$5000 Award for Open Source CMS 127
The Citizen writes "Packt Publishing has released details of an award scheme for open source Content Management Systems to enter and win a $5,000 prize. From the article: 'The Packt Open Source Content Management System Award is designed to encourage, support, recognize and reward an Open Source Content Management System (CMS) that has been selected by a panel of judges and visitors to PacktPub.com.' They're asking for people to submit nominations for their favorite open source Content Management System now."
Mambo will get it (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Mambo will get it (Score:3, Insightful)
There, fixed it for you!
Re:Mambo will get it (Score:4, Interesting)
just to follow the same train of thought, Joomla forked a few months ago from Mambo because of licensing issues, i believe. I have used a few different CMS's over the years, and I can say that Joomla (which I currently use for 3 websites) is good but not great. The back end is a little cumbersome for my non-webnerd friends. My biggest pet-peeve is that the front end is not 100% customizable without editing code. You only have a handful of options on how the modules are displayed, but these options will be fine for the majority of people. Joomla has a large community and a large collection of "plugins" so it shouldn't be hard for anyone to get a feature rich website running quickly.
I used e107 for a while, and the one thing I liked better about e107 is that the frontend is 100% customizable. You define exactly how you want each element to be displayed, but I can see how Joomla's approach is easier for novice users. I can't remember specifically why I stopped using e107, but I do remember I was never satisfied with the "plugins".
just last night I discovered Drupal. I installed it on my webserver to try it out, and I can tell you that the installation process is nowhere near as nice an experience as Joomla's. Other than that, I can't tell you much about Drupal because it took me too long to get the thing running, but it looks very promising.
in closing, I too believe Joomla will get this award, and I think it is well deserved.
Re:Mambo will get it (Score:1)
http://civicspacelabs.org/home/differences [civicspacelabs.org]
Re:Mambo will get it (Score:1)
Re:Mambo will get it (Score:4, Insightful)
The big problem with Mambo is that the security model is too simplistic. Thus products such as DocMan have to role their own ACL system. This is bad, because a CMS should allow you to manage users orthagonally to applications that run on it.
WordPress? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:WordPress? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:WordPress? (Score:3, Insightful)
Considering the plethera of OS plugins available, I'd be hard pressed to think of something that *can't* be done using WordPress.
Re:WordPress? (Score:2)
Re:WordPress? (Score:2)
It can manage different roles, it is not brilliant at handling media files, it can not do work flow management.
It is flexible - the site in my sig runs on Wordpress.
It is a CMS, it is just oriented towards blogs. It is not an enterprise CMS but the competition rules do not say it has to be.
Re:WordPress? (Score:2)
Just because it can be done doesn't make WordPress a full blown CMS. It wasn't meant for it and it would require quite a bit of work to be made into one. Off the top of my head, it lacks an elegant and complete I18N solution, it doesn't have a fully integrated file manager, it doesn't have a way of refering its own pages and posts consistently (ie. similar to eznode:// in ez Publ
Re:WordPress? (Score:1)
Additionally, the backend of Wordpress is quite impressive. The point and click ease of accessing the h
who can submit it? (Score:5, Informative)
It really is a great open source CMS...just not mine
Re:who can submit it? (Score:2)
You can change a single character and submit it :p
This raises a question: when a fork stops being "a fork" and starts being something totally separate?
In a majority of Free Software projects, never. And, to cloud things up, usually you have thousands on thousands of small pieces of code from elsewhere. And this is good; good for anything but this particular flawed
Re:who can submit it? (Score:2)
Re:who can submit it? (Score:2)
My point isn't that unheard of, though. For real-life examples, what about Ubuntu vs Debian? Ubuntu folks put a good deal of work into desktop integration, and have a tremendous following among desktop users. In fact, a load of uninformed people here on
Re:who can submit it? Rules and slash (Score:5, Informative)
What's more curious is, from the rules: "3. The five open source Content Management Systems with the most nominations will go through to the final 4. The top three will be voted for by a panel of three judges. A final fourth vote will come from the results of a public vote on www.PacktPub.com."
So it seems the number of nominations matters a lot in case of this award, which doesn't necessarily promote quality over popularity.
I also wonder if slashcode itself [slashcode.com] should be amongst the runners. Slashcode isn't really widely used for various reasons (e.g. installation, perl development, features) and it's not like if 5000$ would make any difference to slash developers (I'm wrong?). Which makes me ask what are the requisite features a CMS must have to be considered a CMS. Agreeing on some definitions would be useful for such a contest.
Re:who can submit it? Rules and slash (Score:2)
50,000,000 Elvis fans can't be wrong.
