Open Source Content Management Systems

February 20, 2003 2:51 PM

Open Source Content Management Systems Great resource for software (typically free) that allows you to start and maintain websites. The owners have gone so far as to install each one of them and give users admin access to try them out before downloading them.
posted by oissubke (27 comments total)

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with this site. Just thought it was a great resources for people wanting to take their sites to a stage beyond hand-coding or Blogger.
posted by oissubke at 2:52 PM on February 20, 2003

a great resources

I'm an idiot. Look before you click, Carlos!
posted by oissubke at 2:53 PM on February 20, 2003

thanks for the link oissubke. I have a client on phpNuke and he seems to do alright with it, but it's great to see them all lined up in a row like this.
posted by condour75 at 2:56 PM on February 20, 2003

This is useful. Much mahalo oissubke.
posted by Tacodog at 3:16 PM on February 20, 2003

very nice site, ive been looking at and test-installing a lot of different content management systems lately. its weird, a lot of the popular cms suites seem so weighed down by endless features these days, i guess i am an old fashion fan of simpler systems.

i've heard good things about plone (which runs on zope), and rodin, or you could roll your own .
posted by yeahyeahyeahwhoo at 3:24 PM on February 20, 2003

I'm an idiot. Look before you click, Carlos!

So you added an "s", the link more than makes up for it. I'm, at the moment, messing around with a Microsoft designed ASP CMS. You have perfect timing, this gives me some things to compare it too. Thanks.
posted by eyeballkid at 3:30 PM on February 20, 2003

this is great
posted by sawks at 4:03 PM on February 20, 2003

I was in the core team of PHPSlash a few years ago (when I was sippin' the PHP Kool Aid) and I am running a site on PostNuke now. I eventually gave up and rolled my own in Python (using WebWare.)

Things that bugged me to no end: PHP does not let itself to a clean design and/or a reusable one. I am not saying you cannot write clean PHP (of course you can), but more often than not, these CMSs don't have it. Also, sometimes there's just too much stuff going on --PostNuke's permission system for example is overwhelming and I am an old hand at this. Having said that, although I am a Pythonista now, Zope is just as overwhelming if not more so (Zope feels like it was build to handle an industrial-strength site, which it was, but that maybe a bit too much for a casual webmaster).

I've looked and looked for on open CMS system that had clean viewer/model separation, is truly modular and is friendly to both admin and user (I can live with PostNuke, but I hate, hate the 120+ character URLs it and the other *Nukes use for "modularity"). I can not say I found one; I do like Webware a lot, but it is too low level, an app server not a CMS really.

</rant>
posted by costas at 4:12 PM on February 20, 2003

I trawled all the way through the Hotscripts listing of CMS's a few months ago, found their ratings largely useless. This is indeed very useful, and it'll be even more so once reviews start coming in. I settled on ezpublish (ez.no) for the online site of a magazine I run. Its not the easiest to install, and definately not the easiest to do design with (there's no frontend at all for site design, all has to be done in a central php file and in CSS) but it offers tons of functionality. But don't use the new 3.0 version. For now, 2.2 is much more flexible.
posted by gsteff at 4:25 PM on February 20, 2003

PHP does not let itself to a clean design and/or a reusable one. I am not saying you cannot write clean PHP (of course you can), but more often than not, these CMSs don't have it.

I think that has very little to do with language and much more to do with the way I suspect these apps develop. They start tiny (maybe as a personal project), and they keep adding stuff without going thru the process of going back to design docs and rewriting cleanly. I've seen similar things with supposedly reusable apps made with OOP languages (e.g. check out the JIVE forum code sometime), except there the tangled mess is spread across 3 tiers rather than 2.

