Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

$5000 Award for Open Source CMS 127

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the gauntlets-thrown dept.
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."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

$5000 Award for Open Source CMS More

$5000 Award for Open Source CMS

Comments Filter:

  • Mambo will get it (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    because everybody likes Mambo. It's got a good UI but the backend frankly kinda sucks - simple things become extremely cumbersome.
    • "Joomla will get it"

      There, fixed it for you!

      • Re:Mambo will get it (Score:4, Interesting)

        by neersign ( 956437 ) on Monday July 24, 2006 @08:23AM (#15768610)

        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.

        • Try out CivicSpace if you want a simple install process. It's a Drupal distribution designed for the NGO/Activist world so it does a lot of handholding and is very automated. It's basically regular Drupal plus a custom set of modules and themes and the fancy installer. Here they explain the differences between CivicSpace and vanilla Drupal:

          http://civicspacelabs.org/home/differences [civicspacelabs.org]

    • Re:Mambo will get it (Score:4, Insightful)

      by hey! ( 33014 ) on Monday July 24, 2006 @09:54AM (#15769219) Homepage Journal
      Well, one of the main things to consider is the availability of products for a CMS platform. Mambo has an active developer community producing interesting products.

      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)

    by Supersonic1425 ( 903823 )
    WordPress [wordpress.org] is a very competent open source CMS.

    • Re:WordPress? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Well, no, it's a blogging system, not a CMS. Maybe a type of CMS, not a generic CMS.

    • Re:WordPress? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Zaphod2016 ( 971897 )
      Some people consider WordPress "blogware" and not a CMS. To them I say: to-may-to, to-mah-to.

      Considering the plethera of OS plugins available, I'd be hard pressed to think of something that *can't* be done using WordPress.
      • I think WordPress considers WordPress to be "blogware". I haven't used it much (i.e. at all), but can it manage collaboration between many people with varying security roles, who throw in various kinds of media (images, video, audio, documents, presentations, etc.)? Can it do workflow management? I think a multi-thousand employee company would want to do more than read each other's blogs.
        • No, Wordpress is a CMS oriented towards blogs but which can manage small sites quite nicely.

          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.

      • Considering the plethera of OS plugins available, I'd be hard pressed to think of something that *can't* be done using WordPress.

        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

      • Having spent the better part of the last several weeks seeking a good blogware/CMS, and having lived through Drupal implementation and suffering its shortfalls for the last six months, I've been very happy with our recent installation of Wordpress. Things which we were not easily able to do via Drupal such as audio, video, easy image integration have all been solved with instant easy with Wordpress.

        Additionally, the backend of Wordpress is quite impressive. The point and click ease of accessing the h

  • who can submit it? (Score:5, Informative)

    by agent dero ( 680753 ) on Monday July 24, 2006 @06:24AM (#15768359) Homepage
    I'm not a developer on the project or anything...but can I go ahead and submit Drupal [drupal.org] :)

    It really is a great open source CMS...just not mine ;)

    • I'm not a developer on the project or anything...but can I go ahead and submit Drupal :)

      It really is a great open source CMS...just not mine ;)

      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

      • Yes, this flawed contest, which is based on votes. Because everyone is going to vote on your 'Drupal + 1 character from unofficial dude' instead of 'The Official Drupal Team Presents: Drupal'.
        • What I mentioned, was the most extreme case, intentionally ridiculous.

          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 /. call Debian "irrelevant" and "obsolete", even though Ubuntu intentionally remains nothing but Debian with some eye-candy added. The squablings between the two projects are very mino
    • FTA: "If you're a fan of a particular CMS or if you're part of a CMS project team, then we're looking for your nominations."

      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.

  • easy to pick the best (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24, 2006 @06:27AM (#15768364)

    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 ?

    • That site compares all CMS, not just open source. It isn't even very easy to tell which ones are FOSS systems.
    • A much better site to compare CMS's is OpenSourceCMS.com [opensourcecms.com]. They're all OpenSource and PHP-based, which is many, but you won't find Plone and some others there. At least you can do a live demo of them all without having to localinstall it first, and you can view the popularity ratings.

