Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

News for nerds, stuff that matters

How To Choose An Open Source CMS

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wed Jan 25, 2006 08:56 AM
from the focus-on-the-problem dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Content management specialist Seth Gottlieb has written an easy to understand how-to on selecting an open source CMS. Gottlieb is also responsible for the whitepaper 'Content Management Problems and Open Source Solutions' which summarizes 15 open source projects and distinguishes between open source CMS and proprietary software selection."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold:
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • Hm, an OpenSource CMS? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 25 2006, @08:58AM (#14556907)
    http://www.opensourcecms.com/ [opensourcecms.com]
    • Re:Hm, an OpenSource CMS? by netkid91 (Score:1) Wednesday January 25 2006, @09:41AM
    • Re:Hm, an OpenSource CMS? by wageslave (Score:1) Wednesday January 25 2006, @10:01AM
    • Re:Hm, an OpenSource CMS? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Black Perl (12686) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @10:37AM (#14557895)
      While this does seem to be the obvious answer, at least in name, this site is not what people expect. It is NOT dedicated to open source, and it does not have anything other than PHP apps, some of which are not CMSes.

      If you know in advance you must be using PHP, and you're not sure whether you want a portal, CMS, weblog, etc, then this is a good site.

      However, if you have other languages in mind, or are open to a good CMS in any language, you should check other sources. One good reference site is CMS Matrix [cmsmatrix.org]. Another good source of CMS information is CMS Watch [cmswatch.com]; even though it concentrates on the entire spectrum of CMS systems (including commercial ones) it occasionally has very good articles or pointers to articles about open source products (like this one [blogspot.com] which I just found).

      [ Parent ]
    • Re:Hm, an OpenSource CMS? by sankacoder (Score:2) Wednesday January 25 2006, @03:52PM
      • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
  • Best CMS (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 25 2006, @09:04AM (#14556960)
    Two of the most popular and flexible open-source Content Management Systems are vi and emacs...
    • Re:Best CMS by Caspian (Score:2) Wednesday January 25 2006, @09:20AM
      • Re:Best CMS by maxwell demon (Score:3) Wednesday January 25 2006, @09:41AM
      • Re:Best CMS by Xenophon Fenderson, (Score:2) Wednesday January 25 2006, @04:55PM
    • Re:Best CMS by Daengbo (Score:1) Wednesday January 25 2006, @09:31AM
      • Re:Best CMS by TheRaven64 (Score:3) Wednesday January 25 2006, @10:08AM
      • Re:Best CMS by Elixon (Score:1) Wednesday January 25 2006, @10:15AM
      • Re:Best CMS by networkBoy (Score:2) Wednesday January 25 2006, @10:18AM
      • Re:Best CMS by ajs318 (Score:2) Wednesday January 25 2006, @10:58AM
      • Re:Best CMS by Fred_A (Score:2) Wednesday January 25 2006, @11:12AM
      • 2 replies beneath your current threshold.
    • Re:Best CMS by Elixon (Score:2) Wednesday January 25 2006, @10:01AM
    • Re:Best CMS by Billosaur (Score:2) Wednesday January 25 2006, @10:06AM
    • Re:Best CMS by garethwi (Score:2) Wednesday January 25 2006, @10:54AM
    • Re:Best CMS by timjdot (Score:2) Wednesday January 25 2006, @04:48PM
    • 2 replies beneath your current threshold.
  • Killer features (Score:4, Informative)

    by Lord Satri (609291) <alexandre@NoSPAM.leroux.net> on Wednesday January 25 2006, @09:06AM (#14556972)
    (http://slashgeo.org/ | Last Journal: Wednesday October 17, @09:03AM)
    We had to choose between many CMS for our specialized site. There are many CMS out there [cmsmatrix.org]. Our choice ended with slashcode. slashcode is hard to install and configure, but the thing is, we considered (other may think otherwise) it has a "killing feature" that was worthed the pain in the long run: slashcode's moderation system.

    Different CMS shares a lot of features, but some features are unique from one to another and might influence your choice...
  • Many good points (Score:1, Redundant)

    by DTC (450482) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @09:06AM (#14556975)
    Another good resource for choosing an open source cms is this site [opensourcecms.com]. There, you can try most of the CMS offerings that are available.
  • Trial and Error (Score:5, Insightful)

    by garcia (6573) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @09:07AM (#14556985)
    (http://www.lazylightning.org/)
    No matter how many people tell me that "Foo" is the best CMS, the only way that I found to really get a feel for them was to test them out myself. That included setting something up, testing the setup, and testing my abilities at updating the code.

