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I am looking to help out a non-profit get a website up and running.
Only, they don't just want a website with content, they also want to maintain a database of members, and allow those members to register and pay for classes/events/seminars held by the club.
It seems to me, that if all they wanted was to post content, nearly any of the available CMS's out there would fit the bill.
But the registration portion would require some customization.
I have considered just installing a basic CMS for them, and then creating separate web application for the registration section. And this would still work...
But if I wanted to hook into the users/roles from the CMS and use them in the registration side, I think I would have to have some way of either extending the CMS or easily using it's data in the sub-application.
I have been reading about the following CMS's:
Orchard
Umbraco
C1 Composite
All of them seem to have the ability to be extended, but I'm not certain how much "work" is involved to extend each. Given that my requirements are rather simple and the fact that I don't want to spend a ton of time doing this (it is free work, after all), does anyone have a recommendation?
I'd pass on Umbraco and C1 Composite, as they generally aren't user-friendly. I think Orchard is best, as it has the best feedback of them all. Umbraco is aimed more at developers who want to tweak a lot of things.
Orchard - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1978360/anybody-using-orchard-cms
Link - Reviews/Comparison of Open Source ASP.NET MVC CMS
Umbraco would be a very good choice because it:
is mature and has a proven track record.
is very easy to use for most use cases.
has a built-in member system which could (and should) be used for the member registration.
has a Big and friendly community always glad to help out.
has lots of plugins and extensions covering some special use cases.
If you will go outside of .NET and IIS, Joomla is another popular CMS in LAMP. This can be hosted in either Unix or Win environments. There's a large community, lots of implementations and robust API for plugins. I run it on MAMP on my Mac, and it also runs on WAMPServer, for development.
Last year I created a membership style site in Joomla using Mighty Extensions for a bed and breakfast listing service (http://uurehome.com). Mighty User and Membership was enough, this adds custom user fields and subscription plans. You do have to pay for Mighty Extensions. Payment for the B&B listings is done thru Paypal, Mighty Membership enables this.
The subscription plan feature is Mighty Membership is very good. You can have length of time, cost renewals, renewal nag messages. Could have written myself, but why at this cost :-)
Joomla can certainly handle the community side of a non-profit site, there's the usual assortment of content, discussions, news feeds and so on. It's also ok for mere mortals to administer.
Not so sure about comparing to Orchard, as I haven't kicked the tires on Orchard. I have done enterprise web CMS for a living in the past, so I am used to evaluating these sorts of products. Orchard looks similar to Joomla in how it works, based on the screenshots I see in the docs. One thing I will say with confidence is that it's easier to standup Joomla (or something LAMP/WAMP/MAMP) than on the MS Webmatrix. However, if you already have a Webmatrix provider, then it's similar. Said by someone that has done a bunch of IIS and pretty much all the web technologies going back to the beginning of time (that's 1993).
Another aspect of using Joomla for me in this project, which is for a small business, was knowing that there's a bunch of Joomla knowledgable web design shops this owner could use if I stop helping her. While I am not going to say there isn't a base of folks doing web design that are doing Orchard, my sense is that its much smaller than Joomla. This is a factor for me in helping non-profits, churches and so on, not leaving them in a place where I am the "only" person that could keep whatever it is running. Still, if there's even a couple of local web design shops that do Orchard, I'd say that's enough to feel comfortable.
We built http://aclj.org on Orchard with a custom membership implementation within to support millions of members. We do form processing through Kimbia for donations and petition signatures. We're very happy with the implementation and feel that Orchard worked out well for us as a platform. It is VERY extensible and we developed 32 custom modules in-house.
For a non profit organization it is unlikely to maintain a costly server where LAMP stack has both low cost server and some decent CMS which meets your requirements perfectly. Some of them are :
Drupal
Joomla
WordPress
Any of them are highly extensible, got a great community support , plenty of themes and modules readily available and you can get awesome things for free though there are some paid once too.
And if you want my recommendation i would go for Drupal as it provides :
Build in role management service.
Very matured and friendly community.
Great scalabilty.
Secured out of the box
And some more .......
Hope that adds a new dimension to your search :)
Best of luck
I would recommend wordpress for your requirement.
Advantages:
1. More forum support.
2. Easy to learn.
3. Very less server cost to host the site.
4. You will have N number of plugins and widgets etc...
Hope It gives some sense :)
Increasingly, I have noticed the number of Content Management Systems in use. I have some familiarity with SiteCore. I have read some literature on Umbraco. I only just got wind of Orchard the other day. I have only heard positive feedback about EPiServer. I am soon to move into a role that uses it.
