While it only has php CMS it is a good place to start. This site has a demo of most of the CMS out there. You can try them and then a couple of hours later they will all be reset.
Here are my recomendations: *Mambo - If you are trying to create a website. *phpNuke (etc) - If you want a community site. *Typo3, Phone(python) - If you have a larger site that needs more management, mulitple departments etc.
Someone else has already stated it but I'll say it again: * Contracts are 2 ways. You are allowed to change them. Cross out what you don't like and sign and date the changes. At the end you both sign the new contract. * It's generally easier to add a clause then take one away. * If it is just a friendly contract the boss won't have a problem with your changes. * Turn the contract around instead of the boss asking you why you won't sign it ask him to justify the points you have a problem with. * You can also write up a counter contract and ammend the original contract to refer to the additional contract. Eg you have a contract with the boss that says there will always be free coffee, you will always get more than 20 hous of work per week, etc. If this contract is broken it also frees you of the former contract.
Generally once you're able to get the boss in your shoes and ask him if he'd agree to similar terms he will be reasonable. Also I've generally found it's easier to add conditions that make something toothless than crossing it out.
Eg.
* I cannot use a (work supplied) computer for two years after I leave. * The contract never expires. (For the duration of my employment) * Anything I do on my computer, at my own home, on my time, belongs to the company. (As long as it is linked to a project at work) * If I get another job on a computer, I have to notify them (for the first year), and the company has a right to send my new employer a copy of the contract (after notifying you beforehand in writing, failure to notify you beforehand will result in the termination of this contract).
As you can see this doesn't cross anything out but makes them almost meaningless.
It all depends on how big the projects are. If you want something between notepad and say wordpad then you shouldn't have a problem. If you want something like more complicated (a project that will take more than a month) then it is fairly complicated and it will be easier if you are in the same room.
My Dad sells stuff on line and a few of his products are things that people have asked for that only cost $200 from a freelancer then he has sold about 20 copies and made the money back.
That being said his main product took about 6 months to make and other people keep on asking for resale rights (he does commission). He says no and they chuck a fit saying we'll just get a freelancer to make it and wipe you off the market. They get freelancers and say copy this. They always fail because 80% of the product is the little things that are done automatically to make it nice and easy to use.
Now there are also a couple of things to watch out for: * Lots of freelancers don't care about copyright. They use other projects in your and your in other projects. * Start of with a small contact and if your happy then get the same person to do the bigger one. * Freelancers come and go. They might not be interested next time. * Use an escrow service the first few times. It good for them and for you.
This site was great when I started reviewing CMS. Basically it nukes the demos every 2 hours (so people can't stuff them up to much) and allows you to do almost anything with them.
From what you've described you may want groupware more than CMS.
My favourite simple CMS is Mambo but that's just me.
What we ended up using was reuseable cable ties. Looks like a cable tie but on one side there is a leaver that pulls up so you can pull the cable back out.
WindowsXP has a much lower administrative cost than Windows 98. I think everyone will agree with that. As for WindowsXP vs Linux it's got more to do with the setup and use than anything else.
If you lock both workstations down and have software deployment they are both about the same.
If you've got unlocked workstations that people can do anything with then I'd agree that Linux would cost more (It's less restrictive and gives the user more power).
The thing is these are Thin clients which has always been better than thick clients when you can use them (not useable for things like CAD, 3D games, slow networks, number crunching, etc) Clients cost ~ $500 instead of $2000 (I know you can get cheaper computers but humour me). They have no moving parts so they last about 10 years. They don't need to be upgraded because the work is done server side. With the money you've saved on the client you can afford to get server quality servers. Upgrading software is on a single computer (or on a small cluster of computers) and depending on the program can sometimes be done live.
If someone is running it the old code is already in memory stays there until they quite and then loads the new code. Doesn't work if they config files change or if it changes core libraries.
Windows has Terminal Services which provide a similar function.
It won't really work.
If a parent, spouse, brother, friend is paying for the account then the name won't match up in the first place. If they banned everyone where the name didn't match up. You'd have more problems.