    I settled on Drupal only because it was the "hot thing" at the time and I enjoyed the fact that you could put php code into "blocks" and have it run custom code w/o much hassle. At the time I wasn't all that much interested in working on the actual code so the "blocks" allowed me to get some of my bash shell scripts onto the site w/o doing too much hacking.
  • by gregalicious (949319) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @09:12AM (#14557028)
    The problem with CMSes is that updating them is slow. With some of the rich ones out there you're waiting too long to make a simple post or add some content (Tiki Pro, feature rich as it is suffers from this a lot but so do Joomla, Mambo etc). I think that the future (not that it's really pertinent to this question) is something local, a client running on every editor's PC, like NetObject's nPower (if it's any good, haven't used it).
  • Etomite (Score:2, Interesting)

    by BuR4N (512430) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @09:13AM (#14557032)
    (http://www.intellipool.se/ | Last Journal: Wednesday January 31 2007, @03:49PM)
    We have been using Etomite for a while now and are very happy with it.

    Good points so far:

    - Simple to setup
    - Easy to develop templates for, our template (http://www.intellipool.se/ [intellipool.se] took a work day to put together.
    - The back end is easy to use and provides nice editing features directly in the browser.

    Drawback:

    - If you are looking for something that can do "everything" and be extended left and right, Etomite is not for you.

    www.etomite.org
    • Re:Etomite by digitaldc (Score:2) Wednesday January 25 2006, @10:01AM
    • Re:Etomite by nublaii (Score:1) Wednesday January 25 2006, @09:52AM
    • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
  • Tech Support. (Score:2, Informative)

    by TCFOO (876339) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @09:17AM (#14557061)
    Seth Gotlieb made a good point about companies wanting tech support. Many Companies want a formal tech support solution where they can call someone on the phone to ask questions. I think many of the smaller open source projects are over looked because of the lack of phone support; however, some of the larger projects such as Open Office do provide tech support and are used by more companies because of it.
  • Structure (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mwvdlee (775178) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @09:20AM (#14557094)
    (http://www.vanderlee.com/)
    The easiest way to quickly filter CMS's is by looking at the navigation structure. Do you want a "tree" structure (like most corporate websites) or do you want a "module" (like slashdot, nuke and other community sites).

    There are other choices that can quickly filter CMS's, but many of the choices have alternatives or can be hacked around. Only rarely will you find a CMS that can handle both navigation structures.
    • Re:Structure by dan the person (Score:2) Wednesday January 25 2006, @11:55AM
    • Re:Structure by Zoop (Score:2) Wednesday January 25 2006, @12:04PM
  • Too Many (Score:4, Interesting)

    by dkuntze (867585) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @09:22AM (#14557105)
    I think the OpenSource CMS market is getting too flooded... Do we really need another PHP/MySQL CMS? I know some people who are developing a commercial CMS product. I think they are crazy, since there are PLENTY of free CMS packages out there. If there is not need for a full blown enterprise CMS, why would you pay for a proprietary "non-free" application? How about a list of Open Source Enterprise Content Management systems? That would defintely be a shorter list.
    • Re:Too Many by dslauson (Score:2) Wednesday January 25 2006, @10:18AM
      • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
    • Re:Too Many by mspohr (Score:2) Wednesday January 25 2006, @10:41AM
      • Re:Too Many by SolitaryMan (Score:2) Wednesday January 25 2006, @11:35AM
        • Re:Too Many by gmuslera (Score:2) Wednesday January 25 2006, @01:21PM
    • Too few by metamatic (Score:2) Wednesday January 25 2006, @11:09AM
      • Re:Too few by k31dar (Score:1) Wednesday January 25 2006, @11:29AM
    • Re:Too Many by man_of_mr_e (Score:2) Wednesday January 25 2006, @08:15PM
    • 3 replies beneath your current threshold.
  • by loom (35551) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @09:23AM (#14557115)
    I know I digress a bit, but sometimes an open-source solution is not the choice for everyone. A lot of clients I talk to have no technical knowledge, and want a CMS to be able to update the website easily. They have no idea how to install it or to maintain it. Some of them prefer "buying" a product, than buying lots of services.

    Then again, it really depends on the demographic. If it's a student putting up a website and he has all the time in the world, I guess an open source CMS is the preferred solution.

