Free Your CMS With OSCOM, Sept 25-27

Elisabeth Balzer of oscom.org writes: "The following conference might be of interest to you. OSCOM, the international not-for-profit dedicated to Open Source Content Management, announces its second conference, to be held September 25-27 in Berkeley, California. Ted Nelson will deliver the keynote address. With presentations from over ten leading content management system (CMS)projects and a full day of tutorials, the conference promises to galvanize the role of open source in the CMS market." Here's the conference press release, and a registration page with early-bird rates of $300 for two days, $400 for all three.

Re:little question...

[King of the World]

Try drop.org

ps. Zope, OpenCMS, Drupal, Half-Empty, PostNuke.

Re:little question...

[Nomad7674]

I've been doing a review of a number of CMS projects for a small business website I am building. As I understand them, here is the list of some that I have found:

1. Slash [slashcode.com]: The code behind Slashdot. Uses PERL as its underlying technology and is built on Linux. Requires Apache.
2. Zope [zope.com]: Commercial Open Source software which uses Python as its code base. Good support and training available, but the community appears to be lacking.
3. phpNuke [phpnuke.org]: Underlies a lot of the free weblogs on the net at this time. Built on PHP coding and requires Apache. Some personality issues here, but a strong product.
4. PostNuke [postnuke.com]: Underlies many sites on the web, including both commercial and amatuer. An off-shoot of phpNuke, so built on PHP coding and requires Apache. VERY good project management and a solid timeline. Some recent deaths at the project have placed the team under stress.
5. phpSlash [phpslash.org]: A PHP port of the Slash system (one of the older ones, and as such is built on PHP coding. Seems solid, but lacks many of the modern features of slash.

There are many others, including (but not limited to): Nope, Druphal, KorWebLog, etc. This is still a crowded marketplace and people are trying to reinvent the wheel here often. Check out this site [hotscripts.com] and do a search on CMS to get an idea of the diversity.

Best advice from my limited experience so far:

1. Decide which language best fits the way you program (Perl and PHP have roots in C/C++, Python is more like Basic)
2. Decide what features are drop-dead critical for your site (i.e. comment system, moderation system, workflow management, shopping cart)
3. Decide if you want commercial support if something goes wrong
4. Decide how much you want to spend (even if you do not spend on a system, you will wind up with costs for hosting, books, training, etc.)

In the end, I think I have decided on PostNuke [postnuke.com]. But your choice may be very different.