Do these differ vastly in features and price? What has led you to choose one (or several) over the others?
EDIT
I did a brief review of so-called free CMSs here: On Free Microsoft Compatible Content Management Systems
Reasons I ditched Orchard when developing a 50k page website:
The Orchard CMS import tool is simply too slow. It would only accept
small batches at a time. Initially, it took eight minutes to import
1000 records. So, working on that principle I expected that it could
take seven hours to import all the records. Unfortunately, I started
to receive performance issues as more records were inserted into the
database. I even started to reduce the batch size, which helped only
temporarily in the early stages. (See Saying no to Orchard)
I can only comment mainly on Sitecore and a bit on Umbraco from my knowledge of others using it:
Sitecore is an enterprise level web CMS with an "enterprise price tag." It's very extensible, has a lot of developer/community support, and is very developer friendly. The structure of content is based on a tree of nodes with parent-children relationships. Sitecore is well known in the WCM community as a leader in content management and is rated very well by companies sch as Forrester Research, etc.
Based on my previous research and conversations with friends, Umbraco is very similar to Sitecore. It has a lower price compared to Sitecore but its not a complete rip off. Umbraco is also built on ASP.NET like Sitecore.
Here's a three-part series on Sitecore vs. Umbraco from a developer.
Of the ones you mention above, I have only used Umbraco and Sitecore to build with and am certified in both. I like the way they allow me to build systems that really work well for my customers. They both have a feel that they simply give you building blocks to create your masterpiece instead of "modules" of functionality plugged in that give you a blog, forum, etc. They make it really easy to share content throughout the site and create really nice admin experiences.
Umbraco's community is really great. They both struggle a little on the documentation side IMO, but Umbraco's videos really help and the community is quick to help. Also, if you're talking cost then its free (Umbraco) vs. quite expensive (Sitecore).
But the reality is that each developer has their own taste and the style of CMS they like to work with. Ultimately, its the team that has to build the site that really matters most when it comes to how each CMS performs for the end user.
In addition to the links above, here are a couple blog posts that may help you get a feel for the different systems:
Orchard & Umbraco - Introduction (part 1 of 4) - Aaron Powell
Sitecore vs. Umbraco Terminology
Good luck!
I mostly work with EPiServer and Sitecore, and I can tell you the difference in short:
Sitecore has broader architecture and more powerfull UI. CMS is deeply configurable and highly extensible, it has clever publishing and caching system, powerful search and page editor. But it doesn't provide much out of box and UI is pretty old, slow and hard to learn. So this will be a long journey until you understand it good and make a good support of all its features for editors.
EPiServer is easy, friendly to users and developers. It provides an essential bunch of features out of box, has easy UI and page editor, good drag-and-drop experience, easy personalization. It is code-first, distributed with NuGet, provides dependency injection for its services, out of box MVC support. But it's not so extensible and configurable, has pure search (without expensive EPiFind module) and generally lower-featured comparing to Sitecore. So it's good for small/middle websites, but can be an obstacle in complex solutions.
Both have similar tree-item concept, rich documentation, pure public module system and hard UI customization. Both expensive and not open source.
As I know, Umbraco is pretty similar to EPiServer and Sitecore, but free and open source. Of course you get less features, more bugs, not much docs and no free support.
Orchard is really different comparing to other three CMS. It is module-based like Wordpress: you use standard or public modules and themes, instead of writing the whole website from scratch. You create your own themes and modules to customize the website and CMS. So entire CMS is highly extensible and provides a lot of free community modules. But in the same time you lose control and learning curve is much longer. Orchard is free and open-source, entirely MVC-based, UI and API are well done, but it can be hard for both developers and editors to understand it.
Wordpress vs Episerver:
http://tedgustaf.com/blog/2011/2/comparison-of-episerver-and-wordpress/
OK so the guy who wrote that is an Episerver consultant but it's interesting and balanced.
All the different web content management systems have different strengths. So which one is best for you depends a lot on what kind of sites you create, what kind of budget you have and what you think matters the most in a CMS.
For example, Orchard and SiteCore are VERY different systems.
I'm a bit biased as I work there, but I believe that Webnodes CMS have several important advantages over the systems you mention.
Keywords: Relations between content, actual classes for the different content types, custom LINQ provider for all data access, expose all content as an OData endpoint etc.