    Of course, I'm biased, I work for this [jahia.org] CMS vendor :) But it has a license you can pay in cash or code [collaborativesource.org]
  • Drupal gets my vote (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 25 2006, @09:25AM (#14557128)
    There are a lot of good CMS platforms out there, but I am going with Drupal [slashdot.org] - it is the one that the FOUNDER of the web uses (Tim Berners-Lee). It is MUCH more than a 'blogging' software - it has many great pluggins, and Google appears to think it is #1 - they donated $49,500 to drupal [communicateordie.com] - which is more than any other CMS got.
  • www.OpenSourceCMS.com invaluable (Score:3, Informative)

    by jbarr (2233) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @09:28AM (#14557147)
    (http://jimstips.com/)
    I found the http://www.opensourcecms.com/ [opensourcecms.com] site to be invaluable when choosing a replacement CMS for my site [jimstips.com]. Its demos and resource links were very, very helpful. In a relatively short time, I was able to browse and try a number of CMS options. once I came up with a "short list", it was just a matter of following the links to the various CMS sites, downloading the installation packages, and testing them out. (That is what took the time!.

    http://www.opensourcecms.com/ [opensourcecms.com] works as a nice Sandbox environment that auto-refreshes every hour or so (ie: each CMS is automatically reset to a clean install, so though you lose anything you try out, you can't mess things up.)

    It's a great way to get an initial feel for various CMS's in one tight place.

    -Jim
    http://gmailtips.com/ [gmailtips.com]
  • CMS is less important than people (Score:4, Insightful)

    by dptalia (804960) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @09:28AM (#14557151)
    (http://austin.rug.googlepages.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday November 02 2005, @05:03PM)
    You can have the best tool in the world but unless you train the people using it in the proper proceedures and process, then it doesn't matter. And someone has to enforce their behavior.

    That being said, I like a comercial solution: ClearCase, (paired with ClearQuest) as it allows me to enforce a certain percentage of behavior through the tool. And when you have people who feel it's their duty to violate process because it "won't work" (they didn't write it) it's nice to have the tool lock them down.

  • Zope-Based CMS Products (Score:4, Informative)

    by Feneric (765069) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @09:32AM (#14557185)
    (http://feneric.blogspot.com/)

    There's been an ongoing discussion about this same topic over at Macintouch [macintouch.com].

    Personally I'm a fan of the Zope [zope.org] / CMF [zope.org] series of content management systems; the built-in CMF is quite powerful and flexible (and actually fairly efficient -- don't be fooled by the slowness of some CMSs built on top).

    There are many such systems. There are some in private use (like Boston.com [boston.com] and Saugus.net [saugus.net]. There are also some commercial options (like Icoya [icoya.com]). Most though are free and open source, like Plone [plone.org], Infrae Silva [infrae.com], and Nuxeo CPS [cps-project.org]. Each has its own focus and tends to do certain things better than the others. Each has its own special plug-ins and extensions, but since they all utilize the same underlying base framework, it's usually a doable thing (although typically not trivial) to port a product from one to another.

    The capabilities of Zope's built-in CMF are also good enough that it's not at all unreasonable to fashion one's own CMS on top of it if none of the existing products seem to suit one's own particular needs.

  • For Java Freaks (Score:4, Informative)

    by ckmajor (671798) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @09:32AM (#14557188)
    There are quite a few Java based open-source CMS like Magnolia (http://www.magnolia.info/en/magnolia.html [magnolia.info]), Apache Lenya (http://lenya.apache.org/ [apache.org] etc. An exhaustive list of Java based open-source CMS can be find here:
    http://java-source.net/open-source/content-managme nt-systems [java-source.net]
  • by christoc (949327) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @09:39AM (#14557261)
    (http://chrishammond.com/)
    If you want a good open source CMS on the microsoft platform (boo hiss from the /. crowd right?) check out http://www.dotnetnuke.com/ [dotnetnuke.com]
  • cms (Score:1)

    by Gadgycough (937773) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @09:43AM (#14557308)
    phpnuke
    • Re:cms by drewzhrodague (Score:2) Wednesday January 25 2006, @10:03AM
      • Re:cms by Gadgycough (Score:1) Wednesday January 25 2006, @10:25AM
  • CMS Made Simple (Score:2, Interesting)

    by lemkepf (727820) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @09:43AM (#14557315)
    (http://www.paulandmichelle.net/)
    I've been using CMS Made Simple [cmsmadesimple.org] for a while. It works very well and is very easy to use. My "not at all computer savy" clients love it and it's worked well for me too. Simple installation, simple page creation, simple menus, simple templating... yea, it's just simple. :)
  • PHPwcms is excellent (Score:2, Interesting)

    by rtilghman (736281) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @09:43AM (#14557316)
    I went through this process at the beginning of last year. Downloaded, set-up, and tested multiple CMS products. I ended up going with PHPwcms given its simplicity and user friendly design, its amongthe best solutions out there for standard content sites. CMSMadeSimple was another similar and good solution.

