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$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."
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
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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 ?
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
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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.
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
"Joomla will get it"
There, fixed it for you!
AT&ROFLMAO
just to follow the same train of thought, Joomla forked a few months ago from Mambo because of licensing issues, i believe. I have used a few different CMS's over the years, and I can say that Joomla (which I currently use for 3 websites) is good but not great. The back end is a little cumbersome for my non-webnerd friends. My biggest pet-peeve is that the front end is not 100% customizable without editing code. You only have a handful of options on how the modules are displayed, but these options will be fine for the majority of people. Joomla has a large community and a large collection of "plugins" so it shouldn't be hard for anyone to get a feature rich website running quickly.
I used e107 for a while, and the one thing I liked better about e107 is that the frontend is 100% customizable. You define exactly how you want each element to be displayed, but I can see how Joomla's approach is easier for novice users. I can't remember specifically why I stopped using e107, but I do remember I was never satisfied with the "plugins".
just last night I discovered Drupal. I installed it on my webserver to try it out, and I can tell you that the installation process is nowhere near as nice an experience as Joomla's. Other than that, I can't tell you much about Drupal because it took me too long to get the thing running, but it looks very promising.
in closing, I too believe Joomla will get this award, and I think it is well deserved.
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.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
one word
LDAP
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