Best CMS Available?

[craigsboyd]

I was wondering what others' experiences were with various CMS products. Which have you found to be the best? I realize the question is quite broad and the answer would usually be "it depends". But generally speaking my experience has been that Drupal is one of the simplest, cleanest, and fastest - whereas PHPNuke has been the one with the most features/power and appears to have the biggest following which lends itself to upgrades, features and plenty of documentation. Perhaps there are some good CMS out there that I haven't tried yet, so if you have any thoughts or a CMS product that has worked well for you please post.

_{craig1442@mchsi.com}

"Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad." - Anon​

 

[russland]

hi, why don't u have a closer look at spectra (opensource). it's running on coldfusion server. more info on

http://www.macromedia.com/software/spectra/

cheers

 

[AndyTWI]

I've had very good experiences with e107. (

http://e107.sourceforge.net

,

http://www.e107.org

)

 

[craigsboyd]

russland,

I pulled down the latest and greatest spectra...looked promising and I was excited about getting to do a little ColdFusion (I don't use that part of MX Studio as much as I'd like). But then I couldn't get the wizard setup to run, and the backend appears to be geared towards Access (i'm not a huge access fan - developed in it a few times before...lol). It has been kind of difficult. It has not been as difficult as ezpublish (the worst of the worst for installing with Apache 2+ - 404 Errors are very prevalent), so I have yet some hope I may discover what the problem is and get spectra up and running.

AndyTWI,

I will check out e107 when I get some time and report back how it went for me.

_{craig1442@mchsi.com}

"Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad." - Anon​

 

[wcburton]

I did some investigating a while back and really liked what I saw from WebGUI from

http://www.plainblack.com

I found them through SourceForge. It is Perl/PHP based, uses mySql as the backend database, and either Apache or IIS on the frontend.

Product is free, company makes money selling support services and hosting.

 

[craigsboyd]

AndyTWI,

I have just finished installing e107. It was one of the easiest installs I have seen. Ran flawlessly and the site was up in under 1 minute. I am impressed so far.

wcburton,

Will try WebGUI when I get a chance and report back, thanks for the suggestion.

_{craig1442@mchsi.com}

"Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad." - Anon​

 

[Tve]

Hi,

This link is good:

http://www.opensourcecms.com/

I've tried PLONE, Mambo, e107 and opencms.

I like plone because of the structure, but mambo is really easy to use.



AD AUGUSTA PER ANGUSTA

Thierry

 

[DMammone]

I use csNewsPro. Its interface is easy to learn and your content is easy to maintain.

http://www.cgiscript.net/

 

[ganast]

First: my personal favorite:

http://www.Typo3.com

This is a real, cms. Data/layout abstraction is perfect. If you look through the archive of sites made with Typo3 you will notice that by and large you cannot tell that they have the same underlying system unlike all the other 'cms' systems that I have ever seen. (look here:

http://typo3.org/1232.0.html)

Secondly, the development tools available for Typo3 are staggeringly powerful. Have a look here:

http://typo3.org/doc.0.html

Finally, the community is mostly real programmers (a lot like plone in this respect), and you can get good answers quickly.

The downside is that Typo3 is really difficult to learn. Don't let that deter you however... the pain is worth it. Typo3 is magnificent.

I also like

http://www.zen-cart.com

This is not a true cms, but a very nice fork of osCommerce.com that includes some cms-like features and a very good templating system on top of the most amazing e-commerce engine available in open-source (

http://www.osCommerce.com)

OK, and here are some other tidbits and resources.

(ahem, another typo3 plug...)

http://typo3.org/1422+M5cdc6526a47.0.html

I have used phpNuke-alikes on about 10 sites as it was all I was aware of for quite some time.

nuke spin-offs can be found here:

http://www.phpNuke.com

(well not a spin-off.. well sorta...)

http://www.xaraya.com

(consistent development, odd politics)

http://www.envolution.com

(pretty heavy development)

http://www.postnuke.com

(not much to see here...)
(I have installed all of them at one time or another)
...if you use any nuke system, be sure to see

http://www.nukecops.com

here is a huge list of mostly nuke forks:

http://www.opensourcecms.com

a couple other very popular ones are

http://tikiwiki.org/

http://www.mamboserver.com

(mentioned in earlier posts, probably the second most popular cms besides *nukes)


also look here:

http://sourceforge.net/softwaremap/trove_list.php?form_cat=21

...and while you are there do a search for "cms"

and here:

http://www.clueful.com.au/cgi-bin/cmsdirectory/browse/Products:Free systems

I installed the following but never did anything with them for various reasons:

http://www.campware.org

http://www.squishdot.org/

(cousin to plone)

http://cmf.zope.org/

(boiler plate to plone... use

http://plone.org/

if you like zope...)