    That said what CMS you choose - open source or otherwise - is entirely predicated on the project. Got a community site? Take a look at Drupal or Mambo, maybe something smaller if it works. Need a small content site? Check out PHPwcms, CMS Made Simple, or LucidCMS. Someone else mentioned Etomite, but Etomite is quirky, visually unsophisticated (the admin tool looks a little garbagy), and lacks some of the flexibility provided by other tools.

    PHPwcms' management of content as small objects that can be easily called or reused in secondary locations (allowing you to have a repository of "global" content was a huge argument in favor of it for my project. Its only major weakness is the lack of robust entitlement capabilities... its been on the books for a year, but no one has developed it further... you can only set-up an all Admins or vry weak content administrators (who can't edit content).

    -rt
  • My Plug For Geeklog (Score:3, Informative)

    by phpsocialclub (575460) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @09:44AM (#14557321)
    (http://graymerica.com/)
    I am going to put my plug in for Geeklog. http://geeklog.net/ [geeklog.net]

    I use is for the base of many commercial web sites, utilizing the WYSISYG (FCKeditor) page editor and the news manager. It provides an excellent frame work for developing sites on top of, especially if you need a basic website with some extras thrown in.

    It also runs sites such as http://www.groklaw.net/ [groklaw.net] and http://worldmusiccentral.org/ [worldmusiccentral.org]

    By changing the templates or config to eliminate links to the parts you do not need, (example, links pages, polls, etc), you can use the user login, edit, and admin parts to allow your web clients to edit their own pages, saving you the trouble and saving them money in the long run. The templates are completely separate from the code, allowing you to design graphics for the site separate from the code.

    Updates are pretty easy if you keep your custom code out of the main install, a process that is pretty easy if you put your code in lib-custom.php. The code is well written and clear enough for a person with basic php knowledge to hack if they like

    The software is all php/mysql and run efficiently on most linux shared hosts. There are also a wide variety of plugins.

    The forum and developers are responsive to support requests.

    just my two cents from a fan of geeklog,

    it is also available for demo at http://opensourcecms.com/ [opensourcecms.com]
  • "Best" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ukpyr (53793) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @09:54AM (#14557436)
    I'm about 3/4 through evaluating cms products for my small company. I've read about all the major opensource ones, and even went into the commercial realm. I personally installed/evaled 7 or 8 (I didn't always take notes, some were already losers )

    Here are some things that greatly helped me:

    There is NO awesome templating system. If you have web designers and you have programmers, don't expect something to drop into place with little hassle. We have been deploying html + mod_perl applications using a simple in-house templating system. This is actually elegantly simple compared to some of the systems I looked at. It's all very relative to the staff you have. Personally a JSP taglib solution works best for us (so far)

    There is no one "best" system. People claiming X or Y is clearly superior are either not deploying CMS for a group of users, lack experience as a developer/designer/user, or are just crazy. I know of a Major Company(tm) who management told to the developers use X system for some inscrutable reason after reviewing a lead dev's evaluation list. While on paper X is great, there are a few very annoying problems for the template designers, and they don't have the mandate to go modify the code, which is open.

    Part of the evaluation MUST include every level of person using the product. Developers,designers,managment (reports n such), and end users (archetypal secretaries). I tried to let people know what was happening a few times a week with my evaluations, keeping a blog would be great maybe. Other people accepting your choice is super-duper-key. I got some great feedback from docs on a few occasions that helped me steer my choice.

    Get a clear set of requirements and wish list items established early on. CMS systems can be minimal or very very comprehensive, it's easy to get lost in nth's implementation of webDAV or whatever.

    Blog systems may have elements of CMS in them, but are not (usually) full blown CMS systems. CMSmatrix.org and other great places for data lump all the products together. In my opinion there are about a dozen open source products that are clearly way beyond the blog.

    Last piece of advice which you won't hear very often: if you think you may not need a CMS solution you probably don't! If you have a single site, with some updating you need to do frequently or maybe you want to have a team of designers working on it, check out subversion first and maybe that alone will give you enough of what you want. If you just need templating check out apache's tapestry or cocoon projects.
    • Go Native among the Users (Score:5, Insightful)

      by handy_vandal (606174) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @10:34AM (#14557868)
      (http://www.karljones.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday November 13 2003, @02:33PM)
      Part of the evaluation MUST include every level of person using the product. Developers,designers,managment (reports n such), and end users (archetypal secretaries).

      This is so true. End user input is critical, they will make or break the project.

      My dad (rest his soul) was lead programmer (maybe the only programmer, I dunno) for the Star Tribune newspaper, back in the seventies. I was a teenager at the time, he taught me about For-Next loops and so on. Along with the coding, he emphasized:

      The smart programmer ...

