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E2 and LJ, Comparing Content Management Systems
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Thu Aug 29, 2002 11:30 PM
from the hell-is-coding-another-cms dept.
from the hell-is-coding-another-cms dept.
Anonymous Noder/LJ'er writes "Linux.com is running a story written by Slashdot's Krow, one of the authors of Slash comparing the LiveJournal site engine to the Everything2 engine. He went over the installs of the two engines and talks a bit about customizing both. I really like both sites so it is interesting to see someone talk about what makes them tick."
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E2 and LJ, Comparing Content Management Systems
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What timing (Score:2, Funny)
You couldn't plan that better!
How do these compare to Squishdot? (Score:3, Interesting)
(p.s. do I get mod'd up for posting the first real comment?)
(fruit) vs. (fruit) (Score:4, Interesting)
As a developer on both codebases, teh differences as I see them are basic: Ecore is about grouping and linking as sets, while lj is more about mass indexing of list-type data.
One of ecores main weekness is scalability, or lack thereof -- this is not a slam on teh code, but just an introspection on design. Because lj os more about this loose-linked list paradigm, it can easily scale and cluster on mutliple machine while ecore, with it's extreme data interlinking, is heaving right now with redesigns to allow that.
Of course, Ecore (or at least E2) has a much better XML interface, which is probably it's second strongest point. It's first strongest and most important is the concpet that everything is a node.
PostNuke (Score:1)
It seems to be better then any of these.
What i would find much more interesting (Score:1, Interesting)
Yeah, so if you're just doing some random weblog, it makes sense to look at things at the unabstract, content-management-system level. But some of us find more interesting the idea of a system that allows for you to create a website by attaching abstract prebuilt website components together, defining the kinds of pages that you will have on your site as types, and then allowing the website to be created on a backend by less tech-saavy users who are shielded by the system from the raw code. This is what the above four systems basically are.. and it is much more powerful than just a simple CMS, though you can certainly incorporate CMS features into something you make with it.
Have you considered Wikis for content management? (Score:5, Informative)
Here is the original WikiWikiWeb: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WelcomeVisitors [c2.com]
Here is a Wiki you can easily install on your own machine: http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/swiki/15 [gatech.edu]
Here is a free Wiki farm that let's you start your own on a shared server: http://www.seedwiki.com [seedwiki.com]
These sound like *almost* what I am looking for (Score:2, Interesting)
Basically I need a replacement for a filing cabinent that will let me upload documents (and maybe grab copies of web pages), store them in some sort of semantic web/catagory hierarchy, annotate them, replace them with updated versions etc. Ideally, the system would work with a wide variety of data types: pictures, pdfs, text files, html/xml, word documents etc.
Is there a system avaialable that does this sort of thing?
InterAkt is developing a CMS (Score:1)
It is based on their new technology - Krysalis.
PHP (Score:3, Insightful)
Wrote my own (Score:2)
Look at mod_auth_mysql (Score:4, Informative)
If you are into rolling your own, then take a look at the Look at mod_auth_mysql [freshmeat.net] Apache module. It's basically .htaccess file kind of access control except the user info is in a MySQL DB. So you can do updates/inerts/whatever on the database via your perl and get close to what you need as far as access control without having to write files in the docroot.
You might not be able to make it fine-grained enough, but if you have a thing where each user (for instance) gets their own directory or something then it might work pretty well for you.
And if you are not into rolling your own anymore, check out Moveable Type [movabletype.org].
-B
Both are slow (Score:2)
Any comparison of software like this should really talk about performance and not just installation and administration ease. Any idea if these systems can be sped up, and what else is out there?
Flamebait? (Score:1)
Static page generators (Score:1)
Currently there are 2 tools that allow you to do generate static web sites while defining only structure of web site and content:
Qixite (Open source, Linux & Windows): http://qixite.sourceforge.net [sourceforge.net]
and
CityDesk (Commercial, Windows only):
http://www.fogcreek.com/CityDesk [fogcreek.com]
These tools are usually enough, and you do not need to set anything up on the server side because these programs generate static html files.
AxKit (Score:4, Insightful)
Having looked at several CMS for a website I am going to relaunch, I needed an approach that was most general and would allow me to choose how I could store the content and separate the design. OK, the difference to the projects mentioned here is that I don't need a large system to manage things like user comments or other methods of dynamically adding pages. Currently I think I will go with AxKit [axkit.org], which is not really a CMS, but basically an on-the-fly caching XSLT processor. For me this provides the most flexible solution. I have designed an XML format to store my content files, and can then use either an XSL stylesheet to produce HTML or WML or whatever needed, or write an XPathScript style sheet allowing me to process the XML data while additionally using perl code to add dynamic features. The nice thing is that with AxKit you can use HTTP GET parameters to allow different style sheets (plain, xhtml, print, ...), pick a style sheet depending on browser type (lynx, netscape4, mozilla...), etc. And for a website offering mostly static content that needs to be organized in a proper way, I think separating content from layout using XML seems like a good idea. What I like to is that it's easily possible to include multiple language versions of your page in your XML data files and transform to HTML based on, say, a ?lang attribute. Plus, you could even store the XML content tree in CVS...
