RE: CMS for Monthly Magazine?

Shane -

Plone sounds like it may be overkill for
what you're trying to do. You're two most difficult requirements are 1)
excellent search, and 2) document versioning. Do you really need document
versioning or do you want page versioning? I think if you scaled back these two
requirements, just about anything would work fine. Even some blog tools would
address most of your requirements. I'm not sure what your staff looks like, but
the more complex the tool, the brighter your people need to be and more time it
will take to maintain it. Beware of the upgrade path and learning curve on the
tools you mentioned.

Recommendations: Mambo, Movable Type,
Drupal.

Matthew Clapp

projectcms.com

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From: Shane Graber
[mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Sun 6/27/2004 3:44 PM
To:
[email protected]
Subject: [CMS] CMS for Monthly
Magazine?

I am working on identifying CMS' that can and have been
used
successfully for producing online magazines. We put out a small
monthly
magazine (8-12 articles per month) and are interested in upgrading
the
website from static HTML to some sort of CMS. We'd prefer to stick
with
F/OSS products. In reviewing a number of the CMS', we've
identified
three so far that look promising:

* Plone
* Silva
*
Cofax

I have been playing around with Plone and Silva for the last month
or so
and I'm pretty sure I can create what I need with either one of
these,
but I want to make sure I've done due diligence by reviewing all of
the
potentially viable CMS solutions. I just recently found Cofax so I
will
need to review what it can do as well. We currently have a
dedicated
server running Debian and Apache and prefer not to move away from
this.

CMS Requirements:

* Document versioning
* Metadata for
documents and images
* Being able to set a publication date
* Setting an
archive date
* A online subscription option would be very nice and the
software
manages the user base subscription/expiration date

(subscribe to premium content like certain articles)
* Ability to use photos
in articles (our magazine is pretty photo intensive)
* Some sort of
advertising options or at least being able to add our ads
to the page
templates
* Ability to template the pages (the easier the better)
*
Security is very high on our list
* Auto Table of Contents generation
*
Ability to run Polls
* Ability to use Forms
* Ability to list related
documents based on metadata
* Excellent search engine
* Web standards
compliant
* Extensible

So far I've looked at Plone and Silva and have
also reviewed what
PHP-Nuke and PostNuke can do and that's as far as I've
gotten before I
found this list.

Any advice that the wisdom of this
list could provide would be greatly
appreciated.

Thanks in
advance,

Shane Graber
Advanced Aquarist's Online
Magazine