      (a) Listens and nods his head while Management says "We want this, We want that" ... (chances are this is all wrong);
      (b) Sits down with end users (secretaries, etc.) for a while, every day, staying out of their way but watching them work, and asking the occasional question;
      (c) Figures out what the end users really want, need, will accept;
      (d) Codes for the end user, then spins the thing so Management thinks they're getting what they (foolishly) asked for.

      Dad called this "going native among the users" (he took his degree in anthropology).

      -kgj
      [ Parent ]
    • Re:"Best" by deejer (Score:1) Wednesday January 25 2006, @12:08PM
  • The only perfect CMS (Score:2, Insightful)

    by kook44 (937545) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @09:58AM (#14557476)
    The only perfect CMS: Content gets put into XML with editor of your choice, you pull content into your app either at runtime, or make some custom automated publishing script. Any packaged CMS will be way to bloated, and will be a nightmare to integrate into your architecture. Most likely - you will finding yourself bending your app around the CMS.
  • DotNetNuke (Score:2)

    by tetranz (446973) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @10:07AM (#14557581)
    DotNetNuke [dotnetnuke.com] Growing very quickly, high quality, well managed and well documented.
  • by Tihy (948976) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @10:12AM (#14557624)
    (http://www.imobis.ro/)
    WordPress+LightPress:

    - easy to install
    - easy to administer
    - clean
    - faster then Drupal, Serendipity, TextPattern, ...
    - php+mysql based

    http://wordpress.org/ [wordpress.org]
    http://lightpress.org/ [lightpress.org]
  • by naelurec (552384) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @10:12AM (#14557627)
    (http://slashdot.org/)
    A CMS by definition is a content management system. As a result, it is crucially important to determine the content you want the system to manage and how you want the system to manage the content.

    A few starter questions:

    1. What content do I have or expect to have? (web pages? documents? discussion forums? image galleries?)

    2. Where does this content come from? (departments? users? myself? Internet sources? databases? third-party apps?)

    3. How should the system manage this content? (workflows? editors? fine-grained access control?)

    4. How should this content be displayed? (xhtml/css? pdf? print/paper? cell phones? xml? rss?)

    5. How much separation of content and design do you require?

    6. How extensible should the CMS be? (in-house development? modular? out-sourced development? completely opensource?)

    7. What are the administrative requirements? (*nix? mysql/postgresql? apache? php? python?)

    8. What is the anticipated load and can the CMS manage that? (quite different from a 5,000 hits/day site vs 20,000,000 hits/day)

    9. What is the estimated lifetime of the website? What changes to the site are forseeable and should be considered?

    Assuming your doing something more than a personal blog site, most likely pre-existing workflow processes and organizational resources already exist and those should be analyzed when making a CMS choice.

    Don't get overly focused on initial setup times. The cost of administration, development and resources will far outweigh the initial setup costs on all but the smallest of sites.
  • Content Management (Score:2)

    by Seanasy (21730) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @10:40AM (#14557929)

    Most Open Source CMSs aren't much more than blogs or forums on steroids. Very few deal with real content management problems. I still haven't found one that I'm crazy about. I'm trying to work with Apache Lenya [apache.org] right now but it takes a lot of work. Zope/Plone is similar. The power is there for both of them but the initial learning curve is steep.

    Oh, and my biggest pet peeve for any CMS site (or any site) is unreadable URLs. It's OK for some applications but for a site where people will be returning to the same page frequently, it should have a sane URL.

  • Not very in depth (Score:2)

    by lux55 (532736) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @10:44AM (#14557983)
    (http://www.putfwd.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday November 23 2004, @01:50AM)
    I was hoping from the summary for a bit more depth to the article, maybe a few pages in length. Good start at least. There are many differences to consider when comparing open source vs commercial CMS (ex: open source CMS developers tend to be quicker about embracing standards), in addition to the general open source vs commercial software differences.

    There's also a lot of difference between types of CMS, from blog-level packages to easy site builders and Mambo/Joomla-esque packages which are missing any real enterprise-ready features such as versioning, workflow, and fine-grained access control (more advanced than Unix permissions please!), to mid-level packages which vary greatly within themselves as to their focus (marketing/SEO, publishing, or traditional content/document management), to high-end enterprise packages. There's also a big difference between a CMS that includes a content server/content publisher and one that doesn't. An easy comparison of these in the open source world would be Midgard vs any of the Midgard-based CMS packages. The no-content-server packages are more flexible, but require a lot more implementation effort as well.

    Really, it comes down to defining your goals. And often people find that some commercial CMS still solves them better than the open source ones, while many find the opposite to be true. Different goals. (note: I'm the lead developer for the open source Sitellite CMS [sitellite.org] that also has a commercial counterpart -- dual-licensed).

