The key features we were looking for we that we could create the content types that we needed, that it had a workflow approval process, that it had an easy to use interface for publishing content so the campaigners would actually use it to put out media realeases and edit their content rather than just emailing them to us as a word document, that it had automatic publication and retraction so content could be set to be automatically removed from the site and that it was something we could manage. I was very impressed by Drupal as it was easy to set up and use and seemed to have a great design to it and it had the busiest development mailing list of any of the CMSs that we looked. It was however more of community focussed CMS having features like polls etc but not automatic retraction or a WYSIWYG editor for content submission. The latter has recently changed though with someone hacking the htmlarea WYSIWYG tool into drupal and I think that it will be released as a module at some stage. It had this great feature called colloborative books which is ideal for developing documentation and I actually used this tool to document the evaluation project. You can check it out at www.sydney.wilderness.org.au/docs . The site lists all the CMSs that we looked at and accounts of the installation of all the CMSs. It also contains evaluation results of some of the CMSs against the different criteria and I will try and get some more of them up there very soon.
One of the key things we found in looking at the CMS is that they all do things differently and it is really important to have a good idea of exactly what is the purpose and future purpose of your website and look at the CMS which seems to offer the tools that are most suited to accomplishing this. Also get a feel of what the aims of the project are as even though they mightn't have a particular feature yet it might be in CVS or on the developers to do list. The speed that some of these projects are developing at is pretty phenomenal.
Check out the website for more info, also you should have a look at these sites if you haven't already.
www.cmsinfo.orgA great site for seeing just how many opensource cms's are out there and tracking there development.
www.opensourcecms.comThis is a great site as it lets you actually try out a whole heap of php based cms's and blogs and other webapplications such as phprojekt
www.cmsreview.comA new site that has just been up the last few months I think. Has some good information for a whole lot of CMSs both proprietry and Open Source in a format that lets you easily compare them. Not a huge amount of info yet but hopefully it will grow.
Mark Roach wrote:
The TCL one is OpenACS and it is based on the CMS origianlly developed by ArsDigita before it was aquired by RedHat. We looked at it and I managed to install it as there are some debs available but I couldn't get them to work but installed it sucessfully from the source packages. It sorta looked impressive but so different from any of the other systems that I looked at. The learning curve was just to much as it is written in tcl and uses aolserver as the webserver and postgres as the database. Postgres was a plus but had no experience with tcl or Aolserver (heavily pathched, you can't use the Aolserver in debian) and I ran out of time to really look at it. Linux Journal or Linux format I think have just been running a series of articles on using OpenACS and it seemed to be that once you got over the steep learning curve it was pretty impressive.On Mon, 2003-04-28 at 10:45, Kevin Coyner wrote:Hi I've been asked to install a content management system on a website. I've not been down this path before, so would like to ask for recommendations. Aside from the obvious of having lots of features, I guess one other criteria would be that the cms should be easy toadminister for a non-technical user.I see that there are deb's for: scoop drupal postnuke phpnuke Do any one of these, or any others not listed, stand out above the rest?Would those actually even be considered CMS's? I think they are more in the weblog or bulletin board category. I have heard good things about plone, and another TCL based product whose name currently escapes me.
-Mark
Cheers John