There's a lot of competition then (Score:3, Informative)
easy to pick the best (Score:5, Informative)
from 606! open source CMS systems to choose from
http://www.cmsmatrix.org/ [cmsmatrix.org]
dont ever think that OSS doesnt give you a choice
and choice is good right ?
Re:easy to pick the best (Score:2, Informative)
Re:easy to pick the best (Score:3, Interesting)
I've been back to the site a few times to check out the state of the CMS-space, but I still rank Drupal, Xoops, Joomla/Mambo, and MODx at the top.
This is really dumb. (Score:1, Informative)
No, it's slave labor. (Score:2)
Actually, it's worse than slave labor. A slave master has to feed and clothe his slaves, and keep a roof over their heads.
In the real world, an enterprise-worthy CMS might cost easily several million in upfront R&D [anywhere from 10 to 50 man-years worth of labor, just to get to the "alpha" stage, with a total compensation package of easily $200,000 per man per year], and that's before you start regression testing and then moving to something you might call a "beta" version.
$5,000 is roughly what o
I wonder.. (Score:1)
Re:I wonder.. (Score:1)
I Favor Xoops (Score:5, Funny)
* "HAHA! Stupid contestant, your version of Tomcat is incompatible! Your punishment is having to wipe your machine and start over!" Which would be bloody close to what kept happening in real life, too, since after you botched an install of the thing the quickest way to get the next install working without causing compatibility issues was to reinstall Linux from CD.
Re:I Favor Xoops (Score:2, Funny)
Parameters? (Score:5, Insightful)
Many CMSes (both open and closed source) fail on issues that really matter, like:
Rich.
Re:Parameters? (Score:1)
Re:Parameters? (Score:2)
Yes, we spent quite a bit of time attempting to configure it, and eventually gave up. Anyhow, we have our own CMS now (doesn't everyone :-?) which does some interesting stuff,
like integrating with Google Adwords, keyword suggestion,
reading age suggestion, SEO suggestions, etc.
Rich.
Re:Parameters? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Parameters? (Score:1)
Re:Parameters? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Parameters? (Score:1)
Re:Parameters? (Score:2)
However, a lot of this is down to the templates used rather than the core functionality of the CMS. And a lot of it is down to people using Photoshop to produce the graphical layout and then slicing the image.
Re:Parameters? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Parameters? (Score:2, Informative)
Great, simple and flexible. CMS + Smarty + CSS == a win for me!
Re:Parameters? (Score:3, Insightful)
If you judge a tool by what you are able to build with it then I'd have to give some respect to PHP despite prefering ruby and python.
Re:Parameters? (Score:2)
I find this aspect of PHP really interesting. Given a chance, I'd much rather be working in Python, but honestly, all the cool free software web apps -- not just cool as in cool computer science-y features, but cool as in this really makes my work easier, better, richer -- seem to be written in PHP. Those are primarily WordPress, Gallery2, Drupal, and MediaWiki. My hypothesis is that in the past ten or fifteen years, a good number of people have seem various problems that they wanted to solve with a web
Re:Parameters? (Score:2)
I used to bash PHP, but today I consider it a usefull tool. It's dirty and simple, and you can quickly resolve many problems with it. But for big projects I still prefer the Java+Tomcat+Spring combo.
Re:Parameters? (Score:2)
That merely proves the tool is not broken. Once you expand your criteria of judgement, PHP starts looking worse.
Re:Parameters? (Score:2)
It does exactly what I need and only what I need. No compromises anywhere.
It took me a few weeks to code from scratch; that's less time than it took me to test & pick my previous 3rd party CMS and FAR less time than it took to add the features I needed in the CMS I ended up with.
I may have to change some PHP code if I want to change certain generated contents, but atleast I don't have to use an obfuscated system to end up with a half-finished workaround.
Re:Parameters? (Score:2)
That one leaves a lot of variables. What is easy?
We hired a web developer that considered anything involving the command line to be "hard to install".
He refused to use Drupal and tried to force us to use E107. He only answer to why E107 was the best choice was. It was easier.
As to what are the parameters of a good CMS?
I would like to add some.
1. Secure.
2. Fully documented.
3. Isn't tied to a single database.
4. Can scale well.
Druapl seems to take security seriously but I
I've never met a CMS... (Score:5, Insightful)
As a professional, I've very rarely seen clients who want a CMS ever actually use them the way they're intended. They either contract back to the developer to maintain their own projects or they spiral into development hell.
To often, the idea of a CMS far outweigh's their reality, simple HTML/CSS with a few lessons in the basics of editing often end up cheaper and more effective than deploying and maintaining the cheapest OSS title
Re:I've never met a CMS... (Score:2)
-1, Drupal (Score:2)
Re:I've never met a CMS... (Score:2)
If you've got a good framework, you can quickly build an application that does what the client want's it to do (and no more!), rather then going through the process of customising an application so it kinda fits their needs, but never really quite gets there.