    A few articles I found interesting related to CMS selection:

    Tire Kicking and CMS Shopping [econtentmag.com]
    Will your chosen CMS vendor go bust? [steptwo.com.au]
  • ZDnet.au (Score:2)

    by foo fighter (151863) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @10:46AM (#14558012)
    (http://news.google.com/)
    Is it just me, or is ZDnet.au getting a lot of press here today? What's up with that?

    It's interesting that the Australian publication has so much Open Source coverage.
  • by SpunOne (222681) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @11:09AM (#14558308)
    (http://www.fazed.org/)
    Do any of the OpenSource CMS's scale well? For the longest time, I was going to release the one I wrote simply so I could give it the name OpenSTFU. What I discovered is that a lot of programming compromises have to be made to create a CMS that's flexible enough to fit the needs of many people. I eventually gave up trying to make something for mass-consumption, and kept my CMS private. There would easily be three times the amount of code involved to make it a reasonable choice for other people to use. In my experience, flexibility was synonymous with slow, since extra CPU cycles were needed on every page. The CMS suffered from trying to be a Swiss Army knife.

    I'm sure some of that can be fixed with better programming and design, but is that happening with the free, modern CMS?
  • chucking the lot (Score:4, Informative)

    by sammy baby (14909) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @11:13AM (#14558344)
    (Last Journal: Monday February 04 2002, @03:31PM)
    I'm increasingly of the opinion that for all but the simplest of sites, there just aren't any good "off the shelf" content management systems, unless you have no problem with your site looking like the default installation of whichever CMS you chose.

    Here's the logic:
    1. A very basic site (read: a blog) with a very basic CMS is generally not hard to set up.

    2. The technical issue: as sites get more complicated, the level of sophistication required by the user to install and maintain them increases. (In the extreme case, I submit Xaraya [xaraya.org], a CMS so complicated that trying to create a site as simple as "I just want a page with our contact information on it!" becomes an exercise capable of inducing intra-cranial hemmorage). Additionally, any templating system required grows more and more arcane, until it is essentially indistingushable from the actual programming language in which it's written.For example: the easiest way of getting a Drupal [drupal.org] site laid out and usable quickly is to use the PHPTemplate plugin - in other words, to just write PHP code. David Heinemeier Hansson, no stranger to controversy, went a step further than this and labeled general-purpose CMSes "pipe dreams," [loudthinking.com] and said "I believe the time has come to mark a date in the not too distant future for celebrating the death of the general-purpose content management system." (Not like he doesn't have his own thing to push [rubyonrails.com], but that's as may be. See also Jeff Veen's frustration with open source CMSes [veen.com]

    3. The social issue: as the content management system grows more and more complicated, they become more and more intractable for the average end user. Responsibility for day to day site updates is pushed to the IT department, which is absolutely not where it belongs. (Once again, I give you the one, the only, Jeffrey Veen [adaptivepath.com].)

  • Choosing a CMS is not too bad once you understand the architecture (web content vs. documents vs. media), environement (Windows, Linux, OS X, BSD) and end-user (IT, secretary, none). Since we mostly handle web content the question becomes where is it being hosted and is there a corporate policy (Java yes, PHP no, Postgres and MySQL). We generally split development for higher end sites with more traffic and technical staff to our home grown Arc DojoCMS but for a lot of sites Mambo/Joomla really does the trick. Easy to use and great for not too tech savvy end users.
  • by chmod u+s (211367) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @11:37AM (#14558675)
    (Last Journal: Tuesday March 23 2004, @12:17PM)
    What bugs me is that any sufficiently powerful/featureful CMS system that I have tried requires the content to be stuffed into a database somewhere. I am fine with having certain types of content like blog entries and such in a database, but there are lots of times where I just want to incorporate pre-existing static content or stuff that just doesn't play well in a database - like a cgi app for example. Templating, news/blog features, html editors, etc. are all nice to have, but without the ability to manage pre-existing content I have to rewrite all of my resources to fit into their box. That sucks.

    An engine that could manage dynamic content and incorporate static content (parsing it, embedding it, styling it, whatever) would be perfect. But I haven't found such a package. Anybody who has waded through the hundreds of free CMSs and found this featureset, do tell.

  • by mlinksva (1755) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @11:55AM (#14558920)
    (http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/ | Last Journal: Wednesday January 26 2005, @07:17PM)
    Do you really need one? Wiki- and/or blog-focused software is probably all you need, e.g, Mediawiki and Wordpress.