Microsoft used our CMS to demonstrate OData at Mix11. Video from Mix 11
I have got a project from a model who wants to build a site similar to oprah.com
I went through oprah.com and tried to find the CMS it is using but failed miserably. Does anyone has any ideas?
Moreover, which Joomla! components can be used to mimic the Oprah's site?
This is a custom built site, which was built ofver several years. I do not know about the CMS, but it does use J2EE, Oracle DBMS and Autonomy’s IDOL search and personalization engine and Jive’s Clearspace collaboration software for discussion forums and blogs. I would predict therefore that the CMS is either bespoke or another paid for CMS solution. I agree with pharalia - it is definately not an php-based open-source product such as Wordpress or Joomla
You could easily replicate this look in Joomla, or Wordpress or Drupal for that matter. Since I know Joomla best and you asked, I would use K2 with a couple of different display modules for a site like this. RokStories and RokTabs come to mind but there are all kinds of K2 compatible modules out there now.
That said, I'm not sure I would want to replicate a site this old. It makes some really basic mistakes that Oprah might be able to get away with, but someone with less star power is going to have problems.
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This question is a little subjective, however, it aims to give me a bit of information about whether it is better to build or buy.
My company is looking to enter the world of CMSs for our clients websites, do we provide an open source one, or do we build our own model from scratch?
If you buy, which do you use?
If you build, how does your architecture differ?
EDIT: The CMS we are looking to use isn't to maintain our own website, it is something we can offer our clients and pinned onto websites we are custom building for them, it needs to be something that we adapt and manipulate easily for many different website designs and purposes.
How about using opensource one? :-)
Today the only reasons to develop new CMS are:
1) non-usual requirements (deadly rare)
2) You just like to code "your own CMS" (c)
If none is the case, take opensource one.
Personally, I have my own CMS for all my private & commercial purposes, but this was mostly just for programming fun. If you need to deliver, you have to use existing products.
The company I work for wrestled with this same question recently. This depends a lot on your client's expertise and needs. It's generally not advisable to build your own CMS unless you're using it to offer something very novel.
Drupal has lots of plugins available giving a great deal of customizability. It's handy in the same way that most CMSs are in that you can use PHP files as your templates and code them outside of the CMS.
Wordpress has the best user interface of all the CMS's I've used (Drupal, EE, Wordpress, Joomla). If you need to program plugins it's also very well documented and (when the plugin is finished) provides a drag-and-drop interface for the client to make changes to their own web site easily.
I'm currently in the process of moving our site from EE to WP.
Well I can build a simple CMS in less than a day (and everybody can do that with any good web framework). So it depends on how complex it is and how much the open source solutions can do what you want your CMS to do. I generally avoid to use open source CMS because it is usually an overkill compared with my usual client's needs but that's me. Most open source CMS (drupal, joomla, wordpress) have many features that most people simply don't care and they clutter their user interface, so I prefer to build my own as far as it is simple instead of using an open source and struggling to add a new feature and make it scalable.
First, to address your build or "buy" questions - you would be crazy to build. The resourced needed to support code you write as it changes to meet each clients needs will end up costing you a fortune in the long run. It's hard to beat the resources of thousands of developers that many of the big projects have. Does your firm have a security specialist? How about a QA team that constantly searches for ans squashes bugs? Unless you are trying to do a one off, highly specialized application, pick a CMS and go with it.
Next, as far as being able to implement the CMS across many types of sites, that is entirely dependent on your firms developers. If your developer knows XYZ CMS, then he should be able to take any design and make it work for the CMS. Any good CMS has the design layer completely separated from the content and code so the design should not be limited by the CMS in any way. It's just a matter of learning the particular templating system employed by the CMS of your choice.
Last, I am surprised that no one has mentioned the solution to your wanting to limit the amount of control your clients have over their sites. As mentioned you can go the SaaS route and never give the client access to the administrative back end of the site. Any of the good CMS projects offer front end editing. This will allow your client to add/remove/edit the content on the site without giving them access to anything structure or design related. You can completely control the admin, layout, and functionality while the client simply controls the content only, which seems like what you are trying to accomplish.
This depends heavily on what you need, but many CMSs are a platform that you can build upon, getting the best of both worlds.
Wordpress has a very rich plug-in framework.
If you are ok with Windows servers, SharePoint has an extensive plug-in/extension architecture.