If you havn't tried out Rails or Django yet I'd really recommend it - I was playing with Django over the weekend, and it features an admin system which far exceeds Ra
Re:I've never met a CMS... (Score:2)
Scaffolding is not an admin system. Why the hell does everyone, without fail, pick scaffolding to compare to? You could have simply stated that Django has a nice admin system which Rails is lacking.
and allows customisation without having to rip it all out and start again.
Scaffolding is there to be ripped out once you get going. That's why it's called scaffolding.
Re:I've never met a CMS... (Score:2)
(and for the record, I've been developing with Rails for 18 months now)
Drupal geets my vote (Score:2, Informative)
Documentation! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Documentation! (Score:2)
Re:Documentation! (Score:1)
Slash (Score:2)
Simplicity (Score:2, Redundant)
I hope they factor in the practical flexibility of a given CMS. I've tried Drupal [drupal.org], Typo3 [typo3.org], and Mambo [mamboserver.com]/Joomla [joomla.org]. With all of them, you can usually tell which CMS a site uses, e.g. a Drupal site looks like a Drupal site. This is less true for Typo3 and Mambo/Joomla, I think, but admittedly I no longer have any Drupal sites set up (just Typo3 and Mambo, as far as OSS CMS software goes).
And let's talk about average users and training. The Typo3 interface is very frustrating to most of my end-users. Mambo, on
Re:Simplicity (Score:2)
Don't confuse stylistic influence with capability. Drupal (and other platforms) have a family of prebuilt templates that were designed by a small group of people whose work influenced each other's.
There is nothing in the platform that says a site has to have any particular look, as evidenced by sites as varied as The Onion, [theonlion.com] BroadbandSports, [broadbandsports.com] Ruby Baboon [rubybaboon.com] and SavannahNow [savannahnow.com] all coming out of the same core tec
Re:Simplicity (Score:2)
"Don't confuse stylistic influence with capability... There is nothing in the platform that says a site has to have any particular look.
First: admittedly, you are right -- people who take a lot of time to work with Drupal will get something different. However, the vast majority of Drupal sites do not stray outside the prebuilt Drupal design mindset, and this is true for Typo3 and Mambo as well. (This might not be a complaint about CMSs... maybe it's a complaint about the people who use CMSs.)
Second:
Easiest Perl CMS? (Score:2)
Basically, my problem is:
I have a bunch of Perl scripts that do various things. I need to be able to control access to those scripts to registered (paying) users and I need to be able to pass some kind of userID to my Perl scripts so that what one user does is separated from what another user does - and so they can maintain their own data.
The system needs to be able to display a bunch of HTML forms so the users can select options to feed to the scrip
Re:Easiest Perl CMS? (Score:1)
The Debian Administration [debian-adm...ration.org] website is written in Perl, and the code [debian-adm...ration.org] is available. Might be tricky for people to install, especially on non-Debian hosts, but it is simple, secure, and reliable.
It is also insanely easy to manage.
It doesn't have different payment types, but it does support community adverts, user accounts, articles, polls, weblogs, etc.
Re:Easiest Perl CMS? (Score:2)
Re:Easiest Perl CMS? (Score:1)
The Best CMS Is... (Score:2)
Bob
PMWiki ain't bad (Score:2)
Scalability (Score:2)
Daily WTF on CMS (Score:2)
has kept it anonymous!
From that page:
"It didn't take too long for Bryan to figure it out. Being a Web 2.0 system, the CMS used JavaScript that dynamically loaded JavaScript that dynamically loaded XML that was dynamically transformed into proprietary commands that were parsed to dynamically execute JavaScript to dynamically load content."
There isn't one... (Score:2)
For the last two years, I've been looking for a Unified Content Management System (I've even tried to submit questions about finding one to ask.slashdot.org but they've been rejected). The specifics of our site is that we need a News Blog which supports user comments and slashdot style moderation, a discussion forum, a wiki, an events calendar, email lists management, and a shopping cart/e-commerce software. All of this needs to have a unified login and unified graph
Re:There isn't one... (Score:3, Insightful)
LDAP
Re:There isn't one... (Score:1)
Re:There isn't one... (Score:2)
Given all the requirements you listed, of course you're going to need a complex, dinamical CMS. Be realistic now.
A CMS that is able to do anythi
Re:There isn't one... (Score:2)
MediaWiki and Drupal will not perform at their best unless you have one.
If you have mostly static pages and Drupal's caching is still too slow then a) you're doing something wrong/your site is enormous or b) look at reverse proxies like Squid. Fairly simple to set up.
