Open Source Content Management Discussion? 109
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?"
Not really a help... (Score:3, Interesting)
my site is small enough, with few enough participants that i can get by writing my own; it just provides a web frontend for editing the text files directly. this directory [phism.org] has the source code... if anyone is interested
Typo3 rules them all (Score:4, Interesting)
They have freaking instructional videos for $DEITIES sake.
Marketing page:
http://www.typo3.com/ [typo3.com]
Community pages.
http://www.typo3.org/ [typo3.org]
smeat!
Interesting (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Zope and Plone (Score:3, Interesting)
This is really only a concern if the website's for your employer or a customer or something. If it's just for you, then I'd definitely say to go with Zope/Plone. If you really want some feature you can't find elsewhere you can always (learn Python and) write it yourself.
Security -- many are poor at best (Score:3, Interesting)
Additionally, quite a few have a default data from the development site; you're getting a carbon copy of a site not an application. Wikis tend to be the biggest offenders. Twiki, for example, is a royal pain to configure from scratch if you want to start with a blank slate. Use the Twiki site data itself, and most of it seems to work...till you start to customize things...and it breaks again. Very annoying.
I'd treat them with a great deal of caution.
Re:Slashcode considered harmful (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Zope and Plone (Score:2, Interesting)
I note (from reading the Zope 3 book) that Zope itself is way more general than a content management system. Here is the quote:
Of course, I've only just started poking through the documentation and so forth, but so far, Zope as a technology reminds me ASP.net, only more abstract and general.
In response to c2rtwhatever: Python is probably the easiest language I have looked at so far; a programmer who has already used other high level scripting or programming languages will find it easy to learn, even if they hate the forced indentation. This is not to say everyone should have to learn Python, but it's doable. :)
Re:PHPNuke (Score:3, Interesting)
Of the non-Nuke portals I would say that Drupal [drupal.org] seems to be one of the most well coded engines. Xaraya is also probably worth a look to but I have not used that one.
Re:Zope and Plone (Score:2, Interesting)
Zope Pros:
- Built in everything: Webserver, ftp, webdav, gzip, caching.
- Great products: Plone, CMF, discussions, content types.
- Everything is an object. This sounds strange, but actually lends itself to the web very very well.
- Huge, active community. Tons of examples. Tons of sites.
Zope Cons:
- Documentation, while getting better, is not at the level of other solutions.
- Python while the right choice (and better) is not as well known or supported
- Splintering of efforts in the community now. Zope X3, Zope 3, Zope 2.8, CMF 1.5, Plone. They will all come together in the next year or so, but if you are a newbie, it would be a hard choice of where to jump in (probably Zope 2.7.3, Plone 2, CMF 1.5 (included in Plone).
BZ
One downside to Wikis (Score:3, Interesting)
I've used Scoop, Drupal, and built a couple of custom lite-CMS solutions. My only experience with Wikis is installing MediaWiki. To me the biggest downside was support for inserting straight HTML.
While you can insert HTML into a Wiki entry, it isn't recommended. They want you to use the Wiki tagging language. This makes sense because the Wiki tagging is used to convey useful meta-information and separate content from presentation, but at the same time, losing the ability to use all of the functionality of HTML when entering content seems like a big trade-off.
Some of the MediaWiki developers explained that while it is easy to convert Wiki tags to HTML, it's much more difficult to convert HTML to Wiki.
I don't know that any current CMS can adequately accomplish the goals of separating content and meta-information about that content from its presentation. Storing a bunch of HTML in a database field is going to reduce the possibilities for multiple-use (e.g. non-HTML E-mail delivery, RSS and other feeds, etc.) At the same time, inserting content, including legacy content, that has already been formatted using HTML is going to be desirable by at least some users.
Drupal's ability to include not just HTML, but even PHP code within posted contents was a really powerful tool, but exacerbates this problem even more.
To me, a CMS powerful enough but easy enough to use by my company would be able to:
1- Provide a WYWYSIG editor for those who just want to add new content.
2- Allow users to cut and paste highly formatted content from (gasp!) MS-Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.
3- Allow insertion of HTML-formatted content. Given that one goal of serious CMS is to avoid storing HTML as is, this would then have to be parsed and split between content and presentation, and be able to deal with a variety of HTML standards, as well as non-standard HTML.
To me it seems like XML may provide the best hope for being able to accomplish all these goals, or they may be mutually exclusive.
If there's something out there that already does these things, pray tell...
Re:One downside to Wikis (Score:3, Interesting)
Perl Plone alternative (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree with all the comments about Plone [plone.org] being great, if Plone existed before we started developing MKDoc [mkdoc.org] then we probably wouldn't have bothered... If you like Plone but want a CMS written in Perl [perl.org] then check out MKDoc.
MKDoc doesn't yet have such a big community around it yet but it's only just been GPL'ed [mkdoc.org]...
The PHP CMS's are great if you don't have root, if you do then the Zope, Perl and Java ones are worth checking out.
Another one that hasn't been mentioned here is Java Mir [indymedia.org] the Indymedia [indymedia.org] CMS.