One of the great discoveries I made whilst writing this blog has been the ease with which I can create posts using WordPress as the content management system (CMS). It started good and it just keeps on getting better.
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- Example of code used on OPENXTRA website ugly isn’t it?
I’d love to be able to update content on the rest of the site just as easily. Unfortunately, as things stand at the moment, updating the site means wading waste deep in PHP. All changes to the website need to go through either myself or Dean, slowing things down considerably.
In order to ease the burden of creating content we’ve decided to implement a CMS across the entire site. So far the evaluation list looks like this:
- Plone – Python/Zope based CMS;
- Drupal – full power CMS with a full power learning curve;
- Joomla
- WordPress – can’t be beaten as a blogging platform but how well does it work as a vanilla CMS?
- Typo3 – a quirky full power CMS with versioning and workspaces. My fave so far;
- MODx – a bare bones CMS that is Dean’s favourite;
- OpenCms – full featured Java based CMS. Kinda like Typo3 without the goofiness.
I will let you know how the evaluation goes. One thing I have noticed with open source CMS, the documentation is king. The Typo3 documentation is the best of the lot that I’ve seen so far. With large complicated systems like CMS you need a way to ease yourself into the software. Surprisingly, only Typo3 has a simple tutorial to setting up your first site for the most recent release. Drupal is an incredibly powerful tool but the documentation needs a lot of work.
Update 1: Added OpenCms, dropped Drupal, Joomla and WordPress.
Update 2: Forgot about Plone…not suitable because we’d not have enough control.
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In our opinion, Joomla is the worst of the list, despite all the hype.
The best CMS systems we’ve worked with (all Open Source):
-CPS (Python + Zope). Hard learning curve, but easy to extend and integrates DMS and ECM usability right away.
-Liferay (J2EE). Uses Velocity template engine, which makes template building extremely fast.
We have also tried Alfresco, but it just didn’t meet the standards.
Regards.
@Antonio – Funnily enough Joomla hasn’t appealed to us much either. Interesting you mention Liferay. We already run a heavy duty J2EE e-commerce system using velocity so a Java based CMS also using velocity would be an interesting combo especially if we could integrate them somehow. The problem with Zope is that everything seems to be in a constant state of flux so it is hard to get a handle on it. I will check out your suggestions though thanks!
I’ve worked with Drupal before, and it seems….well….probably overkill for what I’m looking for. You could probably make drupal into whatever you wanted, regardless of how complex you wanted it. I just don’t have the time to craft it into what I’d want.
I’ll be paying attention to your reports, because I’m contemplating moving away from blogger so that I can have a more complete functional site that acts as a repository of knowledge, rather than just a blog.
@Matt – I’ve discounted Drupal because it is too difficult to get into. Just discovered OpenCms which looks (really) good. Though, I could see that the fact that it is Java based would make it unsuitable for some. We’re cool with Java because our e-commerce system already uses big globs of it so we’re already invested in it. Typo3 is pretty good though it can be a bit quirky. I’ve also discounted WordPress too. Great as a blogging platform but not too convincing as a CMS. When choosing a solution it will help if you have a very good idea about your requirements because there are so many CMSs out there that you may get lost.
The biggest determinant for us is the documentation in both book and web form. Typo3 is good there and so is OpenCms. Drupal is rather poor IMHO.
Darn,
By the time I got from my google reader to this post you already whacked two of my front runners (Drupal and WordPress). I use WP for my blog and always feel guilty that I don’t use Drupal (I really love Drupal), but WP is to darn easy.
However, I am really interested in your results because (the idiot I am) promised a CMS to my son’s bowling league(pro bono). I want to give them the easiest most maintainable CMS for them and me. It looks like you guys might have eliminated my first choices off your list already. I look forward to hearing more.
John
Not wishing to start a flame war, but I am quite interested in the reasons for not liking Joomla!. Our experience with it (we have quite a bit) has been pretty good to be honest.
One of the best parts of the Joomla! ecosystem is the size of it. It dwarfs all the rest of the CMS combined. So there are always eager and willing community members on-hand.
There are also many thousands of extensions to add functionality.
I’m not saying it is perfect. But I am interested in the meat behind the negative opinions…
Cheers
Al
This is quite interesting: http://www.google.com/trends?q=Joomla%2C+drupal%2C+opencms%2C+typo3%2C+plone
@John – I think our requirements are slightly odd and not particularly indicative for your son’s bowling league. We’ve got a ton of Java code already on the site so having another big glob of Java code isn’t a problem, indeed it would be quite welcome meaning that we don’t need to maintain as many different stacks. In fact we’d only need a single stack
. I really like the architecture in Drupal but I think it has some quite large barriers to adoption most notably a lack of good up-to-date documentation and the difficult, steep learning curve. Other choices are much easier to get going with. I would suggest that WordPress would be a good choice if your requirements aren’t too demanding. If you want to maintain a small(ish) site then I could see WP being a good chioce. We most certainly will not be dumping WP on the Tech Teapot. The big thing we want is the ability to stage changes before they go live. That is possible in both Typo3 (called workspaces) + OpenCms (called projects).