There's one big difference between Linux and Windows/Mac OSX that most people seem to ignore. There is now single leader. Currently Microsoft is largely dirrected by Bill Gates and Steve balmer and Apple is run by Steve Jobs.
While I know they are supposed to just be figure heads look at what happened to Apple when Steve left? It ended up being run by bean counters who wouldn't take risks.
Linux would be put back by maybe one or two years if Linus died but it's setup like terrorist cells. Each tree can work independantly of each other. Currently you have the MM tree and and the AC tree as well as the Linus tree. It would take a while for someone else to eventually become standard tree work would continue in the other trees.
Without Steve, Apple has no vision*. Without Bill and Steve Microsoft has no vision*. Linux has a fragmented vision which is why even if you lose the core people it would still function.
In 10... 20... 50... years what will happen? The problem I see is that I don't think these campanies will be able to survive the founders. Eventually I expect they'll both become more like Cisco or CA or IBM. Just another faceless IT company that get's most of their improvements through buyouts and intergration.
* The problem isn't that people don't have vision but rather that the people with the power don't have vision and the people with vision don't have power.
Probably not the answer your looking for but at my last job (a failed startup) one of the other developers set up a perl script in XMMS(if I remeber correctly). Basically XMMS allows you to point your playlist to a script. This then played for X minutes then added something.
We used text to speach and got it to say the time or read a fortune. It was fun. The only problem we had was the pause between songs which took us a while to fix.
wxWidgets has binding for numerous languages and is under a license like the LGPL (see the home page). Anyway if you want to support multiple platforms try it out. There lots of applications use it already.
It doesn't quite have the scope of QT which from my understanding includes ALOT of extra functionality that isn't just GUI based.
Your logic doesn't make sense though. If the market is small they the product should/will be expensive (cost to develop ~ $1000 with 5 customers you'd need to charge $2200 to make a 10% ROI with 500 customers you can charge $22 and still make the same ROI - excluding support).
That was the DOS/Shrinkwrap revolution. Other companies at the time tried to sell the OS for $10,000 + because that's how long it took them to make it.
Even if wxWidgets didn't exists there would still be Java, TCL, Motiff etc. The fact is QT is very nice and worth the cost if your in that area.
2 of the three I recommend have already been mentioned. RT and Fogbugz.
The last one is Cerberus Help Desk which is what we picked in the end. It's not free but it is low cost. Basically it's designed for help desk work instead of the more generic request tracking.
What does that mean? Well you can:
*Say how long it took to handel an email
*Assign billable time
*Create Service level Agreements
*Look at about 15 different built in reports
*use the knowledge base build in.
*Teach it's fuzzy logic engine that looks up knowledge base articales based on the content of the email.
*Setup Mutliple groups which can't see each others tickets based.
*Add custom feilds
The interesting thing in this case is that it wasn't paid for by "THE PEOPLE" it was paid for by another country.
If by patenting it they can allocate more grant money in "THEIR" own country instead of the country were the patent was registered it will be better for "THEIR PEOPLE".
I guest it all depend of weither you talk about poeple in the global state (in which case this is bad but people in america lose jobs to people in India is good because it raises the average standard of living globaly) or in the regional state (then losing jobs to another country is bad but this is good)
Also how about another scenario, by patenting technology governments can increase the amount of money they can give out from Grants without increasing taxes. This would result in more technology (Grants generally focus on long term research whereas companys generally forcus on ROI - short term) with less of a burden on the general population and would only affect people who used the new technology.
No what you asked for dirrectly but this is what we've been using to do something similar. This will tell you everything that's installed on the machine. What hardware it has, BOIS, free space etc. All in about 10 sseconds. After that is has sections for fixes, comments, changes etc.
We looked at getting just ticket tracking (which is basically what your wanting) and realised we wanted inventory tracking more.
What we are looking forward to is OCS Inventory is planning to work with the GLPI project so you want use the OCS Inventory backend and use and extended OCS Inventory + GLPI front end.
If your mainly wanting ticket tracking about hardware you may be more interested in GLPI which I talked about before.