More often than not, the needs of the site I'm working on are specific enough that its far cheaper and easier to roll my own, but this site surely rocks, its great to see them all side by side like this.
posted by malphigian at 4:40 PM on February 20, 2003

Also, I just found out today that Microsoft has just released an ASP.NET starter kit (an extension of their IBuySpy samples) that handles some nice out of the box content management: Community Starter Kit
posted by oissubke at 4:41 PM on February 20, 2003

I've been looking for some time for something like MetaFilter for a project I'd like to do, but haven't found anything to match the simplicity. Everything wants you to score, and have points, and quizzes and polls, and about a million other things.
posted by benjh at 4:46 PM on February 20, 2003

Couldn't have said it better benjh. I hate trying to edit that stuff out of the code too... since I really don't know exactly what I'm doing. Didn't I read somewhere that there's Metafilter clone code available?
posted by Witty at 4:49 PM on February 20, 2003

Wow -- very nice resource, even if they left out my favorite: OpenCMS. Java/J2EE architecture really scales. My firm load tested it for a client, and it scaled to serve one of the US's top 10 online newspapers with less hardware than Divine/Openmarket's popular CMS. How's that for performance?
posted by spotmeter at 4:51 PM on February 20, 2003

Witty, see this post about FreeFilter, a MeFi clone. Several other variations are listed in the comments.
posted by oissubke at 5:00 PM on February 20, 2003

nice to see the metafilter nerds coming out!
posted by yeahyeahyeahwhoo at 5:00 PM on February 20, 2003

this is a great thing, thanks
and if anyone's looking for a language that lends itself to nice, clean, reuseable code ... Ruby.
posted by Fabulon7 at 5:16 PM on February 20, 2003

No Bricolage?
posted by nicwolff at 5:38 PM on February 20, 2003

While it doesn't have workflow, Movable Type is a really easy way to setup a basic CMS for a business or non-profit. I just finished a big non-profit site using MT as the backbone, and it was a lot easier to setup than some of the PHP CMSs I looked at.
posted by mkelley at 6:11 PM on February 20, 2003

This is a good link. Too bad it is PHP-centric. I like PHP for certain things, but find hacking other people's PHP code damn near impossible. The language seems to encourage poor design choices.

I would like to see the site include CMS apps written in, say, Ruby, Lisp, and C# as well

Still, it's sweet that one can play with runing demo versions.
posted by Ayn Marx at 6:50 PM on February 20, 2003

Good link. I have been looking for a simple CMS/blogging setup forever — I've been updating my site by hand because I couldn't find anything I liked (simple, minimalist, smaller than MovableType — I don't need commenting or trackback or any of that — but I also need it to support three simultaneous blogs on one page, which most of the minimalist blogging tools don't do). I am thinking of going with Bloxsom , because I like the idea and the static-files option, which means I can set it up ony my box for now and worry about getting it working on my sketchy freehost server later.
posted by IshmaelGraves at 8:29 PM on February 20, 2003

Wait, I thought Metafilter was all about politics...?

CMSinfo.org offers a more comprehensive look at open source content management systems.
posted by jjg at 8:53 PM on February 20, 2003

Excellent post, oissubke!
posted by Steve_at_Linnwood at 11:19 PM on February 20, 2003

I'm with the homebrew crowd. I periodically search around for a componentized CMS that's flexible enough for varied application and haven't found one. Either designs are too rigid or, as others have remarked, they're full of cruft I don't want, or both. Recently started looking into Zope, which is interesting and seems very powerfull, but overkill for most applications. For simpler stuff, rolling my own isn't all that much trouble - but more than I'd like.
posted by normy at 2:08 AM on February 21, 2003

When I clicked over I was thinking more along the lines of document management/content management instead of weblog type software. It is a bit more challenging to find proper management software for numerous websites and web servers across different platforms and if I have to sit through one more vendor presentation I may snap. :-)
posted by nofundy at 5:00 AM on February 21, 2003

When I clicked over I was thinking more along the lines of document management/content management instead of weblog type software.

Unfortunately, the field is still trying to get its names sorted out. I think that "content management" has been solidly occupied by the database-driven website management software party, just by virtue of its popularity, and the "other" content management has come to be classified under terms like "document management".
posted by oissubke at 7:39 AM on February 21, 2003

Thanks muchly. For this post and all the comments in it.
posted by walrus at 3:26 AM on February 22, 2003