We are building a content based portal. Along with the content, we want to provide some collaborative tools- i.e. chat, forums, online directories etc
We are hoping to leverage open-source software for this, as this isn't really a differentiator and will hopefully be faster/cheaper. I am looking at light integration between the content and these (common login, ability to easily reference content in chat/ forums etc) and am flexible on features being offered- as long as the broad functionality is achieved.
We have hosted on MS Azure- what should our considerations be towards identifying the right product?
Joomla! is one option. You want to ensure that the majority or all of the tools you are looking for are openly available no your chosen platform. It is hard to make a solid recommendation without much detail on the content, but you can check it out here:
http://www.joomla.org/about-joomla.html
It is free and open source, site says
Joomla is used all over the world to power Web sites of all shapes and sizes. For example:
Corporate Web sites or portals
Corporate intranets and extranets
Disclaimer: Have never used Joomla
Related
Which is better for web content management purposed only?
The website requirements include a user discussion forum and a poll survey with a good search facility and also needs a good SEO tool. The site should also load faster and should be easy to edit contents.
I can't speak to Jahia, but dotCMS can do everything you're asking for. Below are some links that should help you self evaluate dotCMS. I also would point out that dotCMS is more of a platform (makes a great user experience platform UXP) than an off-the-shelf solution and because of this your requirements might take a little work to setup and get running. With that being said, your finished product should meet your exact needs.
Site Search (uses ElasticSearch)
http://dotcms.com/docs/latest/SiteSearch
Performance Report
http://dotcms.com/aw/performance-report
I hope this helps.
Jahia should be able to handle these request. I am the opposite if Fish and have experience with jahia. Jahia does have a forum and poll component's both available as open source so you can modify the code when you require to.
What I like about jahia (among many other things) is that editing content is straight forward and very easy to for non technical persons. ofcourse it has all the permissions in place for all content so you can set it up in such a way that you don't have to be afraid that the non technical persons will mess-up a website.
Performance of Jahia, even without fancy caching proxies is very good and it can run on low resource VM's, just if you want to start small. I am using them on small Linode machines without any issues
I have not worked with Dotcms, but basic forums, polls, search, and SEO are all freely available as Jahia modules. The forums are certainly not as good as a standalone like Vanilla, but they are simple to add and administrate. Search is good and requires little configuration, and anything more than basic SEO is going to be custom work.
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 need to set up a CMS for our marketing dept. Basically they need a system that they can
sharing documents with multiple users
editing documents with multiple users
tracking changes
tracking/keeping multiple versions
storing and organizing files
The types of documents are : Illustrator, Photoshop, Pdf, MS word and Excel.
I am in the process of evaluating different CMS to use. Since we are a .Net shop so the first requirement is Windows based. I know we can use Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or DotNetNuke.
Could anyone give me some suggestion? Thanks a lot!
I don't think you're looking for a CMS so much as a DMS (Document Management System). CMS are usually used for managing web-based content as opposed to documents, or if they do document management they usually do a poor job at it.
For basic management of Illustrator, Photoshop, Pdf, MS word and Excel documents I would look to something along the lines of SharePoint - it will suit your needs well for the PDF / Office documents, though I'm not sure how well it does with Illustration / Photoshop files - I'm sure it will store them but you might not have the full advantage of indexing provided by Sharepoint.
SiteCore is a tad bit on the expensive side, but for what it does it's well worth the investment. I've had a demo of the application and was very impressed with what SiteCore offers for end users. The application is developed in .net so any asp.net developers will be able to add, adjust and modify different items for you.
You've spoke about digital assest management, well here is Razuna, it's an open source digital assest management system that has several kinds of downloads to play with, one even being a pre-setup Virtual Image which can get you started right away. Take a look at it and see what you think.
Good luck on your search, and hope this helped some.
I'd consider Google Docs to begin with.
Otherwise, SharePoint can handle the office documents fairly well. If it's just for the marketing team, the 'free' Windows Sharepoint Services should suffice.
You may then want to look into Adobe Version Cue to handle the Adobe based art files.
An alternative thought would be to consider Version Control, so for example Subversion could work for storing changes, keeping track of changes, etc.
Percussion CMS is a GREAT marketing tool, someone recommended Document Management System for your applications you want to integrate and use with your CMS however; the key word is marketing tool. Percussion CMS is a great investment tool to help establish your online presence! With solutions like community marketing, personalization and web analytics these solutions are geared to generate a response from site users. Community marketing helps to engage socially with your visitors in facebook, twitter and community forums. Personalization helps with brand identity, features including product promotion and help your site's represent your company the way you want to be perceived. Lastly web analytics track users and report data back to marketers including information on bounce rates and geo-tracking. Reports showing whose visiting your site and their behaviors. Most importantly the Web CMS is fool proof. It is not code based or needs a webmaster to publish the content for your website. It's extremely user friendly.