If you want to make it easy I'd recommend Torque from GarageGames. It has greate documentation, lots of premade widgets, it's also finished and being used for a number of games. Mainly it has the polish that makes working with it enjoyable. (Tutorials, prebuild samples, etc) Not open source but has a similar community
Someone else has already recommened Crystal Space. If your looking for an example of an MMORG check out PlaneShift.
Another engine that I've been impressed with is ORGE
Anyway as I stated at the begining if you are trying to get something done ASAP go with Torque it has a lot more support. On the other hand if you want something free try Crystal Space or ORGE. One last project you might find interesting is WorldForge they have been building MMORG for a while now. They still haven't finished anything but it's more like a backend and might be useful.
You forgot the 3rd and 4th way which are catching on.
3rd. Charge a subscription for updates. Doesn't work for shrink wrap but for enterprise software it's great. Sure you can get the patches from other sources (CentOS etc) but if your a big company you can't afford the risk. (This is actually what RedHat is doing)
There is no way you'd be able to add a clause to a license so that they can't license it as something else if they are the original owner. After all they own the copyright and are able to liceense it to anyone else under any license they like (the GPL being one of them)
What you can do is get a contract signed in writting. This is similar to what FSF does when copyright is signed over to it. While it gets the copyright it enters into a contract with the original owner basically saying that it can't be relicensed.
The problem is that IT DOESN'T work. It work for you and it work on smaller projects but the problem he had with the other SCM was that they were to slow. You could probably run Windows XP with office XP on a Pentium 3 100MHz and 128 Ram but very few people would go so far as to say that it works.
If it takes you a couple of hours to merge code or to do a commit then something's not working.
That being said it doesn't mean that it can't be fixed but at what expense? Turning a generaic SCM into a tool tuned just for kernal development.
The thing that get's me is that people have knowing this for ages and only now are trying to fix it. I reviewed allot of SCM about 6 months ago and back then they had flaws but they weren't being fixed.
Where I live contracts can be changes as long as you both sign them off. You don't like the "We own everything you've ever made" clause then cross it out. Have problems with the won't "work for any company that we think is a compeditor" change it to "won't work for any company in appendix a" which means they have to give you a list of who they don't want you to work for.
The important thing is that you both sign it off and both keep a copy. Unless it's a really uptight company they won't have a problem with it.
It's not that simple. While the GPL may take precedence the company OWNS all the code Daimaou wrote WHILE he was at the company. He still owns what he wrote beforehand and has the right to license it to his company however he see's fit. If they don't want a license he can sue then for copywrite infrindgement BUT he'll have to prove that he wrote it before he started working there and that his contract doesn't say anything about prior work he brought in.
Anyway because IT'S their code they have the option of ripping out the GPL code and stop selling the product till they rewrite that code. The GPL is a license if you choose not to abide by it then you can't use it. You don't give up your ownership of the code you just give others license to use your code.
You don't want users to be able to install software.
Realise that a plugin is software. If you can't install the plugin that pulls the RSS feed then you also can install a bad plugin that strips email addresses out of webpages and sends those users spam.
If your installing and uninstalling software constanly then you ARE and admin (or doing admin work). You only want an admin to be able to install plugins as they affect every user on the machine.
That being said in windows if you wanted to install a plugin then just run firefox as administrator while your installing it.
Hold down + and right click on the icon on the desktop. There will be a new option called "Run As" this means you can run it as administrator to install the plugin then close it and reopen it as a limited user.
Does this mean more work? YES. That's why most users run as administrator
You can put CPAN maduales in your own dirrectory and it's "easy as" if you have remote access. Them problem is that because CPAN is so easy to use on your own server lots of projects use it (after all why wouldn't they) which is good BUT here's a problem I've had in the past.
I go to install a CGI (90% of which are perfectly fine) script and it requires a package. Fine lets use CPAN... opps no shell accesses. Hmm I'll download it from perl then uload it. Wait part of it needs to be compiled file I'll compile it... what do I need to compile it against? What is my hosting company running.
By the time you've got this far it's over for most people.
