What CMS does BNET.COM use? What CMS is similar?
August 22, 2008 1:15 PM   Subscribe

What content management system (CMS) does the site BNET.com use? Or, what is the currently available CMS that most closely matches the capabilities of this CMS? Bonus points to open source....
posted by omidius to Computers & Internet (6 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Drupal is the most fully featured open source CMS I know of. From my short cursory perusal of the site, I did not notice anything which it wouldn't be able to handle. Are there specific unusual capabilities you require?
posted by sophist at 1:32 PM on August 22, 2008


Response by poster: Not really, the main ones being user-account management, e-mail, article categorization, seo friendly links, etc. My understanding of Drupal, through a crash course in setting it up for a site, is that it is a resource hog (even with the modules to speed things up) and very difficult to get set up to something similar to BNET.
posted by omidius at 1:35 PM on August 22, 2008


Drupal can't be that bad of a resource hog.. it runs some big high profile sites like The Onion, MTV2, Sony Music and more.

BNET.com looks like it could be pretty easily executed in Drupal. It's got a somewhat brutal initial learning curve, but once you "get it", it's pretty rapid to customize it.

I don't know what CMS BNET is, but its URLs are not SEO friendly at all. Click "Management" and you get http://www.bnet.com/2405-13055_23-41874.html .. seriously? Wow.
posted by twiggy at 2:38 PM on August 22, 2008


You still aren't giving us much to work with. There are probably a number of people who might be able to help if they didn't have to go and figure out what the characteristics of BNet are and guess which ones you find most notable.

Given what you've given us to work with, I'll suggest you build it from useful pieces using Django. It doesn't really do anything out of the box, but it provides you with a framework that can, among other things, be used to quickly create a custom CMS for a site like BNet. There is an autogenerated admin/data entry UI with limited but useful customization support. It has generic views that simplify creating pages that display lists of content items (with pagination), and for displaying individual content items. You can add fields for categorization. It has user account management. Resource needs are pretty good, and there are a lot of useful 3rd party apps that can be integrated.
posted by Good Brain at 2:39 PM on August 22, 2008


Like others have said, I don't see any particularly amazing functionality with the BNET site. It is however a beautiful site visually, which might be part of your attraction.

Drupal looks is nowhere close to beautiful out of the box. You will need to spent a lot of time trying to make it so. Most people seem to just tweak the css, and in a perfect world, tweaking the css should be all you need to do. However, I've found that you often need to make changes to the HTML as well, and then you'll soon find yourself messing around in the core and commenting out and editing echo/print statements. (And once you edit core, you can forget about being able to upgrade your site.)

also, for the record Drupal is a resource hog. A default install will run something like 30 queries to generate the homepage. The only way large sites can handle traffic is agressive caching of all pages. (basically, generate the page on the first request and then for future requests serve the HTML from memory.)

Wordpress is also often used as a CMS. It's easier to tweak visually, but it has some limitations. Say you want a different headline on the homepage, as the one on the main article page, you can't. Or if you want to have a sidebar article with your main article, you can't. (at least not without lots o' hacking.)
posted by kamelhoecker at 4:30 PM on August 22, 2008


Wordpress is also often used as a CMS. It's easier to tweak visually, but it has some limitations. Say you want a different headline on the homepage, as the one on the main article page, you can't. Or if you want to have a sidebar article with your main article, you can't. (at least not without lots o' hacking.)

Glad you put that disclaimer in there, because you can definitely do both of those things - custom fields and dynamic sidebars pretty much open you up to doing anything you can think of. And it's not really that hard.
posted by jbickers at 8:13 AM on August 23, 2008


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