Content Management Systems
Jun 23rd, 2007 by abbot
“It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order - and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.”
– Douglas Hostadter
If you have never been to the Project Cartoon site, you need to check it out. It is a humorous view of how different people within an organization see the solution to a problem. The site is adding new cells all the time. With that in mind, I wanted to talk about the poor soul who is having to constantly take time out to maintain old code. This is code that dates back to a time before people knew what evil lurked in the heart of Internet hackers. Help might come in the form of rich content management systems (CMSs). To quote from such a system, Drupal, CMS can support such functionality as:
- Community web portals
- Discussion sites
- Corporate web sites
- Intranet applications
- Personal web sites or blogs
- Aficionado sites
- E-commerce applications
- Resource directories
- Social Networking sites
With additional plugins to support:
- Content Management Systems
- Blogs
- Collaborative authoring environments
- Forums
- Peer-to-peer networking
- Newsletters
- Podcasting
- Picture galleries
- File uploads and downloads
Sure, you will need to learn how to write the modules so you can integrate and develop, but that is much better than having to write the whole site. It looks like Open Source Content Management Systems are worth reviewing. That is, if you can spare some time from code maintenance. In 2006, Joomla! won the Packt Open Source CMS Award with Drupal in second place and Plone finishing third. The final finalists were:
- Joomla
- Drupal
- Plone
- e107
- Xoops
To quote the 2006 Packt Publishing site, “The judges had strong compliments for all five finalists, with some of the highlights listed below:
- Very easy to install and use with lots of extensions and modules
- The documentation is exhaustive and concise
- Admin user interface is intuitive and powerful
- The backend of Joomla! is very usable and the WYSIWYG editor the content was nice
- Seems like it would scale well and provides a lot of customization options
- Large and active community
- Has been around for quite some time and is stable and actively developed
- Well coded and has an available granular permissions system and a strong eye for security
- Configuration was a breeze
- Lightweight installation
- Plethora of modules and themes
- Exceptional documentation and has an active and friendly community
- The node concept is very good
- Very flexible and powerful
- Great user interface
- Very clean default installation
- Lots of addon modules
- Worth taking the steep learning curve
- Impressed with the customization it offers
- Integration with LDAP or other login systems is a plus
- Easy to setup and install
- Wide selection of themes and modules
- Provides lots of flexibility
- Backend seems well put together
- Drop down menu is a nice touch and is organized well
- Minimalist initial install
- Great community support
- Provides lots of addon modules and themes
- Lots of functionality
- Mature and has a very good permissions system”
A group I have alot of respect for, the Security Catalyst, has plans to move their system to Joomla!. Michael Santarcang, the founder of the site initially posted:
We’re really struggling getting LDAP working with SMF to allow us the opportunity to integrate jabber (authenticated), a wiki and other support tools. When we first were ready to launch the community, I toyed with using Joomla!, but decided it was too much.
Later, Michael posted:
Wanted to share the first of a few updates. We _are_ moving to Joomla - and with the help of a gracious sponsor, we’ll be improving our hosting situation and feature set. We’ll be rolling things out in the coming weeks, including chat, wiki, repository and other elements.
When intelligent people single out a way to do things, it is worth a look. The entire Joomlas! core team visited the folks at the Google Developer Blog. Their discussion makes up episode four of Google’s Summer of Code podcast.
GeoPress, a blogging plugin that allows users to easily embed maps, GeoRSS, KML, and Microformats, is using Drupal. A little background, GeoPress is sponsored by O’Reilly. If you have not figured this out about me yet, I’ll state it as plainly as I can, I think Tim O’Reilly is one of the keenest web strategist around. Brady Forrest, a O’Reilly Radar blogger, posted an entry discussing the GeoPressMT, “Where 2.0: Release of GeoPressMT Plugin.” As for Drupal, Spencer Critchley, also over at O’Reilly, has a book review of “Pro Drupal Development” in which he states:
Drupal, one of the leading open source content management systems, is amazing. The more I learn about it the more impressed I am by the depth of thought (and amount of work) that’s gone into making it so powerful and flexible.
Andrew Savikas is O’Reilly’s Director of Digital Content & Publishing Services and author of Word Hacks. He attended the Yahoo! Open Source CMS Summit held March 22nd and 23rd of this year, and wrote:
Most attendees were there for Drupal — there’s clearly a lot of interest and a strong, vibrant (and global) community.” Interesting to you, he attended a talk on “Video Delivery with Drupal.
Bryan Ruby, at the CMS Report site, does a comparison of Joomla! and Drupal titled “Drupal and Joomla Comparison.” Bryan points to a comparison table Steve Burge posted. To quote Bryan:
In the table Drupal fails on such elements as Shopping Carts, Event Calendars, Document Management, and Themes. The majority of these items are functions or features which are considered lacking in the Drupal CMS. Regarding the other CMS, Joomla fails to deliver in such elements as user permission, content management, multi-site management, and standard’s compliance. Joomla fails in elements that are more architecture centric.
If, like some of the folks I deal with, multilingual support is important, check out Bonnie Bogle posting, “What Multilingual Support Looks Like in Different Open Source Platforms.” To quote Bonnie:
This is a tricky question. While generic database overlays are marketed as the most versatile solution, they are very unfriendly and limited for the end users. The other end of the spectrum (which is chosen by Drupal modules) has separate content instances that pave the way for a handful of appealing features like revision control and permission handling, as well as professional workflow possibilities. However, data sharing was trickier and inconvenient for the users until recently, before sharing improvements hit Drupal’s i18n module set. Drupal 6 will hopefully push forward a content-based solution, but there are still some open questions. If you are interested, a discussion is taking place on this topic on Drupal.org.
More details can be found at the Drupal site where they have posted, “Multilanguage support in Drupal core: i18n2core” and “Introduce dynamic object translation API (optimize this!).”
The bottom line, there are alot of very intelligent people working on the various CMS projects. On top of that, other brilliant IT folks are choosing differently when it comes to which system is best. Select the CMS that best fits the needs and functionality your organization requires. Hopefully it will help get you out of the IT basement that is code support by handing over some code maintenance to the CMS developers.