Oh John, whilst I’m here, I may as well congratulate you on your recent podcasts. I’ve really enjoying listening to them. You creative devil you.
I wish I’d had the idea. You deserve a lot of success with your blog.
@Al – Joomla’s google trend data is impressive. Whilst a large community of extensions is a strength it is also a weakness. OpenCms has all of the features I want in the base code. No need for any extra extensions for it to do what I want. Extensions are great whilst they are working but an absolute nightmare when something breaks.
From our POV a java based CMS is quite attractive as we are already fully paid up members of the “enterprise” java club. I could see that Java would be a big barrier to people not already invested in the club. We can reduce our stack down to a single one instead of running 2 of them as we do at present. Keeping PHP updated is a real pain as we need to manually build it each time a new release comes out.
Hi Jack,
I agree about the extension thing. Selecting the right ones and filtering the not-so-good is an important task.
I totally get the Java thing. We are running several apps in tomcat and I can see why you would want to continue on a single platform. I hadn’t come across OpenCMS before so it’s another good one for me to know about too!
Cheers
@Al – didn’t have you down as a Java type guy? You didn’t deploy your Java apps in the pre-open source days did you?
Blimey – not sure I can remember pre-open source days… (lol)
I am certainly not a Java expert, (in fact am trying to get to grips with the security manager that debian/ubuntu distros package with their tomcat install right now) but ever since I started playing with building Linux from Scratch I’ve been interested in Java and what it stands for. Even before it was GPL’d Sun were quite “open” about the platform.
I really like the way Java apps scale and that the underlying platform is so very robust. I don’t like (particularly) the huge volumes of data that it logs, i.e. Stack dumps, although you can get to the point eventually; most of the time at least.
We use Tomcat for Cosmo (The Caldav Calendar server from the OSAF), Alfresco for doc management, and we have just stared using a nice looking timesheet recording app called eHour. Of course there are other excellent FOSS apps such as OpenBravo (ERP) for example. And we need to at least be aware of them if not experts in all of them.
To answer your question. Before software, I was a networking guy. I grew up debugging X.25 networks and rolling out large RS232 dumb terminal networks to PDPs and VAXs etc before DECnet and then Ethernet were around.
I remember one of my first jobs was installing a V.23 modem. It did 1200bps one way and 75bps the other…
I used to use a V.23 modem to access Prestel all the way back in 1986. Bought a game on it too (defender clone). E-commerce new… pah!
That’s about the same time. Right after I started my first proper job. I had finished a 4 year electronic engineering apprenticeship (remember them? Great idea apprenticeships) in ’85 and has started in field service at one of the first computer communications companies: Gandalf.
Hiss! I used to work for KNX who also did a lot of ISDN just like Gandalf. In fact, Gandalf got bought by Mitel a month or so later than we did! I also worked for one of the first computer comms companies: Network Designers
Was KNX Dave Mushens? It wasn’t Bob Jones was it? When I first started it was Case who were our main competitors. The Case DCX vs the Gandalf PACX – Ahhhh those are names I haven’t lingered over for some time…
Bob Jones was Sonnix sold out to 3Com if memory serves.
KNX was Mike O’Neill who sold out to Global Village (a maker of Macintosh modems) who sold out to Mitel. I used to do the Windows NT device drivers for the horrifically complex full height PC boards (essentially a full PC on a card).
Yes I knew/know Bob reasonably well. He’s had quite a few startups under his belt.
Gandalf had a similar sounding product for a while – it was a custom 19″ PC chassis with lots of ISA slots. In each slot you installed a full height ISA card PC that ran the client end of Novell Netware. It presented a VT100 serial port out the back so you could use PC apps (123 etc) and get file and print services from the network without needing a PC. It was great for long distances where LANs couldn’t go at the time – you could run the comms over line drivers. 9600bps was fine then and 19.2K was really quick
Dave Mushens was Fivemere; One of the main ISDN players at the beginning.
So.. why is Liferay not on the list?
And why was Plone erased.. perhaps you should review CPS (Collaborative Portal Server) instead of Plone (python + zope also).
On the Enterprise Content Management area, take a look at Nuxeo 5, it’s just amazing. Really. And it has a Web Engine that I haven’t reviewed yet..
Oh, ok, i’m blind.. T_T
nevermind about Plone, with CPS then same thing.. it’s the guys at Google that are using Python, and they’re doing pretty well
Again, why not Liferay?
@Antonio – whenever I see anything with portal written over it I tend to run a mile. Any software with pretensions of being an enterprise portal is likely to be far too big for our rather modest requirements. You end up spending most of your time trying to remove stuff rather than adding it.
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