$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."

Comments

Parameters?

[Richard W.M. Jones]

What are the parameters for a good CMS?

Many CMSes (both open and closed source) fail on issues that really matter, like:

• Not having stupid URLs like /cms.cgi?pageid=1234
• Putting lots of <table>s in the layout rather than using semantic markup
• Putting page content too late in the page so search engines have to work harder to find it, or generally being unfriendly to robots
• Not setting page metadata usefully
• Not including accessibility features like access keys, forcing ALT text, jump to navigation
• Not providing stylesheets for different @media
• Not integrating well with analysis tools so you can see where people are coming from, what they do, whether your visitors are going up or down, are they reading the pages you think they should be reading, etc.
• Speed
• Ease of configuration (hello, Plone)
• Providing workflow which is either too difficult to set up, or too complicated to understand for the users, or over/under-kill for the requirements of the site

Rich.

Re:Parameters?

[killjoe]

You know it's interesting. People bash PHP all day long and yet people are able to make some really cool web sites with it. I am not a great fan of PHP but I have to say that wordpress, drupal, cmsmadesimple, gforge etc are all pretty amazing, mature and robust systems built by pretty smart people using this language that everybody loves to hate.

If you judge a tool by what you are able to build with it then I'd have to give some respect to PHP despite prefering ruby and python.

Re:Parameters?

[afd8856]

I dare say that it took you probably more time to write your own CMS than to properly learn Plone.

I've never met a CMS...

[onosendai]

..that I actually liked

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

.. saying that, +1 Drupal. Well designed, nice architecture, decent documentation and great user-base, the four horseman of a decent CMS.

Re:WordPress?

[Zaphod2016]

Some people consider WordPress "blogware" and not a CMS. To them I say: to-may-to, to-mah-to.

Considering the plethera of OS plugins available, I'd be hard pressed to think of something that *can't* be done using WordPress.

Re:Mambo will get it

[Linker3000]

"Joomla will get it"

There, fixed it for you!

Important Real Live CMS Features:

[wmaster]

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

Enterprise WCMS?

[dkuntze]

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

Re:Mambo will get it

[hey!]

Well, one of the main things to consider is the availability of products for a CMS platform. Mambo has an active developer community producing interesting products.

The big problem with Mambo is that the security model is too simplistic. Thus products such as DocMan have to role their own ACL system. This is bad, because a CMS should allow you to manage users orthagonally to applications that run on it.

Re:There isn't one...

[mountain_penguin]

one word
LDAP