You can have the same problems with PHP if they don't have GD or XML or what ever else compiled in but in the past it's been less of a problem.
As for saying it's a great place to start. I stand by what I said. If you want a place where you can check out allot (not all but allot) of open source cms (and some that aren't) in a single location where you have access to the admin side as well as the user side then that's the site to go to.
The biggest problem I have with your post is that your complain about my recomendation and then fail to make one of your own.
First of all you can check out a live version of almost all of the CMS at opensourcecms. This is a very good place to start.
First of all what do you want?
The main types are:
* Portals - Think slashdot + forum + gallery etc.
* Wiki - Think wikipedia
* Blogs - Need I say more.
* Groupware - Think Sourceforge.
For wikis the main one I like are:
* PmWiki for an easy to install persoanl wiki.
* Media Wiki for a large company wiki.
I don't do blogs so... no idea.
I've tried a couple but none of them have really worked yet in my projects.
Portals... We'll again what do you want? If you want a community portal Drupal and PostNuke are popular. If it's a small content based portal then I'd have to same mambo is the best. But if you're going for a larger installation then I'd recommend Type3 or Phone.
All of the above execpt Phone can be checked out at opensourcecms. As for php vs perl. We'll php is so much easier to install because most of the perl ones require CPAN packages which users don't have the right to install on most hosting servers. On the other hand some servers on support perl so it's really up to you. If your not planning on changing it the lanuage is very important.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.opensourcecms.com/
While it only has php CMS it is a good place to start. This site has a demo of most of the CMS out there. You can try them and then a couple of hours later they will all be reset.
Here are my recomendations:
*Mambo - If you are trying to create a website.
*phpNuke (etc) - If you want a community site.
*Typo3, Phone(python) - If you have a larger site that needs more management, mulitple departments etc.
I had a similar expeince recently.
Someone else has already stated it but I'll say it again:
* Contracts are 2 ways. You are allowed to change them. Cross out what you don't like and sign and date the changes. At the end you both sign the new contract.
* It's generally easier to add a clause then take one away.
* If it is just a friendly contract the boss won't have a problem with your changes.
* Turn the contract around instead of the boss asking you why you won't sign it ask him to justify the points you have a problem with.
* You can also write up a counter contract and ammend the original contract to refer to the additional contract. Eg you have a contract with the boss that says there will always be free coffee, you will always get more than 20 hous of work per week, etc. If this contract is broken it also frees you of the former contract.
Generally once you're able to get the boss in your shoes and ask him if he'd agree to similar terms he will be reasonable. Also I've generally found it's easier to add conditions that make something toothless than crossing it out.
Eg.
* I cannot use a (work supplied) computer for two years after I leave.
* The contract never expires. (For the duration of my employment)
* Anything I do on my computer, at my own home, on my time, belongs to the company. (As long as it is linked to a project at work)
* If I get another job on a computer, I have to notify them (for the first year), and the company has a right to send my new employer a copy of the contract (after notifying you beforehand in writing, failure to notify you beforehand will result in the termination of this contract).
As you can see this doesn't cross anything out but makes them almost meaningless.
It all depends on how big the projects are. If you want something between notepad and say wordpad then you shouldn't have a problem. If you want something like more complicated (a project that will take more than a month) then it is fairly complicated and it will be easier if you are in the same room.
My Dad sells stuff on line and a few of his products are things that people have asked for that only cost $200 from a freelancer then he has sold about 20 copies and made the money back.
That being said his main product took about 6 months to make and other people keep on asking for resale rights (he does commission). He says no and they chuck a fit saying we'll just get a freelancer to make it and wipe you off the market. They get freelancers and say copy this. They always fail because 80% of the product is the little things that are done automatically to make it nice and easy to use.
Now there are also a couple of things to watch out for:
* Lots of freelancers don't care about copyright. They use other projects in your and your in other projects.
* Start of with a small contact and if your happy then get the same person to do the bigger one.
* Freelancers come and go. They might not be interested next time.
* Use an escrow service the first few times. It good for them and for you.