For websites that are just trying to be in control of their mostly static content, AxKit surely helps (provided you have access to the server box as you need to install the apache module...). Storing pure content as XML and then providing different stylesheets for layout seems a proper way to go for me.
Of course, this is not to say I don't like the LJ or E2 engines, butjust depending on what you need for your website, XML might be helpful, and AxKit might be the way to implement it.
Re:AxKit (Score:4, Informative)
First if your needs are really simple you can try the AxKit wiki [cpan.org], which is the only wiki out there that allows you to enter data in either XML (sdocbook), WikiWiki text, or Perl's POD format. Although right now the wiki is extremely simplistic (no versioning or user management), it's quite extensible.
Next up the ladder of complexity is CallistoCMS [callistocms.com] which is has a really cool online editor component, basically allowing you to do almost WYSIWYG editing of XML content live in the web browser (all just uses pure HTML+CSS+JS+DOM, no ActiveX or Java plugins involved).
Finally there's XIMS [sf.net], which is basically what you might consider as a full blown CMS, including versioning, metadata, workflow, etc etc.
Check out Typo3 (Score:3, Informative)
www.typo3.com [typo3.com]
Some really cool features: (Stolen directly from typo3.com) I've started to use it for a couple sites in the last six months, and its really made web development fun.
-Pete
The only real test for performance... (Score:3, Funny)
Okay, you can sit around with your TI-86 all night long and talk about XML parsing times, but who cares? The only real test of a site is how much it provides content, and by content, I mean a peek into the life of CowboyNeal. Using this test, let's compare:
CowboyNeal on e2 [everything2.com]
Versus
CowboyNeal's livejournal account [livejournal.com].
Aside from technical details, which one of these gives us more insight into the delicate poetic soul that is Mr. Pater?
MS Sharepoint Portal Server (Score:4, Informative)
It's a pretty damn poor Document Manager, and a really abysmal Content Manager in most respects (except for - again a killer feature - WYSIWIG page editing inclusive of component embedding), but the MS Office integration is the key. And of course, no-one can integrate with MS Office better than MS.
If there was a decent "Open Office Portal Server" then things would be just dandy - but, as it is, Sharepoint will act to lock people into another round of MS-dependency. Sharepoint Portal Server has been used by people talking to me as an argument to stick with MS Office even with the existence of open office and star office.
Not to mention that parties... (Score:2)
Also, on a somewhat serious note, e2 isn't about the technical interface...not that it wasn't nice for Mr. Nate et al to give it to us. However, e2 really succeeds as much as it does for the human bonds it encourages. Or in other words, what other web community can gather 100 people from across the continent to have a scavenger hunt?
Perlmonks is powered by Everything2 (Score:2)
Seeing it in action there, and having used it there for almost a year, it has convinced me personally, that E2 is the way to go for this type of content management system, but YMMV.
What if it's not your machine? (Score:3, Insightful)
One of the assumption that's being made both in the story and in many of the comments is that the CMS runs on a dedicated machine over which you have total control. This assumption covers database formats and filesystem layouts that are unfriendly to multiple installations, plus custom Apache configs (even an Apache dependency is noxious IMO) to "just install mod_obscure_widget" pseudo-advice.
The problem is that the assumption is just not true for many people, who run their sites on servers owned, configured and administered by a hosting provider. Any CMS that can be installed in such an environment automatically becomes about five times more useful than one that requires total control of a dedicated machine. That's the review/comparison that would really be useful to most of us.
Fixed fonts are evil (Score:1)
In the future lets pick review sites that allow the Web client to format the fonts.
pMachine (Score:1)
CMS vs. site engine (Score:2)
comparing the LiveJournal site engine to the Everything2 engine.
This actually is one of my pet peeves. CMS is a larger term than just "web site management system". CMS need not have anything to do with web site management; it may act as backend system that may include authoring part, workflow management.
This is probably also why it seems all commercial CMSs have big problems (I work on a project that uses one and we have plenty of issues. That is, if they are "just" web site management systems, geared towards web design, they should be marketed as such. The company I work for bought a reasonably pricey CMS with some expectations, and then developers find out it's only glorified web management system. The irony is that not only are we rewriting much of existing functionality, we are not even using most of 'advanced' functionality that is mostly related to actual web publishing (in our case CMS is not the front-end system).
"Full" CMSes should probably concentrate on having complete robust platform for developing actual applications, which can then drive web sites or other publishing (often publishing to actual front-end systems, not being one). It would be good to have reasonable interfaces to actual publishing front-ends (web servers etc)... but it shouldn't be too tightly coupled.
If god does not exist... (Score:1)
All I want is a nice script to run on my blog/site that I just have to type a title and a message and it will automatically be put into the "static" page, and it shows the latest X posts, and automatically groups entries in an archive by month. Is that so much to ask?
Sucks too, cause I don't know anything about scripting, and school is right around the corner, so I don't have time to learn. I need my blog for the school year!