OK, so now you have links to all the open source cms engines on the net, you owe me: go check out

http://www.typo3.com

--gabe

 

[craigsboyd]

ganast,

Got the latest and greatest of Typo3 and installed it...ran into a few things on the install including a nasty little thing having to do with cgi-fcgi versus cgi...but after some search and replace on the php files and slowly going through the configuration settings to make sure I had them all right I got the site up...it is currently at

http://www.craigsboyd.com

nothing there really yet (I went with the completely blank dummy install since I like to do things myself). I will let you know how the rest of it goes...looks pretty promising so far and you are right it does seem to seperate the layers better than most of the other cms I have tried so far...still haven't played with it enough to give you a true take on it yet...it is almost 5:00am, I gotta get some sleep now.

_{craig1442@mchsi.com}

"Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad." - Anon​

 

[ganast]

You got 3.6.0 rc2 from sourceforge cvs? or from the snapshots page?

If so, great. It seems to work really well for new installs. If you have questions, there is a long thread that should answer all your questions here: [link nntp://news.netfielders.de]news.netfielders.de[/url] on the "english" list, and there is also a web archive.

Be aware that 3.6.0 final should be out in mid April!

You might also look into getting this package (put it in your fileadmin directory somewhere):

T3D_dummy_content_elements-z.t3d

and import it, ( howto_075_import_a_pagetree.wmv )as it installs a whole bunch of content elements preconfigured for you to look at. It is really used for setting up master style sheets. You can look through them, and even put them in a place in your page tree that is pasword protected so that only you can see them. They are a great tutorial in themselves.

Finally, these are 'must read' items on the =442&cHash=d442c244f7]documentation page

Getting Started
Various installation guides... guess you got that...
Futuristic Template Building (!)
older, but still helpful: Modern Template Building
... and don't miss the video library!

videos!

good luck!

--gabe

 

[craigsboyd]

ganast,

Yes, got 3.6.0 rc2, thanks for the extra info and links will try them when i get some time here. I am really interested in that elements package, looks like it would be really worthwhile.

_{craig1442@mchsi.com}

"Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad." - Anon​

 

[Chewie71]

I haven't seen anyone mention PHPWebSite yet.

http://phpwebsite.appstate.edu

I've got it setup on my NetWare 6.5 server at home and have experimented with it a bit. It looks good, and is pretty easy to manage. My test site is pretty basic, but I've seen others that have some pretty good looking sites using this CMS.

Matt

 

[ganast]

Here is another I just remembered as well:

jetboxone (I actually have a test site of this and forgot about it... oops)

and an interesting new project here:

Fenix

That should be a... cms builder (unification of authentication across multiple PHP scripts) for programmers... this is not something that you want to look at if you are not a programmer. in the future, however, there should be some interesting applications based on it.

--gabe

 

[franzm]

check out

http://www.concretecms.com

as well. It's not free, but it is open source and is a real pleasure to use.

 

[planetant]

Anyone have any concerns or reassurances about security issues using open source CMS?

 

[gjanast]

Bottom line is that Open Source projects generally have a much larger working list of bugs and possible exploits that are being worked on than do the closed counter-parts. This is good.

The closed counter parts do have issues, but the issues are much harder to find because not nearly as many people are looking at the code.

Eventually this question will always come down to a philosophical argument, but there are actual statistics, and the security stats do often favor open source... regardless of what the software does.

Here is an interesting article that covers the security aspect of Open Source: Why Open Source? Chapter 6 - Security

--gabe

 

[carote]

There are loads of good content management systems out there. I strongly believe that you must spend some time trying a few out, or paying an integration company to do this job for you: you provide them with your requirements, and they will dig the perfect match out for you.

We develop our own CMS platform:

http://www.jazar.co.uk.

what makes it different? It is all driven by CSS & XSL, no limitation in terms of design (even for dynamic modules such as forums, news, etc .. the layout is controled through xsl).

Now, is it the right solution for you? Probably yes , as mambo or plone may be as well. It really depends on your requirements, and on your initial budget.

I would always recommend to hire an integrator if you are serious about your website.

-------------------------
Emmanuel

http://www.jazar.co.uk