Skip to main content

Open source CMS evaluations

I have now seen three more or less serious open source CMS reviews.

First guy to hit the field was Matt Raible (1 2 3 4), ending up with Drupal, Joomla, Magnolia, OpenCms and MeshCMS being runner-ups.

Then there is OpenAdvantage that tries out a handful (Drupal, Exponent CMS, Lenya, Mambo, and Silva), including Plone which they use for their own site (funny/annoying that the entire site has no RSS-feeds, nor is it possible to comment on the articles), following Matt's approach by exluding many CMS that seem not to fit the criteria. It is somewhat strange that OpenAdvantage cuts away Magnolia because it "Requires J2EE server; difficult to install and configure; more of a framework than CMS", and proceed to include Apache Lenya in the full evaluation. Magnolia does not require a J2EE server. It runs on Tomcat just like Lenya does (maybe it's an idea to bundle Magnolia with Jetty to make it seem more lightweight). I'm still sure that OpenAdvantage would 'fail' Magnolia for being too complicated as Matt did.

All websites have a different need, and these two evaluators value ease of setup, use and design-modification (not functional modification). A more enterprise-ish review has been done by Optaros, evaluating for different website needs (brochure, periodical, collaboration, wiki and community). Elegant observation:

Open source content management software is most frequently used in small to medium sized web sites with very common requirements (such as corporate identity websites and departmental intranet sites or online magazines rather than large product websites with hundreds of thousands of pages) and as a foundation for building unique, highly-customized solutions (such as Amazon.com which uses open source components such as Perl, MySQL, and the Mason templating engine).
The paper provides an in-depth evaluation of three or four CMS'es in each of the five categories. I am left with the feeling that the landscape of Java-CMS'es are very far behind the other ones, but still I would prefer to work with a Java-based CMS as it is my language of choice, and because I've fallen pretty much in love the the Java Content Repository. Nonetheless, the paper is an excellent starting point for a small or medium-sized business considering an open source CMS. I wonder if there is a common content repository interface (not Java-dependant). Jackrabbit has (or are on their way to) implemented a PHP-interface for their repository (but still no .net, perl, ruby and python interfaces). In the mean time the closest you get to platform independant content is a database (which is not so good).


Comments

  1. Anonymous30/1/06 06:36

    the observations in your post about Magnolia are true to some extent. However, its strong point is that it supports JSR 170.
    Have you looked at ALfresco and OpenCMS yet?

    check this url for some of my comments on open source products - http://www.apoorv.info/index.php/category/open-source/

    ReplyDelete
  2. tfnico30/1/06 09:29

    Thanks for the comment! I've already been subscribing to your blog for 3 weeks, mind :)

    From what I've read about Alfresco it does not really constitute a web CMS. It's more of the file-system kind, or DAM system.

    I would be biased towards Magnolia since we have been working with it for half a year, we did a review of different CMS back then. OpenCms is still a very valid option for us, but unfortunately they use activeX components for their WYSIWYG. Can't be the biggest job in the world to fix, but until then I'm staying clear.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous30/1/06 11:50

    You are right about Alfresco. It's more of document management. On top of it, it's still in version 1.

    About OpenCMS, i didn't know about the activex bit. But we've recently used it for a project and it works with firefox as well as IE. Also, in case if it is helpful, they've recently integrated FCKEditor [1]. I have no clue how good or bad it is though.

    Oh and btw, i don't work with Alkacon ;-) It's just that i've played around with opencms recently.

    I've also heard good things also about magnolia. Apart from the initial setup and stuff like that, i think it's a decent product. All the best with your evaluation.

    [1] http://www.opencms.org/opencms/en/download/modules/index.html

    ReplyDelete
  4. tfnico30/1/06 13:23

    FCKEditor should do the trick. In fact it is the same default editor that is used with Magnolia :)

    It is also possible to plug other editors into Magnolia, Kupu for instance.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous27/7/06 01:20

    Hello Thom. Just came across your comments on our CMS article. Just to clarify my reasoning behind the Magnolia/Lenya split, I favoured Lenya (at the time) purely because of the Apache backing. There wasn't much to choose between them (as far as I remember), but I felt that endorsement as an Apache project gave some weight to Lenya. As far as I can tell, Lenya has slipped from the limelight somewhat, and there's a good chance Magnolia is now a better choice, as it seems to have a more active community.

