Open Source Content Management Discussion?

Media Girl asks: "As someone considering the vast array of GNU/open source CMS systems out there (and right here), what have been the experiences, insights and opinions of developers on the various programs out there, such as Slash, Scoop, Drupal, PHPslash and the various Nukes? CMS Matrix has a nice comparison grid of features, but there seems to be a lot left between the lines, and the Perl powerhouses are left out of the matrix. How do the typical components (blogs, articles, comments, karma) compare? What about modality, security and speed under heavy loads? What about the quality of ongoing development and activity of the app's community? What's leading edge and not bleeding edge? And what about the Perl/PHP debate? Can we take a snapshot of this realm of open source web development applications and hash it around a bit?"

Try em yourself

[insensitive claude]

Open Source CMS [opensourcecms.com]

My experience: pMachine, Wordpress, MovableType

[prostoalex]

Mainly dealt with the blogging engines here, since most of the sites are content-driven without the need for many additional modules.

MovableType [moskalyuk.com] - fast to setup, easy to deploy, live community with hacks and what not around it, but since the move to the paid distro in 3.0 the activity died off a little bit. Never upgraded to the paid version, couldn't justify the license money with WordPress having so many similar features. It's a Perl+MySQL or Perl+flat file set up, so theoretically nothing more than cgi-bin is required.

Which brings us to WordPress [techinterviews.com] - extensible, lively community, very easy to install and setup. The engine itself is a bit immature at this point for some advanced stuff, but if you know PHP, you'll find your way around it. Has a link manager and mass edit for comments (very useful for spam treatment), extensible as far as design, not too modular though.

pMachine [itfacts.biz] - easy to set up, easy to use, but not too flexible. Coded in PHP and uses MySQL, many tweaks available, but limited functionality for the free version. The authors have since moved on to a different project, Expression Engine, and the community is a bit abandoned.

The above links are going to my sites which run the said engines, not the engines themselves, a simple google search would take you to download pages for the engines.

Quick Summary

[natmsincome.com]

Hi,

Here's a quick summary.

First of all you can check out a live version of almost all of the CMS at opensourcecms [opensourcecms.com]. 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 [wikipedia.org]
* 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 [opensourcecms.com]. 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.

Re:The problem with current CMS systems

[afd8856]

You should have tried Plone than. Of course, it's not PHP or Perl, but if you know these Python is at a difference of just one day of learning. It has everything you ask for:

• tree structure: the content is stored in a file-system like tree, with folders and files you can navigate. Of course, this system is virtual, as all the files are stored in a database. It also has a navigation system that has a tree-like appearance.
• easy templates: to modify the appearance you just have to edit one .css file. Of course, how different the result will be depends on your css hacking skills. Also, Plone has a sistem of "skin layers", that make it easy to add a new skin based on the default one. Every relevant template is customizable through this system: you just add the template (for example, how the document type is rendered, or how the news type is rendered) to the "custom" skin layer or to your own skin layer and it will override the defaults.
• easily configurable: well... it depends on what you wish to do with it. Once you understand what happens it's easy to do everything. But there are a lot of howtos and a couple free plone books available that can teach you what you need to know. Also, the community is very helpful. This is a project entirely created by the community, it's not a comercial project suported by the community. Of course, if you need comercial support, there are quite a few businesses that can help you.

I have to mention something: Plone runs on zope, which is an application server that includes database system, web server, templating system, scripting, real database connectors, etc. To do realy advanced stuff in zope & plone you would need to learn python. But python is a fun and easy to learn language, so I wouldn't put this as a negative point :)

Plone is at this moment at version 2.x, so you'll get an already refined system.

And another thing, Plone was declared the best CMS for 2003 (I forgot at which event, but it was an important one), surpasing even comercial offerings.

