Recommended CMS on an inflexible platform?

March 26, 2004 10:51 PM

While there's been a previous "What CMS do you dig?" question, mine's narrower. What CMS would you recommend for a system using W2K Advanced Server and MSSQL? (more inside)
posted by RakDaddy to computers & internet (8 comments total)

I ask this because I'm evaluating CMS packages for a client who uses that setup and they're not going to change to Apache and MySQL. So far, I've looked at enVivo (a bit frustrating to grok) and ADXSTUDIO (looks good on paper, waiting for a license key for a test drive). I'd appreciate any mojo anyone has to pass on.
posted by RakDaddy at 10:54 PM on March 26, 2004

Given your clients pediliction to MS products, I'd look at Microsoft CMS
posted by seanyboy at 4:49 AM on March 27, 2004

Looking around a bit, there's also OpenCMS 5.0. I don't know if its any good though.
posted by seanyboy at 4:57 AM on March 27, 2004

Take a look at Supermodel.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 2:07 PM on March 27, 2004

Dot net nuke might be your ticket (ASP.NET/SQL Server based).
posted by X-00 at 3:43 PM on March 27, 2004

Microsoft's CMS server is an expensive tool to implement. I tried OpenCMS and I absolutely hated it.

We are implementing Jahia where I work. It is all Java and there is a build for Windows. The software is relavitely cheap... The licences are $5K per physical server, and then there are some fees per active and passive users. We ended up with licenses for 2 physical servers, seat licenses, and a bunch of consulting time for under 20K.

The kick ass selling point for me was that it has this concept of 'containers'. You can have any number of containers on a page and assign permissions to different users on different containers. Other content manangent systems I have seen/demo/used all went on the basic idea that you have a protected top and left hand area and then the page content was this f*ing free-for-all area under and to the right of that. I hate that. Not to mention that there are a ton of other cool features.

Plus, you get all of the Java code and can modify it should you chose. It is template based and the templates are JSP/struts based. Also, you can get at the API using taglibs or JAva in your code, so whichever you feel most comfortable with...

It natively interfaces with a ton of apache libraries. For instance, it comes working with Lucene which allows you to search not only your site, but also PDFs and DOCs on your site as well.

Has WYSIWYG editors. Basic workflow. Webdav. LDAP integration for single signon. And it is also a Portal server at the same time... meaning that each user can get a, you know, portal page that is unique to them and whot-not (OK, I don't care so much about this point so I didn't look too deeply, but it sounds cool).

Now, it does lean a little toward the Java/UNIX end when you read their site, but it does work with MS SQL Server, though we are using PostgresSQL. (Works with mysql too). We are using Apache, but the system just requires a servlet engine to run jsp. We use resin, which kicks everyone else's ass speed-wise and there is a windows build for this. I imagine setting it up with IIS would be a breeze.

So, while this does steer you clear of ASP and toward JSP, it keeps you on IIS and using SQL Server on the backend.

Something I would recommend fleeing from is Zope.

Hope that helps.
posted by internook at 6:15 PM on March 27, 2004

Slide on Velocity could probably be hammered together under Windows and IIS under Tomcat. You'd probably get to write some glue code to put it all together, and that code would be Java, which you may or may not find as icky as I do.

I believe Mason could be made to happen under IIS and ActiveState's ActivePerl port.

There's a ton of PHP stuff out there, and as app platforms go, PHP is pretty easy to get going as a module under IIS. Of course not everything will run with MSSQL right out of the box, but you might surprise yourself as to how much would.

Regardless of what you choose, it's a generally good idea to stay away from coding ASP. Even if you like VBScript and the ability to take advantage of COM objects, you'll hate how flaky and unreliable the asp.dll module is on production sites. IIS sites with heavy ASP on them tend to need to be rebooted from time to time just to keep them serving requests.
posted by majick at 5:57 PM on March 28, 2004

Thanks for the mojo. I'll get crackin'.
posted by RakDaddy at 5:54 PM on March 29, 2004