    I still stand by my other decisions, and would personally favour Plone, Joomla! and Drupal as excellent solutions. I fear that Java-based solutions, while excellent and scalable, are still too heavyweight for most of the situations my clients find themselves in. When a more heavyweight solution is required, I feel Plone to be an excellent fit.

    The point you made about our website lacking comment facilities is a good one, and I'll have a word with our director to see whether it's possible for us to switch these on. Your point about RSS is well-taken too.

    ReplyDelete
  6. tfnico28/7/06 15:17

    Thanks for your comment, Elliot. It is very hard to say one particular CMS is better than another. As you say, we have to rely on our customers' needs, and choose accordingly.

    Lenya seems to be quite active still, but I'm not sure I would trust the quality of software merely because its Apache top level project status. I just spent some minutes playing around with their demo. It looks nice, but I don't find the UI that intuitive to use, and there are a lot of unstable features (editing, searching, publishing).

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Git tools for keeping patches on top of moving upstreams

At work, we maintain patches for some pretty large open source repositories that regularly release new versions, forcing us to update our patches to match. So far, we've been using basic Git operations to transplant our modifications from one major version of the upstream to the next. Every time we make such a transplant, we simply squash together the modifications we made in the previous version, and land it as one big commit into the next version. Those who are used to very stringent keeping of Git history may wrinkle their nose at this, but it is a pragmatic choice. Maintaining modifications on top of the rapidly changing upstream is a lot of work, and so far we haven't had the opportunity to figure out a more clever way to do it. Nor have we really suffered any consequences of not having an easy to read history of our modifications - it's a relatively small amount of patches, after all. With a recent boost in team size, we may have that opportunity. Also the need for be...
1 comment
Read more

The Git Users Mailing List

A year ago or so, I came across the Git-user mailing list (aka. "Git for human beings"). Over the year, I grew a little addicted to helping people out with their Git problems. When the new git-scm.com webpage launched , and the link to the mailing list had disappeared, I was quick to ask them to add it again . I think this mailing list fills an important hole in the Git community between: The Git developer mailing list git@vger.kernel.org  - which I find to be a bit too hard-core and scary for Git newbies. Besides, the Majordomo mailing list system is pretty archaic, and I personally can't stand browsing or searching in the Gmane archives. The IRC channel #git on Freenode, which is a bit out-of-reach for people who never experienced the glory days of IRC. Furthermore, when the channel is busy, it's a big pain to follow any discussion. StackOverflow questions tagged git , these come pretty close, but it's a bit hard to keep an overview of what questio...
Post a Comment
Read more

Git-SVN Mirror without the annoying update-ref

This post is part of  a series on Git and Subversion . To see all the related posts, screencasts and other resources, please  click here .  So no sooner than I had done my git-svn presentation at JavaZone , I got word of a slightly different Git-SVN mirror setup that makes it a bit easier to work with: In short, my old recipe includes an annoying git update-ref step to keep the git-svn remote reference up to date with the central bare git repo. This new recipe avoids this, so we can simply use git svn dcommit   directly. So, longer version, with the details. My original recipe is laid out in five steps: Clone a fresh Git repo from Subversion. This will be our  fetching repo. Set up a  bare repo. Configure pushing from the fetching repo to bare repo In the shoes of a developer, clone the repo Set up an SVN remote in the developer's repo In the new approach, we redefine those last two steps: (See the original post for how to do the fir...
17 comments
Read more

Git Stash Blooper (Could not restore untracked files from stash)

The other day I accidentally did a git stash -a , which means it stashes *everything*, including ignored output files (target, build, classes, etc). Ooooops.. What I meant to do was git stash -u , meaning stash modifications plus untracked new files. Anyhows, I ended up with a big fat stash I couldn't get back out. Each time I tried, I got something like this: .../target/temp/dozer.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/temp/core.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/temp/joda-time.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/foo.war already exists, no checkout Could not restore untracked files from stash No matter how I tried checking out different revisions (like the one where I actually made the stash), or using --force, I got the same error. Now these were one of those "keep cool for a second, there's a git way to fix this"situation. I figured: A stash is basically a commit. If we look at my recent commits using   git log --graph --...
12 comments
Read more