, I've been looking for a Unified Content Management System (I've even tried to submit questions about finding one to ask.slashdot.org but they've been rejected). The specifics of our site is that we need a News Blog which supports user comments and slashdot style moderation, a discussion forum, a wiki, an events calendar, email lists management, and a shopping cart/e-commerce software. All of this needs to have a unified login and unified graphical design. So far we're forced to use MoveableType (which lacks the slashdot style moderation and user submitted stories and has a really awful comment system), Ikonboard (which last time I check had ceased to be published due to some legal issues between the developers), MediaWiki (which has some serious performance problems), PHPCalendar (which works great but is difficult to fix the graphic design), mailman (which also works great but again is difficult to fix the graphic design), a home grown shopping cart (which really isn't very good). All of these have their own login system and graphic design issues. It looks like there are 6 different sites on our 1 site. Of course there is no chance of getting any kind of workflow set up for proper approval of visitor submitted information or for monitoring the editors by an admin.
The closest I've come to something that is a Unified Content Management System is Drupal. However, it lacks the slashdot style moderation. It also seems overly complex to install, setup, and admin. Finally the biggest problem is that all of its pages are dynamically generated. If they would use static html pages like MoveableType it would dramatically reduce the server load and we'd scrap most everything in favor of drupal.
I've done the CMS gamut and Textpattern takes the cake.
:) I'll be the 1st to admit there's room for improvement, but it's a partially a function of the core developers' antibloat that I so appreciate.
Relatively simple, totally customizable, great plugin system and a wonderful development community. All of the web essentials out of the box and nothing more.
It passes every litmus test a poster mentioned earlier, including the easy-to-install.
1) Real multilingual Support for all modules/themes/blocks - at least the core system must provide that out of the box
;-)
While most CMS system work well in monolingual environments, the real challenge is the multilingual use. That starts with correct browser language detection, goes further with solving the character set complications for output & input, continues with taking care for multilingual people, and finally ends at providing a choice of language in case of not translated parts. Most CMS I came around are sumb English centered and don't care for more.
2) A serious and configurable caching system that enables the webmaster to react to traffic and load related problems
Most CMS are designed with small low traffic sites in mind. That's ok, but some of the fortunately grow. Unfortunately you're mostly alone then. Reacting to a Slashdot (well, that's how I learned to tweak sites for traffic peaks), or a download rush, or accidentially all search engines crawl your site the same time - all that happens and needs solutions.
3) Security features that integrate with corporate policies
That's where almost all of them fail - but actually it'S not that complicated to use LDAP, SSH, SSL for log-in processes.
4) A theming engine that encourages designers' creativity
While all CMS provide a browser bases interface to edit themes (do you know a good designer who really works that way?), most of them fail when it comes to providing API and documentation a designer person would understand.
I definitely forgot to mention other important features - those are just the first coming in my mind. While working with several different CMS systems every day, I feel most comfortable with the mix of features PostNuke http://postnuke.com/ provides. It is far from perfect, but at least provides a good portion of the features I mentioned above.
Ah, did I mention interoperability/compatibility between CMS systems?
Greetings, Chris
"An operating system must operate."
The problem is there is too many applications out there that call themselves Content Management Systems. They really need to be reclassified to reflect their capabilities, etc... I'm more partial to enterprise-grade content management. There are a couple of open source apps, in my mind, that could apply: www.alfresco.com -- managed by a group of ex documentum and Interwoven people. www.opencms.com
Without having to install.
http://www.opensourcecms.com/
Surprised nobody has mentioned that site yet. You get to try them as demos which are reset every two hours or so.
Enterprise-grade functionality. Many mega-companies like Dassault Systemes in France and Volkswagon in Germany use it. Very powerful, very flexible and very complex. If you like Firefox because of extensions then typo3's (thousands) of extensions will appeal to you.
It's very popular in Europe and is getting some legs here in the US. Check it out at http://typo3.org
Sky[blog,doc,events,talk,pages] is the total solution.
Don't know why it doesn't get more notice in the
open source community?
http://www.skybuilders.com/Products/open_source/
Since we're on the topic: Does anyone know of a CMS that does CMS-y things, but renders out to static pages that can be uploaded to any host?
I'm interested in the management features and such, but I don't want dynamic stuff on the server.
I am aware of the multitude of template libraries for all kinds of languages, and I've been piecing one together based on that, although it'll never be useful for anyone else. I was just curious if there was anybody who already filled this niche. If it's out there I can't find the Google keywords to find it, and there's too many now to try to wade through, especially for a feature that they are likely to mumble about in passing (as opposed to trumpeting on the front page).