This site was great when I started reviewing CMS. Basically it nukes the demos every 2 hours (so people can't stuff them up to much) and allows you to do almost anything with them.
From what you've described you may want groupware more than CMS.
My favourite simple CMS is Mambo but that's just me.
http://www.opensourcecms.com/
If I was stating from scratch I go wireless. No or very few calbe to take care of and it should be fast enough.
f ault.mspx
Also I'd recommend getting a preconfigured server.
If you want Linux then there is
*SME - http://contribs.org/
*ClarkConnect - http://www.clarkconnect.com/
Both have a free version. Basically they wrap everything to together with a web interface. Things are bolted on as plugins.
Or if you want to go the Microsoft way there is
*SBS - http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/sbs/de
Anyway those are my recommendations.
What we ended up using was reuseable cable ties. Looks like a cable tie but on one side there is a leaver that pulls up so you can pull the cable back out.
Velcro is ok but we found it to bulky.
WindowsXP has a much lower administrative cost than Windows 98. I think everyone will agree with that. As for WindowsXP vs Linux it's got more to do with the setup and use than anything else.
If you lock both workstations down and have software deployment they are both about the same.
If you've got unlocked workstations that people can do anything with then I'd agree that Linux would cost more (It's less restrictive and gives the user more power).
The thing is these are Thin clients which has always been better than thick clients when you can use them (not useable for things like CAD, 3D games, slow networks, number crunching, etc) Clients cost ~ $500 instead of $2000 (I know you can get cheaper computers but humour me). They have no moving parts so they last about 10 years. They don't need to be upgraded because the work is done server side. With the money you've saved on the client you can afford to get server quality servers. Upgrading software is on a single computer (or on a small cluster of computers) and depending on the program can sometimes be done live.
If someone is running it the old code is already in memory stays there until they quite and then loads the new code. Doesn't work if they config files change or if it changes core libraries.
Windows has Terminal Services which provide a similar function.
It won't really work. If a parent, spouse, brother, friend is paying for the account then the name won't match up in the first place. If they banned everyone where the name didn't match up. You'd have more problems.
There's one big difference between Linux and Windows/Mac OSX that most people seem to ignore. There is now single leader. Currently Microsoft is largely dirrected by Bill Gates and Steve balmer and Apple is run by Steve Jobs.
... 20 ... 50 ... years what will happen? The problem I see is that I don't think these campanies will be able to survive the founders. Eventually I expect they'll both become more like Cisco or CA or IBM. Just another faceless IT company that get's most of their improvements through buyouts and intergration.
While I know they are supposed to just be figure heads look at what happened to Apple when Steve left? It ended up being run by bean counters who wouldn't take risks.
Linux would be put back by maybe one or two years if Linus died but it's setup like terrorist cells. Each tree can work independantly of each other. Currently you have the MM tree and and the AC tree as well as the Linus tree. It would take a while for someone else to eventually become standard tree work would continue in the other trees.
Without Steve, Apple has no vision*. Without Bill and Steve Microsoft has no vision*. Linux has a fragmented vision which is why even if you lose the core people it would still function.
In 10
* The problem isn't that people don't have vision but rather that the people with the power don't have vision and the people with vision don't have power.
Asheron's Call did something like this. Basically the more people that used a spell the weeker it became.
It 1000 people used ICE and 1 person used fire then the fire spell would become more powerfull.
Since they added more spells and you had to figure them out by mixing stuff together it worked fairly well.
Probably not the answer your looking for but at my last job (a failed startup) one of the other developers set up a perl script in XMMS(if I remeber correctly). Basically XMMS allows you to point your playlist to a script. This then played for X minutes then added something.
We used text to speach and got it to say the time or read a fortune. It was fun. The only problem we had was the pause between songs which took us a while to fix.
Ask and you shall receive.
wxWidgets has binding for numerous languages and is under a license like the LGPL (see the home page). Anyway if you want to support multiple platforms try it out. There lots of applications use it already.
It doesn't quite have the scope of QT which from my understanding includes ALOT of extra functionality that isn't just GUI based.
