$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.

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: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.