Important Real Live CMS Features: (Score:2, Insightful)
While most CMS system work well in monolingual environments, the real challenge is the multilingual use. That starts with correct browser language detection, goes further with solving the character set complications for output & input, continues with taking care for multilingual people, and finally ends at providing a choice of language in case of not translated parts. Most CMS I came
Re:Important Real Live CMS Features: (Score:2)
Typo3 [typo3.org] is quite possibly exactly what you are looking for. It is enterprise-grade [3ds.com] quality, it was designed to be multilingual [3ds.com] from day one, it has a sophisticated caching system and check out TemplaVoila [194.117.233.66] for templating/theming (the video is very short and may not give you a sense of its power). Security awareness has gone up recently as extensions [typo3.org] are now audited for security holes.
A quick overview of features [typo3.com] and tutorial videos [typo3.org] may help you get a feel for what Typo3 can offer in a CMS.
As with most thi
Enterprise WCMS? (Score:2, Insightful)
If you want to try them before voting... (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.opensourcecms.com/ [opensourcecms.com]
Surprised nobody has mentioned that site yet. You get to try them as demos which are reset every two hours or so.
Re:If you want to try them before voting... (Score:1)
Typo3 (Score:2)
Enterprise-grade functionality. Many mega-companies like Dassault Systemes in France and Volkswagon in Germany use it. Very powerful, very flexible and very complex. If you like Firefox because of extensions then typo3's (thousands) of extensions will appeal to you.
It's very popular in Europe and is getting some legs here in the US. Check it out at http://typo3.org [typo3.org]
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Typo3 (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Typo3 (Score:1)
Re:Typo3 (Score:2)
Why would it, you ask. Because that's the supreme form of "eat your own dog food" a CMS can offer. Having it's own administration interface implemented as a site built on top of its own CMS engine, or having everything, down to user accounts, implemented as objects within the same CMS engine.
I mean, if it's a really good CMS it should be able to implement any site, right? So why not its own administration?
There are bootstrapped CMS engines out there. Look for them.
Out of curiousity... (Score:2)
I'm interested in the management features and such, but I don't want dynamic stuff on the server.
I am aware of the multitude of template libraries for all kinds of languages, and I've been piecing one together based on that, although it'll never be useful for anyone else. I was just curious if there was anybody who already filled this niche. If it's out there I can't f
Typo3, Joomla, ... (Score:3, Informative)
Typo3 can switch to static documents very easyly. Joomla needs a little tweaking, iirc. As far as I know most of the current OSS CMS support generation of static content. It's the easyiest way to enable a cheap and easy means of caching.
Re:Out of curiousity... (Score:1)
Security?! (Score:2)
Re:Security?! (Score:1)
Xoops should win (Score:2)
all of the features, good community support, and actually installed and worked fairly straight forward was Xoops. Nothing else even came close or was in the same ballbark.
eZ Publish (Score:1)
In the past I've used Textpattern, Mambo, Joomla, Etomite, Typo3, Sharepoint, and a few others, and eZ Publish dominates them all.
It is a real *content* management system - not article management (with title, body text, etc.). You can set up different content classes with your own editable fields and customize various views for displaying the information.
What I find amazing is that the entire back-end administration is built
Re:eZ Publish (Score:1)
What, pray tell, does the "eZ" in the name stand for? I've never used eZ Publish, so I'm not knocking this product, but am I the only one who is sick and tired of systems that claim to be "easy" or "intuitive" but really aren't?
I remember coming close to smashing several early Macintoshes in frustration trying to do simple things. Hint: if you have to learn the intuitive way to do something it ISN'T intuitive. If there's a steep learning curve it ISN'T easy.
I thi
Re:eZ Publish (Score:1)
Perhaps somebody can testify as to whether it is ez-ier to implement than a comparable commercial CMS?
Does anyone else think this is a bad sign? (Score:1)
So, the story amounts to somebody wanting to bring attention to Open Source CMSes, and the fact that there's ANY MONEY INVOLVED AT ALL, is enough to attract attention in the Open Source world.
Doesn't this seem sad to anyone else?
Useless without a definition (Score:2)
Without defining what a CMS is, this is like saying, "We'd like to give some Open Source project that does something with websites $5k".
Defining what a CMS is is not an easy job. Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] doesn't even have a good definition. The best you can hope for to define one as a set of features, and any system that can do those features, is, for your definition of a CMS.
Synergiser (Score:1)
rm (Score:1)
Re:And the winner is... (Score:1)
For now, we'll all have to settle for just finding out which CMS has the most name recognition.
Re:submit nominations (Score:2)
_ Mambo
_ Joomla
_ Drupal
_ Wordpress
_ Whatever CoyboyNeal uses