Your logic doesn't make sense though. If the market is small they the product should/will be expensive (cost to develop ~ $1000 with 5 customers you'd need to charge $2200 to make a 10% ROI with 500 customers you can charge $22 and still make the same ROI - excluding support).
That was the DOS/Shrinkwrap revolution. Other companies at the time tried to sell the OS for $10,000 + because that's how long it took them to make it.
Even if wxWidgets didn't exists there would still be Java, TCL, Motiff etc. The fact is QT is very nice and worth the cost if your in that area.
2 of the three I recommend have already been mentioned. RT and Fogbugz.
The last one is Cerberus Help Desk which is what we picked in the end. It's not free but it is low cost. Basically it's designed for help desk work instead of the more generic request tracking.
What does that mean? Well you can:
*Say how long it took to handel an email
*Assign billable time
*Create Service level Agreements
*Look at about 15 different built in reports
*use the knowledge base build in.
*Teach it's fuzzy logic engine that looks up knowledge base articales based on the content of the email.
*Setup Mutliple groups which can't see each others tickets based.
*Add custom feilds
So far I've been very impressed with it.
The interesting thing in this case is that it wasn't paid for by "THE PEOPLE" it was paid for by another country.
If by patenting it they can allocate more grant money in "THEIR" own country instead of the country were the patent was registered it will be better for "THEIR PEOPLE".
I guest it all depend of weither you talk about poeple in the global state (in which case this is bad but people in america lose jobs to people in India is good because it raises the average standard of living globaly) or in the regional state (then losing jobs to another country is bad but this is good)
Also how about another scenario, by patenting technology governments can increase the amount of money they can give out from Grants without increasing taxes. This would result in more technology (Grants generally focus on long term research whereas companys generally forcus on ROI - short term) with less of a burden on the general population and would only affect people who used the new technology.
OCS Inventory
No what you asked for dirrectly but this is what we've been using to do something similar. This will tell you everything that's installed on the machine. What hardware it has, BOIS, free space etc. All in about 10 sseconds. After that is has sections for fixes, comments, changes etc.
We looked at getting just ticket tracking (which is basically what your wanting) and realised we wanted inventory tracking more.
What we are looking forward to is OCS Inventory is planning to work with the GLPI project so you want use the OCS Inventory backend and use and extended OCS Inventory + GLPI front end.
If your mainly wanting ticket tracking about hardware you may be more interested in GLPI which I talked about before.
Lastly here more products that do issue tracking.
It depends what you want.
If you want to make it easy I'd recommend Torque from GarageGames. It has greate documentation, lots of premade widgets, it's also finished and being used for a number of games. Mainly it has the polish that makes working with it enjoyable. (Tutorials, prebuild samples, etc) Not open source but has a similar community
Someone else has already recommened Crystal Space. If your looking for an example of an MMORG check out PlaneShift.
Another engine that I've been impressed with is ORGE
Anyway as I stated at the begining if you are trying to get something done ASAP go with Torque it has a lot more support. On the other hand if you want something free try Crystal Space or ORGE. One last project you might find interesting is WorldForge they have been building MMORG for a while now. They still haven't finished anything but it's more like a backend and might be useful.
You forgot the 3rd and 4th way which are catching on.
3rd. Charge a subscription for updates. Doesn't work for shrink wrap but for enterprise software it's great. Sure you can get the patches from other sources (CentOS etc) but if your a big company you can't afford the risk. (This is actually what RedHat is doing)
4th. Dual license, SugarCRM and StarOffice.
There is no way you'd be able to add a clause to a license so that they can't license it as something else if they are the original owner. After all they own the copyright and are able to liceense it to anyone else under any license they like (the GPL being one of them)
What you can do is get a contract signed in writting. This is similar to what FSF does when copyright is signed over to it. While it gets the copyright it enters into a contract with the original owner basically saying that it can't be relicensed.
Realse that this is contract law not a license.
The problem is that IT DOESN'T work. It work for you and it work on smaller projects but the problem he had with the other SCM was that they were to slow. You could probably run Windows XP with office XP on a Pentium 3 100MHz and 128 Ram but very few people would go so far as to say that it works.
