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Page history last edited by Martin Tomes 1 mo ago


 

Battle of the CMS (Content management Systems)

This wiki came about from a Developer Group (formerly UKBug) in 2009.  http://www.ukbug.co.uk

 

I (Jason Chapman) did a session on pbWorks to describe how to get content up in 1 minute to communicate with people(www.jac2.co.uk)

 

 

JAC Note 27/10/09: Since the second session, Cedd has filled in his column and

 

 

Cedd's Roll Your Own(Also see notes at bottom)

Martin's Drupal Dave's DotNetNuke Corrado's Sharepoint Services (Free) Corrado's Sharepoint Services (Commercial) Jason's pbWiki / PBWorks
From an authors POV            
Need to know HTML Yes No  No (Design and Code  de-linked)     No
Support for querying content to build lists, tables etc.

Forums are searchable.

All other items (pages uploads etc) can be searched for and listed at any  location by an administrator

 

Yes, using the Views module.  Yes     No
Versioning – live vs dev pages Yes Yes, there are modules to do that  Yes (3rd party)     Maybe
Skinning – instant change of look and feel / layout No downloadable skins, achieved through 1 css stylesheet and the maser page Yes  Yes     Yes
Flexible Layouts  Not sure what this means Yes, whatever it means.  Yes     A bit
Multi-Author Yes Yes  Yes     Yes
Spell check Maybe Possible, I haven't tried to do it myself.  Yes     Yes
Browser support tested in ie, firefox Depends on chosen theme.  Yes     Yes
Multi-personality (same site looks different for different users) No, but easily done Yes, users can be permitted to choose a theme.  Yes     No
Audit Trail of changes No Yes  Yes     Yes
Security - user Yes Yes  Yes     Yes
Suitability for in-house Yes Yes, use Open Atrium which is a Drupal distribution Yes     Yes
 (intra / extranet)            
Search Engine friendly  Yes Yes  Yes (free add-in)     Maybe
(e.g. meaningful static URL's). Yes Yes  Yes (3rd party)     Yes
Rendering speed Seems fine Scalable to 2000 hits per second if you are clever at scaling sites. Secret: use Varnish.  OK     OK
Multilanguage support No Yes  Yes     ?
Ajax enabled Yes Yes, jquery is included  Yes     Bits are
Object-Model Yes Uses hooks rather than objects.  Yes     No
Community Features Forum, all members can upload, all members have free rein over one page. Everything you can think of and then some.  Yes     Some
Tagging, blogs No Yes  Yes     Sort of
Workflow  No Yes  Yes (3rd party)     No
(e.g., user enters data, manager approves and publishes it)   Yes  Can also be done by suitable role config      
Calendars and events. No Yes  Yes     Yes
User groupings (think Google groups). Yes (there are different types of user) Yes  Yes (3rd party)     No
             
From a "CMS" Administrators            
Free vs Open Source vs paid for Free to develop Free (GPL)  Free (BSD) some paid     Paid for
Platforms Windows Windows, Linux, MacOS/X (requires PHP and MySQL)  Hosted, Windows     Hosted
LAN installable erm, I guess. Don't know what that means.  Yes     No
Coding / API / plugins what? But I'm guesssing no. Yes, can write modules and themes.  Yes     API
Data Driven (in terms of getting data from external sources) Yes, SQL Server Yes  Yes SQL Server     No
HTTPS version Done on webserver Drupal 7 cracks this one.  Yes     Yes
Good hosting service (value for money and good support, good speed etc) The one I  use at the mo is not fantastic, but still the best I've known. Yes, I use Virtual Names.  Limited providers in UK     OK
Security w.r.t. hacking No problems so far. Automated hacking attempts extrememly frequent. Excellent, the security team is very active.  Good, security team are quick to respond     Good
Support for defining content types. Pretty much. Would probably take about 30 mins of developer time. 1-5 days for a user interface to do it. Yes  Yes     No
Over and above title / body, e.g. Specific fields for “problem domain” No support for adding new fields. This would be difficult to do. Yes  Yes      
Migration away from CMS / Host Good. Could generate exported data using the View module. The migrate module can get data into Drupal  3rd party tool can render out static html for each page.      Bad
User Community / support just me! Great  Good     Good
Paid for support Let's talk :-) Yes, from Acquia  Yes, Good     OK
Upgrade path to future V’s erm... Breaks API so own code needs changing, otherwise good.  Good     Good
             

 

Notes from Cedd after second session:

Looking back it seems that using one of the other cms solutions would probably have been a better idea. The talks were all good at educating me about some of the things that put me off using these solutions in the first place. Here are a few things that I would be scared about trying to do. I'm not saying that these would actually be hard but they just seem like they would.

1. Adding the guestbook control to a page looked very easy. What about adding selected guestbook entries to a page. Ie. the administrator adds the control and then chooses which entries should be shown there.

2. All members on the mts website have a page which they have full control over which happens autmotically. I would be scared about hooking into the registration code of another cms to make this happen.

3. members on the mts website can upload stuff to the forums so they can discuss xrays etc (not that this has ever happened, but they wanted it, so its there). This would mean getting into bed with the csm forum code. That scares me too.

4. Master detail and other complex data relationships. The cms' were very good at displaying lists. What happens if things in the list want to click on to a new page showing some linked / detail / related data? This sounds hard to me!

Cedd is working on Drupal at the moment, so see Cedds Drupal Diary for this progress.

 

Jason's Notes after second session

I have taken the plung and am going to set up a drupal site.  See my Diary Jasons Drupal Diary.

 

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