Don't install phpNuke

[baldass_newbie]

It's a freaking security nightmare.
Once you get on the defacement lists, expect to get hit with every new 'sploit as soon as they're out. Francisco Burzi may be a nice guy, but he doesn't know shit about coding secure PHP. If you're going to run it, you'll at least need one of the secure releases or better yet...

Use drupal [drupal.org]. Very solid, safe, secure and easily configurable. The toughest bit is figuring out taxonomy or categories that the various entries (blogs, forum topics, stories, etc.) adhere to. These things are all 'nodes', btw. But once you have your categories down, you're done.

You can even search for a script [phrixus.net] to do the conversion from phpNuke to drupal, and no drupal doesn't require any special directories. Give it a whirl.

And if folks are whoring sites, then I'll whore mine.
Brew-Masters [brew-masters.com]
I have the throttle hooked up, so hopefully it won't get slashdotted, but then it doesn't look like this thread is getting a lot of comments.

Try eZ publish CMS

[funnybug]

I tried so many cms with interesting features. and I spent so many hours trying to find tutorials and docs... I stopped searching since I discovered ez publish. PROS: You can build any kind of site with it (from a home site to a corporate portal with ecommerce b2b/b2c features). It's full object oriented like plone, and is build under php. You can use mysql or postgresql as database backend. It's relatively well documented (everything is in their web site, and there is a book "Learning eZ publish" available to buy from the site). In my opinion, it's the best open source php cms available (it has also commercial licence). CONS: It takes 160 hours to master the product (including the scripting language). Visit the site: http://ez.no/ [ez.no]

What are your projects *needs*?

[mobiGeek]

You need to get a very good list of your "business needs" to start with. Starting to install and configure a particular CMS (and I use the term loosely...) is a waste if you don't know:

• who your content-providers are and their technology strengths (and tolerance levels!!)
• who your end-user community is and how "involved" they will be in the site (forums? community-driven content? story submission? ...) [don't get caught in the "needed feature" vs. "cool factor" trap!]
• who your admins are and their technical strengths/weaknesses (are these the same people who will be configuring the system? are they coders or do they only work from white-books and red-books ?, etc...)
• how much time is devoted to adminstration of the system?
• a single look-and-feel template for the whole site or different sections get their own template(s)?
• do you want to separate development, test and production?
• how much time is devoted to enhancing the system?
• what skillsets are available for enhancing the system?

Once we listed out these, we found that a number of the CMSes I see people talking about here fell off our list.

We don't want to have users "logging in" to our company website. We don't need/want forums/blogs/galleries. We need a simple-to-use content-provider interface for people with little-to-no webskills. We want separate servers for development, testing and production. We have a very skilled set of admins, but they don't want to be tweaking the system every day.

Based on our evaluation period, we believe we are going forward with Bricolage [bricolage.cc]. It is not an easy system to get into, but its power and flexibility is fantastic and it has a fairly supportive community.

Re:Not a surprise, but why not a wiki?

[Paul Bain]

Blogs were the first[,] and are the most deployed[,] apps to use CMS.

A blog is definitely not a CMS. A true CMS has certain [bris.ac.uk] features [cmsreview.com], such as content "versioning" and support for workflow.

I'm aware of very few apps meant to make a web developer's life easier by allowing online editing as if it were an online Dreamweaver or what not.

To the contrary, many CMS's are evolving in precisely this direction. Increasingly, they are improving their user interfaces (UI) so that the CMS UI becomes, in effect, a WYSIWYG word processor. As an example, I cite the excellent UI in OpenCMS [opencms.org], which somewhat resembles MS Word. Adding content to OpenCMS can be just like editing in MS Word except that the OpenCMS UI still does not have quite as many features or the same ease-of-use -- yet. See also Bitflux and Xopus, which are WYSIWYG editors meant to be used with any CMS, not a particular CMS.

If you want KISS & need to add a lot of content, what is lacking in wikis?

Wikis can be be easy to install, administer, and use. But they lack [slashdot.org] a great deal. [slashdot.org]