Re: [OSCOM] New whitepaper on open source CMS

Seth Gottlieb wrote:

> I just published a whitepaper that talks about selecting an open 
> source CMS and summarizes 15 open source CMS projects.   My blog has a 
> summary and a link that will not ask you to register.
>
> http://contenthere.blogspot.com/2006/01/content-management-problems-and-open.html 
>
>
> Feedback is welcome.


Seth, thanks a lot for making your paper available. Just a few notes re 
Apache Lenya

to start with the egocentric first:

- I don't think this quotation by myself is really right resp. that I 
ever said it this way:

 "The idea of Lenya is to offer a CM Framework by enhancing Cocoon, 
which incubated Lenya prior to
release 1.2 in September 2004 by CM components, but also a CMS 'nearly 
out of the box.'"

but yes the "content" seems to be right:

 - Lenya shall be a CM Framework by offering components such as 
workflow, access-control, resource-types, navigation, 
editor/ui-interfaces, repository-interfaces, etc.

 - Lenya shall offer a CMS out-of-the-box by offering 
publications/publets/modules with standard out-of-the-box functionality

 - Lenya was incubated in spring 2003 at the ASF

 - Lenya became a top-level project in September 2004  at the ASF

 - Lenya is based on Cocoon


Second the following sentence seems to me misleading:

"After having difficulty getting people to contribute to the project 
because of its close
ties to a single company, Wyona donated Lenya to the Apache Software 
Foundation."


It's true that we had difficulty growing the community because of its 
close ties to Wyona (and other reasons), but that
wasn't the reason we donated it to the ASF.

We were asked by the ASF to donate it (for various reasons and I believe 
we proved that it was a good choice).


Third: "The largest installation is NZZ ..."

well, NZZ is a large and prestigious installation, but there are many 
more if you take a closer
look at for the live-sites page of Lenya or for instance the Wyona 
customer list/press releases, among others "Wired News" which
is owned by Lycos and has many more pageviews than NZZ. Or Combots which 
is an offspring of Web.de and
has the intention to become bigger than web.de ever was.

ok, so far for the "marketing" stuff ...


Fourth:

I am not sure how to understand the sentence: "where editors and readers 
have different views of the same site."

It seems to me that it is quite the opposite ....


Fifth:

I think it would be worth mentioning that Lenya also has interfaces for 
Xopus, FCK and has built in form based editors.
Also that in the 1.4.x version one can use OpenOffice resp. OpenDocument 
natively (whereas I have to admit that this
feature isn't fully functional yes, but will be soon), but generally 
speaking Lenya allows arbitrary editor integration ...


Sixth:

The community has certainly not slowed, but rather increased. Just take 
a look at the statitics resp. the traffic
on the mailing list and commit messages with actual content resp, 
quality of changes.  


Seventh:

Well, it's true we haven't released 1.2.5 on schedule and should do this 
as soon as possible and we are also
very bad at marketing ( ... two more days till releasing ... one more 
day till releasing ... ), but
1.4 has certainly not stalled at all, and people still actively apply 
bugfixes to 1.2.x.


Thanks again for taking the time on this. I will also try to send you 
some feedback on the more general stuff,
for instance is "Planet OSCOM" *really* representativ what's going on 
within the OS CMS world  .... ;-)


Michi


-- 
Michael Wechner
Wyona      -   Open Source Content Management   -    Apache Lenya
http://www.wyona.com                      http://lenya.apache.org
[email protected]                        [email protected]