Re: [OSCOM] CMS Choices

In response to Thomas Bolioli's message from Sat, 5 Feb 2005 (included 
below):

I recently went through a similar CMS decision process.  The client was a 
corporation, and we considered both open source and commercial CMS 
offerings.  They wanted a corporate looking site, but with WYSIWYG browser 
based editing, versioning and workflow.  We considered these open source 
offerings: Mambo, Midgard/Aegir, Typo3, plone, Sitellite.  PHP was a plus 
because we have other applications in PHP, and it's easily hosted.  Our 
hosting environment is a FreeBSD VPS (virtual private server).

- Mambo looked promising, but didn't have configurable workflow roles.

- Midgard was eliminated because I couldn't get it to install on FreeBSD. 
I'm sure its possible but I tried for several hours, and gave up.

- Plone was a strong contender, but it ran a bit slow, and requires a lot 
of memory, which is hard to guarantee in a hosted environment. Also it 
wasn't at all clear to me how one would go about implementing a site with 
a very different structure -- how you use templates to make plone not look 
like plone?

- Typo3 seemed to have a strong technical basis -- very configurable, but 
it has the flavor of 'built by programmers, for programmers'.  That's not 
in itself a bad thing, but our content authors would be non-technical, and 
the interface and documentation are very complicated.  I found several 
comments on the typo3 site to the effect of, "yeah, it's complicated, 
that's because it's powerful and that's the way we like it".  Perhaps one 
could pare it down, but it seemed like a lot of work to make the interface 
usable.

In the end we chose the commercial version of Sitellite.  It used to be 
open source, and is transitioning in the newest version to commercial 
only. I would have chosen a fully open source option, but I really 
couldn't find anything that had:

a) template structure for a page based, published site (as opposed to a 
CMS for a community/blog/BBS style site)

b) a powerful, configurable back end with versioning & workflow

c) an easy to use, simple authoring interface

d) good documentation for authors, and for template developers


Tony Byrne of CMSWatch.com, in this (http://tinyurl.com/6r4gw) pdf oscom 
presentation lists his top ten features from commercial CMSs which open 
source CMSs could use. In particular these from Tony's list seem key:

- Intelligent copy and paste from MS Word
- Intuitive versioning
- Visual workflow cues
- Browser based image editing

I'd add to that list:
- Clear documentation for content authors
- A simple, usable authoring interface

Regards,
Oliver



On Sat, 5 Feb 2005, Thomas Bolioli wrote:

> I am in the process of deciding on a CMS product for my needs and I need a 
> little guidance since I have never had a need for CMS before. I can be pretty 
> flexible as far as technology (java/php/etc;) but I have some pretty specific 
> needs with regards to function. I would prefer some form of open source, 
> something that runs on linux, based on open standards (to the extent they 
> exist) and that has the ability for plug ins/addons/extensible. Basically, 
> the setup I am looking to implement is multiple sites by multiple companies 
> so I would like to not have to setup multiple installations but share one 
> installation but I will use multiple installations if I need to. The sites 
> have a mix of static data and dynamic data presented based on queried/posted 
> info from user input. Some sites will require events calenders, search 
> capability, newsletters and address book management (site address book users, 
> not CMS users). I am a programmer so I can write/modify plugins to do what I 
> need to do when it does not exist (ie; that address book thing). The site 
> owners do not (mostly) really need to create new pages (I am doing it so I 
> can code without wysiwyg), although one site will need to create new 
> newsletters from templates (or dynamically based on data...), but they will 
> need to create and edit events, and other content. That is actually why I 
> need the CMS portion, just to handle the data entry. I was thinking of 
> writing all of this myself since an editor is not really needed, just data 
> entry but I would hate to reinvent the wheel and would prefer to leverage 
> what is out there.

> The front end site cannot look like a CMS based site so things such as 
> blog/slash-like packages are out. What I am currently looking at is Mambo, 
> Midgard/Aegir, Cocoon/Lenya, ezPublish, and openCMS. What is everyone's 
> opinion of those choices and am I missing something here that I should be 
> looking at? Is CMS overkill and I should roll my own? I am curious about 
> search. I do not see much out there so any advice on that part would be good. 
> In a pinch we can use google's API so that is not required.

> Thanks in advance,
> Tom