      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)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The summary made it sound as if this is a bounty for producing an OSS CMS according to some criteria. But reading the award rules [packtpub.com], this is just a popularity contest. Nominate one CMS which you think should win some money for doing nothing and the rest is up to Packt.

    • 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
  • What CMS will they be using to manage all the information coming in from the voters? Can one consider it being a biased vote then?

  • I Favor Xoops (Score:5, Funny)

    by patio11 ( 857072 ) on Monday July 24, 2006 @06:30AM (#15768372)
    I had to review something like a dozen of these for work last year (the technology incubator I work at went on a blogging kick and tried to pitch the idea to all of our client companies). Xoops was far and away my favorite, mostly because it was one of the only ones I could get working in under an hour. It also had an attractive layout out of the box and had modules for blogs/forums/news posts, which were essentially everything our clients had on their wishlists. Installing RedHatCMS, by comparison, is painful enough to be the subject of a Japanese game show* except the episode would have to last about three weeks.

    * "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.
    • 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.
      Looks like Linux is ready for the desktop !

  • Parameters? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Richard W.M. Jones ( 591125 ) <{rich} {at} {annexia.org}> on Monday July 24, 2006 @06:36AM (#15768380) Homepage
    What are the parameters for a good CMS?

    Many CMSes (both open and closed source) fail on issues that really matter, like:

    • Not having stupid URLs like /cms.cgi?pageid=1234
    • Putting lots of <table>s in the layout rather than using semantic markup
    • Putting page content too late in the page so search engines have to work harder to find it, or generally being unfriendly to robots
    • Not setting page metadata usefully
    • Not including accessibility features like access keys, forcing ALT text, jump to navigation
    • Not providing stylesheets for different @media
    • Not integrating well with analysis tools so you can see where people are coming from, what they do, whether your visitors are going up or down, are they reading the pages you think they should be reading, etc.
    • Speed
    • Ease of configuration (hello, Plone)
    • Providing workflow which is either too difficult to set up, or too complicated to understand for the users, or over/under-kill for the requirements of the site

    Rich.

    • Uh, did you eve *really* try plone? YES: * Not having stupid URLs like /cms.cgi?pageid=1234 YES: * Putting lots of s in the layout rather than using semantic markup YES (in-page link "jump to content"): * Putting page content too late in the page so search engines have to work harder to find it, or generally being unfriendly to robots YES: * Not setting page metadata usefully YES: * Not including accessibility features like access keys, forcing ALT text, jump to navigation YES (with plugin)
      • Uh, did you eve *really* try plone?

        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)

          by afd8856 ( 700296 )
          I dare say that it took you probably more time to write your own CMS than to properly learn Plone.
        • As I said, we hired someone (actually a company) to customize it, write some custom workflow and special document types, everything relativly easy and we were done. It's now running for nearly 3 years, 1 admin, 1projectmanager, 4 main-editors and nearly 250-basic-authors (2000pages). No problems so far, nearly no running costs.

    • Re:Parameters? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Rekolitus ( 899752 )
      Some of my own:
      • Having to go to extensive measures to convince the CMS that you want to add a static page, no, not a news item
      • Hard-coded HTML within the CMS itself
      • Bloated core (features that not everyone will need implemented in the core, not a plugin/module/etc)
      • Bloated default installation (I want a content management system, not a "community" management system, and 99% of my website visitors don't need to see a login form)
      • CMSes that simply don't give you enough control over what HTML is out
    • Some extremely good points, especially about accessibility.

      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)

      by bytesex ( 112972 )
      Which is strange, because the mother of all CMSs, which also comes in a web-based form, has been around for so long. All they'd have to do is copy this [ibm.com].

    • Re:Parameters? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Martz ( 861209 )
      CMSMS (CMS Made Simple) http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/ [cmsmadesimple.org] ... is the only CMS I've found which does exactly what I want, without overcluttering the entire admin cp or that requires a year of learning.

