I have a couple projects on my plate that call for more than a personal publishing platform like WordPress, so I’m evaluating open-source web content management systems. This white paper from Seth Gottlieb of Optaros is invaluable in getting oriented in that space.
These are the basic requirements for the first project, a community website with an event calendar, discussion forums, and frequently-updated news pages:
- WYSIWYG content creation by nontechnical personnel
- Apache/MySQL/PHP platform
- Calendaring
- Discussion forums
- Ease of ongoing maintenance
Here are the candidates I came up with after skimming Seth’s white paper:
And my first thoughts on them:
- eZ Publish has its own templating engine and content editing syntax… I don’t like that. I want straight HTML/CSS/PHP. TYPO3 also has its own declarative language: TypoScript. I don’t want to spend my time getting up to speed on something that’s not transferable to more generic work.
- I found Drupal distinctly unpleasant to work with on the BlogHer site. The editing page didn’t include a WYSIWYG editor (though I think you could use tinyMCE) and the design of the site didn’t appeal to me.
- Joomla doesn’t have built-in support for user-friendly permalinks but there are workarounds available. User-friendly permalinks are not important for my first project, but may be for other projects I have planned.
- Joomla recently forked from Mambo when a set of core developers left the Mambo project. Does this mean political problems in the future for Joomla? Well, where there are people, there are political issues. So I can’t say that’s a reason to eliminate Joomla.
Checking out the Google Trends chart for these four packages confirms Joomla as the frontrunner:
A vibrant and interested community means more templates, more extensions, and more help. Joomla has a reputation of being pretty and easy to use, compared to Drupal, which is powerful but better for techies. Because the first project I’m working on will likely be handed off to people with far less technical experience than I have, I need to find a package that prioritizes ease of use.
I have Joomla installed on my local machine now and I’ve begun playing around with it. So far, so good… the installation went smoothly and the administrative interface is pleasant to work with. I was particularly impressed with how the first step of the installation checked my configuration (file permissions, PHP setup, etc.) and notified me of potential problems.
8 Comments
anne: would also recommend checking out some of the comments in Matt Raible’s three part open source CMS evaluation, the last of which is here:
http://raibledesigns.com/page/rd?entry=open_source_cms_evalation_part
also curious as to whether or not you’ve checked out TextPattern.
Thanks, Steve, I’ll definitely check that out. I hadn’t heard of TextPattern. I’m going to look into it too.
Why the PHP requirement?
Because it’s the most marketable of the dynamic scripting languages.
Anne,
Textpattern is interesting. One of the easiest blog/light CMS tools with which to build a site in that it supports the concept of sections natively (no odd workarounds needed).
Also check out Expression Engine (at pmachine.com). I’ve built sites with its predecessor, the eponymous pMachine. EE is more powerful and seems like a very nice choice for certain uses.
Anne, can you define ‘marketable’ in this context?
michael: marketable as in making my professional self more marketable.
rick: thanks for the suggestions and info. I’m not familiar with Expression Engine or pMachine; will check those out.
Argh, I should have checked back sooner.
Anne, I am still not sure what you mean. Certainly, there is a lot of demand for PHP developers of various sorts, but there is an even larger supply, and a heck of a lot of very bad PHP code that they are cut-and-paste-ing together to create sites.
Standing out from a very large crowd is that much more difficult, and the ceiling for your rates is correspondingly lower.
Now, far be it from me to advocate choosing a system solely because of it’s small marketshare, but I do think that tools should be chosen by balancing the following considerations:
* overall marketshare
* the ratio of demand to supply (this is hard to estimate, but a good proxy is the average salary for people with that skill)
* productivity
* the degree to which a tool/platform/language will be applicable to future markets or problem domains
Of these, I consider overall marketshare to be the least important crtiteria.
You already know what primary set of tools I’ve chosen based on those criteria, so I won’t belabor the point.