Management Tool Opinions

January 26, 2005 1:17 PM

I need comparative opinions on different content management tools [more inside]

I promised my wife that I would build her a website that she and her friends could use to collaborate on writing projects. I had planned to code it from scratch as an exercise in PHP/MySQL programming. It's becoming clear, however, that my schedule is making it hard to come up with the time and energy to get it done. I've noticed that my webhost provides scripts for automatic installation of a variety of content management systems. I have no experience with any of them. I would greatly appreciate feedback from anyone who has worked with them on which systems will a) do the job required and b) are easy to configure/customize as needed. Bonus points for information on security, backups, bugs, migrating from one system to another if I change my mind, or anything else that might be relevant. I'd enjoy being able to code customizations myself if the source code is reasonably clear.

The available systems are:

Geeklog
Mambo Open Source
phpWCMS
phpWebSite
Post-Nuke
Siteframe

The website as envisioned will have a members-only area (requiring login) for posting stories and writing comments/feedback on said stories. (These may be anything from article to short story to novella length - not just a blog entry.) Preferably the stories should be viewable by author or by date. Links from newer to older versions of the same story would be nice. There will also be a public area for stories which have passed through the editing process and the author feels are ready for general consumption. Comments may or may not be required for the public area. In the case of longer entries, the public front page should contain just short snippets + a link to the full entry. Admin privileges will be held by myself, not by all members. The site will be hosted as a subdomain of my personal site. My webhost is running Red Hat Linux, with a MySql database.

Thanks in advance for all advice.

posted by tdismukes to computers & internet (6 comments total)

You can demo & review most of these at opensourcecms.
posted by Gyan at 1:43 PM on January 26, 2005

I've heard that postnuke has serious security issues (possibly resolved by now). I've toyed briefly with Mambo and thought it was pretty nice.

But I'm mostly sold on Drupal (drupal.org). It's got a very modular design, and because of the way one module can affect others, administration can be a little intimidating. But it's also very flexible. It's got an active developer community, plenty of add-on modules. And even I, with rudimentary PHP skills, have been able to grok the code and tweak a few modules. Installation is not especially difficult (although not one-click, either).

BTW, CMSs have been discussed here before--you might want to do a search on "CMS".
posted by adamrice at 3:02 PM on January 26, 2005

http://www.cmsmatrix.org/ allows you to easily see comparisons between various products (including commercial products). Most of those you mentioned are there.
posted by spock at 3:04 PM on January 26, 2005

Drupal is pretty impressive and fairly easy to figure out. Another similar system that a mate of mine uses is Xoops.
posted by sien at 6:09 PM on January 26, 2005

I've been playing with cmsmadesimple with great results. Very, VERY easy to setup, and to use.
posted by coriolisdave at 6:16 PM on January 26, 2005

I tried Mambo and didn't like it. It's got a slick admin interface, but it was far too hard to make it do something it didn't want to do, and far too easy to break it.

I finally settled on Etomite, because it was easier to mess around with, and though it's got less stuff than most CMSs right out of the box, it would be very easy to add PHP functionality to it if I were so inclined.

One thing I'd be sure to check on when you test-drive systems is how well they handle file structures. One of the things that flabbergasted me about most systems I looked at when making my own decision was that 90% of them would only let make categories and sub-categories, but not any sub-sub-categories. So, with Mambo for instance, your wife could have a "Writing / Fiction" section but not a "Writing / Fiction / Short Stories" section. That's ridiculous!

Also, I second OpensourceCMS.com.
posted by Hildago at 6:33 PM on January 26, 2005