      Great, simple and flexible. CMS + Smarty + CSS == a win for me!

      • Re:Parameters? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by killjoe ( 766577 )
        You know it's interesting. People bash PHP all day long and yet people are able to make some really cool web sites with it. I am not a great fan of PHP but I have to say that wordpress, drupal, cmsmadesimple, gforge etc are all pretty amazing, mature and robust systems built by pretty smart people using this language that everybody loves to hate.

        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.

        • 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

        • PHP has one great feature, it's dead simple to deploy it. Just enable mod-php on Apache and you're ready to go... Ruby and Python require more work, and they're not as avaliable as PHP.

          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.
        • If you judge a tool by what you are able to build with it then I'd have to give some respect to PHP

          That merely proves the tool is not broken. Once you expand your criteria of judgement, PHP starts looking worse.
    • That's why I built my own CMS.

      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.
    • "Ease of configuration (hello, Plone)"
      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)

    by onosendai ( 79294 ) <oliyoung.gmail@com> on Monday July 24, 2006 @06:44AM (#15768398)
    ..that I actually liked

    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

    .. saying that, +1 Drupal. Well designed, nice architecture, decent documentation and great user-base, the four horseman of a decent CMS.
    • The fact that there are ten thousand CMS packages out there tells me that everybody has different needs is are trying their best to scratch their itches. I don't think you can get five people in a room and get them to agree to what a CMS is supposed to do in the first place.
    • If there's a security issue, you need to upgrade. So I would put ease of upgrade first on the list. Dumped drupal after a failed upgrade. Of course, the fact that it was overkill for my needs helped a lot in that decision.
    • It's for that reason that frameworks are much more important then fully developed CMSs.

      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
      • I was playing with Django over the weekend, and it features an admin system which far exceeds Rails' scaffolding

        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.
        • I whole heartedly agree, Frameworks > CMS and thus I'll always suggest a custom designed framework over a cookie cutter CMS everyday.

          (and for the record, I've been developing with Rails for 18 months now)

  • Drupal geets my vote (Score:2, Informative)

    by Aminion ( 896851 )
    I have been pleasently surprised by Drupal. It is very easy to manage and extend, you get tons of functionality by using well developed modules, customizing its themes is easy and it has great i18n support. Drupal lately seems to have become the favorite open source CMS on the market and thereby increasing the number of developers working on it and people who can help you out.

  • Documentation! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by massysett ( 910130 ) on Monday July 24, 2006 @06:56AM (#15768422) Homepage
    I hope the contest rewards documentation! A CMS is not a simple beast, yet the systems I have examined (I remember Joomla and its predecessors, in particular) were not well documented. The best docs I could find for Joomla was some tutorial posted by a user in a phpBB forum. A great CMS isn't too useful if it can't be figured out because there are no docs.
    • I recently used Website Baker [websitebaker.org] on a website I developed and I was pleasantly surprised by the ease of use and documentation [websitebaker.org].
    • FYI, there are now several printed (!) books on Mambo/Joomla:
      • Building Websites With Mambo : A fast paced introductory tutorial by Hagen Graf
      • Building Websites With Joomla!: A step by step tutorial to getting your Joomla! CMS website up fast by Hagen Graf
      • Mastering Mambo: E-Commerce, Templates, Module Development, SEO, Security, and Performance by Tobias Hauser and Christian Wenz
      • Mambo: Your visual blueprint for building and maintaining Web sites with the Mambo Open Source CMS by Ric Shreves

  • Slash (Score:2)

    by ettlz ( 639203 )
    There you go!

  • Simplicity (Score:2, Redundant)

    by Dekortage ( 697532 )

    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

    • With all of them, you can usually tell which CMS a site uses, e.g. a Drupal site looks like a Drupal site.

      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

      • "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:

  • I have a project I'm working on and need a Perl based CMS.

    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

    • 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.