I don't think there's any reason to build from scratch unless you are planning to compete in the CMS market.
Do not reinvent the wheel. It takes really a lot of time and money to make a CMS.
If I were you, I would go with an open source CMS, start building custom stuff and contribute back what you can (this is how the company works where I work).
My choice is Drupal, because of the rich set of contribs, excellent flexibility/extensibility and good security.
I think it depends on how many clients are supposed to use the CMS.
We have only one client and built a proprietary CMS which we heavily customize to the client's specific needs.
It also gives us a strategic benefit since this client can hardly migrate his web sites to another company now.
If you have a couple (> 2) of clients who are supposed to use the CMS, IMHO an open source CMS would be the best choice.
Can you develop a new CMS as good as some other ones that have been around for years and hundreds of people have worked on it's development?
That's a question I always ask myself at the start of every website buliding project.
There is surely a good open source platform that meets your requierments and that you can improve.
I suggest these:
Liferay : for large organisations and advanced projects it's written in java. I personally love this CMS. Big places like NASA use it and my company used it for a project, it was great.
Plone : Same as above - language = Python
EZPublish for large organisations but not as advanced as Liferay - language = PHP
Joomla and drupal for normal websites.
As a design agency, presumably with a number of customers with live websites that constantly need to change that are taking manpower away from new projects,
My first question would be if I intend to migrate my existing customers to the CMS based version of their site
Then, What are the commonalities/differences in your customer sites?
If there is a lot of commonality (in the back end code as opposed to the front end design), then maybe integrating a basic article editor is all you need?
Look at how a CMS is going to affect your design flow, Your designs will then be CMS 'Themes', that'll be a learning curve.
I'm not trying to discourage you from Buying or Building a CMS, but the decision will be completely decided by your companies situation.
Personally I use Joomla and DotNetNuke. I'm a developer not a designer, so I buy off the shelf themes and modify them. I also had no existing clients when I started out. I decided to use a CMS specifically because I could buy themes, and secondry to that was the client modifying the articles.
I cant think of an open source CMS that doesn't provide everything that most companies would need.
you get the benefits of bug fixes, little deployment time and ease of documentation.
When selecting the CMS try to use one that is not too bulky or not too popular.
most CMS allow for easy expansion so if a client has special needs then its easy to add functionality.
A reason that you start to build you're CMS could be because the landscape of CMS systems is big (and you can't make up your mind on one system to put in all you're energy).
Do you want a simple CMS for a website, an integrations framework or personalization / social media.
As there are a lot of OS CMS out there, I wouldn't recommend you to start from scratch. Check for research EG:
http://www.slideshare.net/OpenSourceCMS/451-group-future-of-web-content-management-open-source-cms
Also check the OS license of products and how this could affect your projects.
Good luck!
Lots of good responses already, but I don't see anyone talking about the real users, the customer who is paying for this site.
One reason a CMS product is often better is that it can give you a lot of help material, usability refinements and add-ons that you won't get when you build it yourself. More importantly for the end-users, it can mean they extend and add to the site without needing to get IT to give them permission (and the run-around on budget/resources) to do so.
Another issue is that if you build it yourself, then that is the only copy of that software that is being security tested and probed. A product will have been through more penetration tests and probing.
On the other hand there are a wealth of CMS' out there and it can be confusing if you do not know what you want. The CMS Matrix is a good site for comparing all sorts of CMS' to find one that suits your needs.
I work for a CMS vendor, Elcom Technology, so I am slightly biased - but I have also used WordPress, SharePoint, DotNetNuke, Joomla and Drupal to various levels of degree and they all offer a big step up over something home-built.
A very important reason why you may want to choose something that is already made (FOSS or commercial) is that someone else may be able to support it.
PS
I've used CMSMS on various projects. It has enough user control to let them edit, but not mess with the layout and stuff.
Is there any CMS such as expression engine or wordpress that allows a user to click a button and convert all the text to another language (it would have to be human generated otherwise it has too many mistakes probably).
I'd like to know if there are any good solutions out there that work for real world use, in like business company websites.
Tridion CMS is designed to assist in website translation. They even have translation services to help you through the process of translating your content. It is not a cheap solution but is a viable solution.
As noted above - this is a huge topic and not easily answered briefly. But here are some things to consider...
NO CMS on the market today elegantly interoperates, out of the box, with translation technology for use in real-world translation projects. Reports from clients we've worked with have even raised concerns about the SDL integration.