Actually, it's worse than slave labor. A slave master has to feed and clothe his slaves, and keep a roof over their heads.
In the real world, an enterprise-worthy CMS might cost easily several million in upfront R&D [anywhere from 10 to 50 man-years worth of labor, just to get to the "alpha" stage, with a total compensation package of easily $200,000 per man per year], and that's before you start regression testing and then moving to something you might call a "beta" version.
$5,000 is roughly what one contract programmer would cost for a WEEK. A week isn't even enough time to start making your stupid little "object note cards" [yeah, I'm dating myself]. Hell, a week isn't even enough time to start drawing stupid pictures on the whiteboard with the dry-erase markers.
Wake up people - you're being had. These corporations want FOSS out of you SO THAT THEY WON'T HAVE TO PAY YOU WHAT YOU DESERVE!!!
But seriously - anyone who falls for this con job deserves to be had.
Does anyone think that security is an issue? Some of the OSS CMS out there are truly scary in this respect.
Virtually serving coffee
Why do they need to know my name and email to submit a nomination? Why can't it be simple like a Slashdot poll?
I played around with about 10 or 11 CMS systems last year. The only one that had
all of the features, good community support, and actually installed and worked fairly straight forward was Xoops. Nothing else even came close or was in the same ballbark.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Since we're on the topic: Does anyone know of a CMS that does CMS-y things, but renders out to static pages that can be uploaded to any host?
Typo3 can switch to static documents very easyly. Joomla needs a little tweaking, iirc. As far as I know most of the current OSS CMS support generation of static content. It's the easyiest way to enable a cheap and easy means of caching.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
You're absolutely correct. Most open source developers don't give any thought about calling their scripts "CMS", and have probably never bothered to read even the Wikipedia entry on this term. Most of the scripts out there are just plain old "Portal systems" (better code, but mostly just PhpNuke remakes) or just editorial scripts which don't do much beyond grouping uploaded HTML into virtual filesystems and generating menus from it. Most of the so called PHP "CMSes" don't even qualify as WebCMS, due to lack of a real database abstraction (hint: a simple SQL function API wrapper isn't the same). It's the same with kiddie discussion board developers not understanding the difference to forum software with real discussion trees.
However, I guess we have to put up with our developers egos (for calling everything "CMS") and NIH syndrome (not reusing better code, even though EVERYBODY uses the GNU GPL these days). OTH this gives us users a huge collection of functional (even if with quirky code) Web site management backends. And services like opensourcecms at least make an informed choice possible.
So it seems the number of nominations matters a lot in case of this award, which doesn't necessarily promote quality over popularity.
50,000,000 Elvis fans can't be wrong.
And the only one that does it properly, IMHO, is http://www.exponentcms.org/,
Staging and editorial control all work properly unlike all of the others that I've tried that do staging in any way where once a page is OK'd: then any changes are automatically OK'd.
I vote for git.
Try Bricolage.
Hands down the best open source content management system out there is "eZ Publish".
In the past I've used Textpattern, Mambo, Joomla, Etomite, Typo3, Sharepoint, and a few others, and eZ Publish dominates them all.
It is a real *content* management system - not article management (with title, body text, etc.). You can set up different content classes with your own editable fields and customize various views for displaying the information.
What I find amazing is that the entire back-end administration is built using the same API and template language that you'd use to build the front end. The administration is really just a different "view".
It does have a steep learning curve, but I doubt you'd find anything else as flexible, robust, secure, and stable.
Check it out here: http://ez.no/products/ez_publish
What about using Drupal with Postgresql backends syched using Slony?
The sums involved here are so small that it doesn't make any difference in terms of compensating any development effort.
So, the story amounts to somebody wanting to bring attention to Open Source CMSes, and the fact that there's ANY MONEY INVOLVED AT ALL, is enough to attract attention in the Open Source world.
Doesn't this seem sad to anyone else?
Without defining what a CMS is, this is like saying, "We'd like to give some Open Source project that does something with websites $5k".
Defining what a CMS is is not an easy job. Wikipedia doesn't even have a good definition. The best you can hope for to define one as a set of features, and any system that can do those features, is, for your definition of a CMS.
Synergiser (http://synergiser.symcube.com/) is rather immature but shows promise - and doesn't need fancy SQL or anything like that, just a webserver with apache, unzip and php.
I use to work at Enron. My favourite CMS is "rm".