    • I liked the use of TWiki at my last company. I liked it so much I use it for my own personal CMS (on virtual linux hosted webspace at linode.com).
  • ...the one you write specifically for the project you're working on. It has all the features you need, doesn't have all the bloat of the stuff you don't need, and is easily tailorable to the usecases required in your spec.

    Bob
  • For a light weight PHP-based (ugh, I know, but every hosting service supports it and it's really easy to whip up plug-ins) wiki, it's hard to beat PMWiki [pmwiki.org]. Their default template is XHTML too, which is nice.
  • I hope they require it to work adequately in a high-performance clustered environment in order to win the prize. Every open source CMS I've worked with falls apart in such environments. Moveable Type, for example, requires some nasty rsyncing, generates several times as much backend traffic as it does front-end traffic and won't perform its read-only actions against a separate replica database server. Its performance blows chunks.
  • I'd love to nominate this CMS [thedailywtf.com] but the author
    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 really isn't a perfect CMS yet.

    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

    • one word
      LDAP

    • For the last two years, I've been looking for a Unified Content Management System[..] The closest I've come to something that is a Unified Content Management System is Drupal. However, it lacks the slashdot style moderation. It also seems overly complex to install, setup, and admin. Finally the biggest problem is that all of its pages are dynamically generated.[..]

      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

    • Might be a silly question, but are you running a PHP cache? You can't start asking performance questions unless you are.

      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.
  • 1) Real multilingual Support for all modules/themes/blocks - at least the core system must provide that out of the box

    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

    • 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)

    by dkuntze ( 867585 )
    The problem is there is too many applications out there that call themselves Content Management Systems. They really need to be reclassified to reflect their capabilities, etc... I'm more partial to enterprise-grade content management. There are a couple of open source apps, in my mind, that could apply: www.alfresco.com -- managed by a group of ex documentum and Interwoven people. www.opencms.com
  • Without having to install.

    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.

  • 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]

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • FYI the rendering of menus can be configured with typoscipt and is fully adaptable. The parents comment is equivalent to: That car sucks because its red.
        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • Comment removed based on user account deletion
            • The menu thing was a false assumption on my part, and yes the default rendering from the content module will turn your stomach. But the rendering of content elements can easily be switched to css styled rendering. The default behaviour is probably preserved for compatibility reasons. (But this is again a assumption on my part). And rest assured no one will recommend a table to render a simple list these days. Btw I think the site you are refering to has no official ties to typo3 at the moment. http://lists [netfielders.de]
    • Ah, but is Typo3 bootstrapped onto itself?

      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.
  • Since we're on the topic: Does anyone know of a CMS that does CMS-y things, but renders out to static pages that can be uploaded to any host?

    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)

      by Qbertino ( 265505 )
      Since we're on the topic: Does anyone know of a CMS that does CMS-y things, but renders out to static pages that can be uploaded to any host?

      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.
    • If you really want a pure static site that you upload, instead of a CMS why not just use something like Dreamweaver.. you can put together a nicely consistent site via its templates and library items, and it will output a completely static site. (It will have some HTML comments for template markup, but yuo can strip these out during export if you want)
  • Does anyone think that security is an issue? Some of the OSS CMS out there are truly scary in this respect.
  • I played around with about 10 or 11 CMS systems last year. The only one that had
    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.
  • Hands down the best open source content management system out there is "eZ Publish".

    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
    • "It does have a steep learning curve, ..."

      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
      • To their credit, they do claim that they are an "Enterprise" system.

        Perhaps somebody can testify as to whether it is ez-ier to implement than a comparable commercial CMS?
  • The sums involved here are so small that it doesn't make any difference in terms of compensating any development effort.

    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?

  • 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 (http://synergiser.symcube.com/ [symcube.com]) is rather immature but shows promise - and doesn't need fancy SQL or anything like that, just a webserver with apache, unzip and php.
  • I use to work at Enron. My favourite CMS is "rm".

Slashdot Top Deals

Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle. -- Steinbach

Close