    If you're a special person that believes pain is necessary by all means use a full-fledged CMS for your site.
  • To this day I'm yet to find a CMS (or even a blog system) with good multilingual support. By "good multilingual support" I mean:

      * UTF-8 everywhere.
      * Templates/autogenerated strings are i18nable.
      * Able to i18n all user-created content. System understands the relationship between alternative versions of posts, etc.
      * Able to choose default language through HTTP content negotiation (get the browser's default).
      * Able to override browser default with cookies.
      * System use nice, strict XHTML and mark all multilingual content with the proper xml:lang attribute.

    Am I the only one who cares about that?
  • CMS in packages (Score:1)

    by sperdich (942787) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @12:10PM (#14559125)
    (http://perdichizzi.com.ar/)
    Has anyone tell me witch can be the best CMS to download and install from packages? I'm using kubuntu right now, and I have installed Typo3. It's working for me, but I wonder if there is something better... Sergio http://www.salvaneschi.com.ar/ [salvaneschi.com.ar]
  • by BestNicksRTaken (582194) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @12:56PM (#14559764)
    (http://the-jedi.co.uk/)
    I'm going through this choice at work at the moment, management wants to replace the in-house mess with an off-the-shelf portal+CMS+forum.

    I've written a basic CMS in a previous job, and am patching this one, the hardest part is constantly modifying it to dumb it down further and further for the users whilst still making it useful.

    I really don't want to have to re-invent the wheel again, so have been looking at various offerings, both commercial and FOSS.

    I'd personally prefer a Perl/Python/Linux/Solaris solution, but there are AD/NTLM requirements, Exchange integration, database portability - currently MySQL will do, but we're going to need to move to Oracle eventually in keeping with company policy; and it's looking like the commercial ASP/Windows solutions are the only choice.

    The main problem I'm having at the moment is what do you do if you want to add functionality? The commercial vendors all say 'just develop your own website in a frame of the portal', which is all very well and good unless you need to be able to integrate the search and permissions systems and don't want to have 2-3 servers.

    Not many vendors have an API or even Web Services kind of system, it's all some .exe that runs on the 2003 domain server to talk some proprietary crap to Exchange!

    With the FOSS model, at least you get the source and have a nice language - they're generally Python/PHP/MySQL, not JavaBeans/ASP/Access rubbish.

    What I need is:

    Platform: Solaris+Apache
    Language: Perl/Python/PHP
    Database: MySQL+Oracle
    Authentication: NTLM/ActiveDirectory single-signon
    Extensibility: hack the source/a nice API or wrapper system/web services
    Integration: RSS syndication, Exchange calendar+addressbook

    Zope/Plone, PostNuke, BEA, Drupal etc. do not even come close.
  • Excellent Open Source CMS system

    http://phpwebsite.appstate.edu/ [appstate.edu]
  • CPGNuke (Score:1)

    by Uzbek (769060) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @02:09PM (#14560680)
    (http://forum.arbuz.com/ | Last Journal: Monday September 27 2004, @09:12PM)
    Better than phpNuke and recent Dragonfly release brings this suite to a new level. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_CMS [wikipedia.org] Uzbek.
    • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 25 2006, @03:41PM (#14561597)
  • Geeklog! (Score:2)

    by rat7307 (218353) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @04:59PM (#14562374)
    (http://slashdot.org/~rat7307)

    When setting up my geocaching website [cachegurus.com] I evaluated about 10 CMS systems, including Drupal, phpWebSite, Geeklog, Joomla, Mambo, PHP-Nuke, phpWCMS, phpWebSite, Post-Nuke, Siteframe, TYPO3 & Xoops.

    In the end I found that Geeklog was the one with the most intuitive (to me) templating system and was the easiest to add your own code to. I found that most CMS systems are great out-of-the box solutions for doing what THEY want you to do, but adding custom modules and functionality is a nightmare!!

    I wasn't expecting geeklog to be as good as it was!

    Sheesh, I sound like a fanboi...sorry!!

  • Alfesco (Score:1)

    by jawahar (541989) on Friday January 27 2006, @03:15AM (#14576938)
    (Last Journal: Friday December 09 2005, @12:09AM)
    You may want jboss based http://alfresco.org/ [alfresco.org]
  • Re:Dokuwiki ! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by CynicalGuy (866115) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @09:27AM (#14557143)
    Please no. Wiki != CMS. I really hate the current trend of open source projects putting all their documentation in a wiki.

    How to install SomeProject - This article is a stub, but you can help by writing it!

    No thanks.
    [ Parent ]
    • Wikis as CMS by Crisses (Score:1) Wednesday January 25 2006, @10:34AM
    • Wiki, why not? by beofli (Score:1) Wednesday January 25 2006, @11:12AM
    • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
  • by saltydogdesign (811417) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @09:34AM (#14557202)
    My bullshit detector is making a hell of a lot of noise.

