Content Management Systems

[Joe Black]

Anyone used them?, think they're worth the money?, and if yes to either question then what sort of figures are we talking about?

I refering to things like Vignette, Broadvision, RedDot et al.

Reason I ask is because it's something under consideration where I work...all my hard work in the bin ...

[NoddY]

http://www.opensourcecms.com/

Has demos of 'free' CMS. However, most of them run using the disaster that is PHP4. The Nu Meeja darlings rave about Drupal, Joomla and Mambo. The website omits, for a reason not apparent to me, Plone on the Zope platform. This is the most sophisticated of the lot, and is written in Python. Zope is an odd beast however, storing its data in the Zope Object Database (ZODB) and not your local SQL server. *Everything* in Zope is an object etc. Plone sits on top of Zope, which in turn sits on top of your favourite OS (I use FreeBSD6-STABLE with ease and success).

Of merit:

excellent indexing (of anything you tell it to, e.g. PDF/Word)
excellent workflow management
fine grained access control
nifty AJAX based search (similar to Google Suggest)
simple backup (ZODB is one file Data.fs)
multiple Plone instances under one Zope instance / multiple Zope instances + myriad of virtual hosting options
Access protocols HTTP (of course) also WebDav and FTP.
Load balancer (i.e. scaleable)
Thicko users will find the Javascript HTML editor a piece of cake

Pains:
Skin / modding interface steep learning curve, although you can do much with tweaking the CSS.
Hard to get rid of 'Plone look'
No package manager for the various add-on products.
Integration with external authentication mechanisms, I pulled my hair out trying to authenticate users against an existing LDAP server - and failed.

http://plone.org/
http://www.zope.org/

[DimPrawn]

Have used Obtree content management. Does the job and is coded in server side Javascript. Not a great developer experience mind. Would not recommend.

[milanbenes]

my job involves CM KM work

pays the bills dunnit

Milan.

[Boris]

Mmbase

have a look at mmbase.

It works really well, is well supported and is being used in the real world for many live systems.

It's free too.

[milanbenes]

doesn't:

free = crap

and therefore

crap rates ?

Milan.

[Jakes Daddy]

I work for a company who have written (and sell) one based on Lotus Domino - I've been working with it (both as a user and on-going development of the product) for 5+ years. Its pretty good / feature rich / good pricing structure - but then I would say that !! The only gripe I have with it is that its Domino based and therefore may not perform/scale as well as other systems; and that you obviously need a Domino infrastructure to sit it on.

The other one I've worked with is ILWWCM (IBM Lotus Workplace Web Content Management) or whatever they are calling it this week. Not a bad product, sits on top of Websphere - not as feature rich as our Domino based product , and costs a darn site more !

HTH

[DimPrawn]

Jakes Daddy. Do you work in the Cotswolds?

[Jakes Daddy]

Jakes Daddy. Do you work in the Cotswolds?

No, Swindon (for my sins !) - where were you thinking of ? Do they need a good contractor - the Cotswolds is easy for me !

[mcquiggd]

Wrote my own once for a government publisher... took 9 months over it - me and an XML guru who was part time, then they bought a software house with a product that had been in development for 10 years and spent the next two years with a couple of dozen guys trying to get it to match the functionality we had come up with, without a spec!

They ended up bolting half of our stuff onto theirs. Total waste of time.