If it takes you a couple of hours to merge code or to do a commit then something's not working.
That being said it doesn't mean that it can't be fixed but at what expense? Turning a generaic SCM into a tool tuned just for kernal development.
The thing that get's me is that people have knowing this for ages and only now are trying to fix it. I reviewed allot of SCM about 6 months ago and back then they had flaws but they weren't being fixed.
Where I live contracts can be changes as long as you both sign them off. You don't like the "We own everything you've ever made" clause then cross it out. Have problems with the won't "work for any company that we think is a compeditor" change it to "won't work for any company in appendix a" which means they have to give you a list of who they don't want you to work for.
The important thing is that you both sign it off and both keep a copy. Unless it's a really uptight company they won't have a problem with it.
It's not that simple. While the GPL may take precedence the company OWNS all the code Daimaou wrote WHILE he was at the company. He still owns what he wrote beforehand and has the right to license it to his company however he see's fit. If they don't want a license he can sue then for copywrite infrindgement BUT he'll have to prove that he wrote it before he started working there and that his contract doesn't say anything about prior work he brought in.
Anyway because IT'S their code they have the option of ripping out the GPL code and stop selling the product till they rewrite that code. The GPL is a license if you choose not to abide by it then you can't use it. You don't give up your ownership of the code you just give others license to use your code.
Anyway that's enough for the moment.
You don't want users to be able to install software.
Realise that a plugin is software. If you can't install the plugin that pulls the RSS feed then you also can install a bad plugin that strips email addresses out of webpages and sends those users spam.
If your installing and uninstalling software constanly then you ARE and admin (or doing admin work). You only want an admin to be able to install plugins as they affect every user on the machine.
That being said in windows if you wanted to install a plugin then just run firefox as administrator while your installing it.
Hold down + and right click on the icon on the desktop. There will be a new option called "Run As" this means you can run it as administrator to install the plugin then close it and reopen it as a limited user.
Does this mean more work? YES. That's why most users run as administrator
You can put CPAN maduales in your own dirrectory and it's "easy as" if you have remote access. Them problem is that because CPAN is so easy to use on your own server lots of projects use it (after all why wouldn't they) which is good BUT here's a problem I've had in the past.
... opps no shell accesses. Hmm I'll download it from perl then uload it. Wait part of it needs to be compiled file I'll compile it ... what do I need to compile it against? What is my hosting company running.
I go to install a CGI (90% of which are perfectly fine) script and it requires a package. Fine lets use CPAN
By the time you've got this far it's over for most people.
You can have the same problems with PHP if they don't have GD or XML or what ever else compiled in but in the past it's been less of a problem.
As for saying it's a great place to start. I stand by what I said. If you want a place where you can check out allot (not all but allot) of open source cms (and some that aren't) in a single location where you have access to the admin side as well as the user side then that's the site to go to.
The biggest problem I have with your post is that your complain about my recomendation and then fail to make one of your own.
Hi,
... no idea.
... We'll again what do you want? If you want a community portal Drupal and PostNuke are popular. If it's a small content based portal then I'd have to same mambo is the best. But if you're going for a larger installation then I'd recommend Type3 or Phone.
All of the above execpt Phone can be checked out at opensourcecms. As for php vs perl. We'll php is so much easier to install because most of the perl ones require CPAN packages which users don't have the right to install on most hosting servers. On the other hand some servers on support perl so it's really up to you. If your not planning on changing it the lanuage is very important.
Here's a quick summary.
First of all you can check out a live version of almost all of the CMS at opensourcecms. This is a very good place to start.
First of all what do you want?
The main types are:
* Portals - Think slashdot + forum + gallery etc. * Wiki - Think wikipedia
* Blogs - Need I say more.
* Groupware - Think Sourceforge.
For wikis the main one I like are:
* PmWiki for an easy to install persoanl wiki.
* Media Wiki for a large company wiki.
I don't do blogs so
I've tried a couple but none of them have really worked yet in my projects.
Portals
IE has the plugins that block adds as well so to say that one group can and another one can't is sort of stupid.