    Security is a function of the developer, not the language. To be sure, some languages have inherent security features that can help, but if you honestly think it's that much more difficult to muck up a Perl program than a PHP program, I've got some land near Baghdad you might be interested in purchasing.
    [ Parent ]
  • by jrister (922621) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @10:08AM (#14557590)
    PHP is no mor eor less secure than any other programming language. As someone else just mentioned.

    I have had to argue this point for months with the CIO/CEO of my company, who were under the same impression. They had the idea in their heads that PHP caused all kinds of havoc, from security issues, to search engine optimisation issues, etc.

    Eventually I convinced them that its all in how a language is implemented, how the code is written, and how various requests and such are handled.

    The vast majority of PHP-related security vulnerabilities are the result of a variable that was either deprecated, but never removed from the code, or just a check variable that the developers never thought anyone would find and abuse.

    The bottom line is, whenever you deal with any kind of external data coming into your program, in PHP, C++, Java, VB, or anything else, if you do not check the sanity of that data coming in, you will have serious problems.

    Use whatever programming language you like, just remember to SANITIZE ALL USER DATA/QUERY DATA before processing!
    [ Parent ]
    • by oni (41625) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @10:32AM (#14557839)
      (http://slashdot.org/)
      Another big reason that you see so many PHP vulnerabilities is that PHP is free and easy, and so lots of (frankly) amateurs pick it up and write wizz-bang apps with it. The reason I call them amateurs is that they really have no idea and usually don't even know or care to write code with security in mind. Many, perhaps most newbie programmers think that bugs are something that happen to other people who aren't as smart as they are.

      So basically, you have some well-intentioned but not experienced person with a good idea, and they sit down and hack together an application while learning PHP at the same time. Do they even know the definition of "SQL Injection Vulnerability" - probably not.

      And a lot of the issues that I see on places like bugtraq are application specific, and I usually haven't even heard of the app. "The PHP app, Lyrus Extreme version 3.2 has a remote exploit." In your head, you subconsciously tally that up as "one more PHP problem" and if someone is gathering statistics on PHP problems by searching bugtraq for the string PHP, this one will be counted. But really, it's not a PHP problem, it's just an amateur programmer.
      [ Parent ]
  • Yeah and avoid CyricZ for sensible comments.
    [ Parent ]
  • by spge (783687) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @11:16AM (#14558383)

    Sorry to see that you've been rated as a troll (16:11 GMT, 25th Jan 2006) You make a very reasonable point. Those who think they smell bullshit could do worse than read about mysql_real_escape_string() versus Prepared Statements [ilia.ws], The addslashes() Versus mysql_real_escape_string() Debate [shiflett.org] and PHP Insecurity: Failure of Leadership [greebo.net]. That said, I like using PHP. That said, I dread to think about the security state of my code...

    The last article listed above contains this quote:
    "For some time, I've been worried about the direction of PHP. As many of you know, I helped write XMB Forum and now help write UltimaBB. XMB in particular is an old code base, and UltimaBB, a descendant from XMB. I've done a lot to protect that code base from attack, and luckily, we've been missed despite some doozy and silly security issues. After writing PHP forum software for three years now, I've come to the conclusion that it is basically impossible for normal programmers to write secure PHP code. It takes far too much effort."

    [ Parent ]
  • Re:Avoid PHP programmers for CMS (Score:2, Insightful)

    by the packrat (721656) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @01:20PM (#14560090)
    (http://www.rattus.net/~packrat)

    While PHP is a truly awful language that strives against every programming principle and the very act of writingin maintainable code, the problem is not the language.

    The problem is the sort of people that PHP as a language was designed for. It was designed for non-programmers and kids to easily hack together vaguely working web applications for pocket money or sweets. It excels at this, cast your eye around the uncountable fray of PHP programming forums and the people using them. (Witness also that people outside this set avoid PHP with great vigour).

    However, people who like PHP are most definitely not the people you want to have writing a CMS that holds actual data. MySource is a great example of this. Because the people who designed MySource are basically idiots, a site with 5000-odd pages comes up against issues where on each page render every child page (And its children) has to be individually checked for access rights so the side menu can be generated. As a result, for the above-mentioned 5000-page site, on a fast 2-processor server with gobs of memory, serving a single page takes about 3 seconds.

    3 whole seconds.

    PHP programmers are the sort of people who write these ridiculous piece of code, and leave the issue scattered through the whole source tree without any hint of abstraction so that fixing it becomes a major rewrite. PHP programmers are the sort of people who release a 'commercial grade' CMS without having ever tested it with 5000 pages.

    PHP programmers are great for small websites paid in sweets, but don't use anything they've touched for a CMS.

    [ Parent ]
  • 9 replies beneath your current threshold.