At best - a handful of CMS's either offer very light-weight features that "appear" to help (side-by-side editing that prevents use of TM) but don't scale or have modest oem connectors to captive translation providers (CQ5<>TDC).
If your needs are modest - these might work fine.
But if you're serious about localization and have a moderate to high volume of content and want to work with any translation provider - you need a proper, rich, scalable integration between your CMS and the TMS (translation management system) used by your Translation firm (LSP).
Regrettably - these are scarce. We do nothing BUT build these connectors and use a neutral platform to provide direct integration all sorts of translation providers and technologies, the full SDL suite included - and still we've only been able to build a few rich CMS plug-in connectors because they are very complicated and require substantial development effort - IF they are going to be useful.
But the CMS choice you make should be driven as much by your broader needs. Localization should only be one facet of the decision process.
I guess the harsh reality is that there is NO CMS that will do what you descibe without smoe modification or a connector.
RK
I would recoomend you to use Kentico CMS.
See the video on Multilingual support in Kentico CMS:
http://devnet.kentico.com/Blogs/Martin-Hejtmanek/March-2010/Webinar-5---Multilingual-support-in-Kentico-CMS.aspx
Kentico CMS offers multilingual functionality including Right-to-Left languages and Eastern languages. Please see some "live" examples:
Site in 10 languages (incl. Chinese) : http://www.chep.com
Site in 7 languages (incl. Japan, Korean): http://www.wayoutback.com
Arabic: http://www.scb.gov.sa/
Hebrew: http://www.medicsfile.co.il/
Chinese: http://www.royalcaribbean-asia.com/?lang=zh-CN
Hindi site: http://www.rajasthantourism.gov.in/
More details on multiple languages support:
http://www.kentico.com/cms-asp-net-features/Content-management/Multiple-languages.aspx
Kentico also offers Translation Management:
http://devnet.kentico.com/docs/devguide/index.html?translation_management_overview.htm
Especially the translation status overview makes it really easy to manage multilingual web sites. If only a part of web site is translated then you can set to combine the rest with the original language without adding the missing pages in it manually.
By default Hippo CMS utilizes Google Translate, but you can plugin your own translation engine / review process. See for more information: http://www.cmswire.com/cms/web-cms/hippo-cms-75-launched-introduces-drag-drop-layout-localization-channel-management-010391.php/
If your organization already uses SDL for translation services then using SDL Tridion is a natural choice because of the built-in connector to send Tridion content for translation using a right-click on the GUI item. After translation, it is updated in the CMS and the author is notified.
SDL Bought Tridion a few years ago and has been maturing this solution since then. Today it is available in the current release, Tridion 2011 SP1, and is compatible with both World Server and Translation Management Server.
This is all human translation and any solution that honestly recommends machine translation for final content is not serious about it.
Drupal 8 is the best option available for Multilingual capability... Although you have to wait a little bit for its release, You will get a good result. Also earlier versions of drupal including Drupal 7 supports multilingual functionality.
But Drupal 8 will have more features...With Drupal 8 multilingual functionality, it is possible to translate anything in the system.
The multilingual functionality provides language configuration, assignment and detection functionality. It also provides a user interface to the existing back-end support for automatic software translation. Now it’s more easier to translate contents with the build-in user interfaces.
Plz refer the link for more detailed info Drupal 8- What’s new and Expected Inside
Day Communique (CQ5 - now ADEP), in combination with a third-party translation vendor, can do this job.
In Communique/ADEP, you manage your pages in whatever native language you choose. Once they are done, you kick off a translations workflow. This will go to your translation vendor (of which there are several). The vendor will have a human translate it, and possibly also use software to speed up the translation process. It will come back to you for approval in the workflow, if you wish. Otherwise, it will just be published to your web site.
So yes, from the user's perspective, one click can indeed translate a page in multiple languages, and publish it to multiple web sites. Our company is doing this, only we are doing our own in-house translation.
I have not used this, but I looked into it awhile ago and this looks to be the best solutions I have seen.
http://umbraco.org/blog/2009/3/25/microsoft-translator-and-umbraco
That is not how major businesses do translation. It's good for quick and dirty, general idea translation, but it's not for anyone serious about messaging to multiple languages and cultures. Typically, businesses work with translation vendors and grow translation memories that help to guide content authors to creating a consistent message and to reuse content (keeping translation costs down).
This is a big subject, not a small one. Honestly, I'm kind of flabbergasted at how to answer this question, so I'll stop here.