I'm looking for [preferably free] software that's designed to support Parent Teacher Association websites. CMS seem like the right place to start. I'm sure many of them could be customized to support our needs (member registration, forums, document sharing, photos, bulk emailing, online payment processing) but I'm wondering if there are any specialized PTA software packages already out there?
Drupal is always a good first bet, with modules for everything you've just described. You can also take a look at Joomla. Some say they find Joomla easier to manage.
Drupal is very common and there are lots of options for hosting. Depending on how elaborate you want to get, it's easy to hire someone to set it up for you as well.
You have couple of options:
Drupal
Joomla
Dotnetnuke
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I have the task to build a web-site for a smaller non-profit organization. I have a bit experience with ASP.NET but because ASP.NET hosting is rather expensive here in germany (we will also need a lot of webspace and traffic) and aslo because there are quite a hughe list of features I think I should go with a PHP/MySQL based CMS (correct me if I am wrong). The question is wich one? There are are so many free CMSs out there. If I tell you what I need, can you tell me what would be a good choice?
Here are my requirement (sorted by priority):
Ease of use (installation, configuration, maintainance) for me who builds the site but also for the members of the organisation they must be able to easily change the the content of some main pages, add supages, add a new mailinglist upload a file to the repository etc.
A membership/role management system. Based on the role of a member access to certain subpages, subforums or folders in the file management system etc. must be restricted. Only certain roles must be allowed to add new mailinglists or moderate the forum.
A mailingsystem that allows me or the members of the organistation to add new adresses, maillinglists or newsletters.
A file management system. Members should be able to upload arbitary files on the server and browse them via a web frontent. Access to folder should be restrictable based on the member rights.
A pulbic forum with private subforums.
Localization. As much as possible of the final site (if not everything) that is presented to the visitor of the site as well as to the members who maintain the site should be presented in german.
Good control over design/look and feel of the overall site. I should have good control over how I want the site to look like.
A lively community with enough momentum to find ressources and help when I am lost.
Extensibility. In case there are some smaller features missing or f the behavior of an existing feature is not quite the way I want it, it would be cool to easily add it myself.
As mentioned by others, Joomla might be a good option for you, although Wordpress may also work (and it's easier). However, I highly recommend that you check out OpenSourceCMS.com, which hosts demos for many of the free and open source CMS's, blogs, forums, shopping carts, etc. For most of them, you can try out both the admin and the frontend. Spend some time looking them over and then when you find some that you like, investigate them further by going to their websites.
Concrete5 is a new Content management system that is excellent. Easily themable, user friendly, great little dashboard for management
and it's open source
My vote would be Joomla. It has most fot he features you discussed, if not in the core as an extension, component or theme. I've set several up and rarely have to use any coding during setup, plus there's a vibrant community if you need help. It also integrates nicely with other 'best of breed' apps like BB forums, Coppermine photo gallery's and others.
Joomla! would seem to fit your needs, and I'd also suggest Kunena for the forum (which integrates with Joomla) and DOCman for the file management solution.
Well, I'd suggest Drupal for any sort of advanced web site. While Joomla! and similar systems are a bit easier to get started with, Drupal's a lot more flexible and extensible.
You want full control over theming? Or user authentication? Access control? Database queries? User picture scaling? Tagclouds?
It's there when you need it :)
I would go with Joomla too, even though I'm a ASP.NET developer.
Joomla is very flexible and customizable, so it fills all your need, because of the big community.
As a complete CMS noob, I asked myself the same question. I started with Drupal. Sure you can do lots of things with it. Very extensible and customizable.
But after implementing my first site in Drupal, I decided to create the next one in Joomla, to have a frame of comparison. Conclusion: Joomla is a looooooooooooot easier to get started and takes a lot less time to create a functioning website from scratch. Sure, for very big projects, Drupal lets you customize more, but for the type of project you suggest: I would recommend Joomla...
I found this PDF report comparing WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and Plone quite helpful when I was asking myself the same question recently. Nice comments with a focus on non-profits - find the comparison summary/recommendation on pp 13-14.
Definitely read the report because it talks about the strengths/issues of each package - given your prioritized list of features, I'd recommend Joomla. I think you can do what you want with reasonable effort and good recent modules like DocMan. WordPress is awesome for a blogging site, but lacks a number (2,3,4,9) of your requirements, and though Drupal is powerful and flexible, it definitely has a steep learning curve. Plone even more so.
Good luck!
I'd vote for DotNetNuke, it's ASP.Net but that saves you the overhead of learning a complete new environment, language and tool just to implement a 'free' CMS, realistically how much is your time worth? It meets all your criteria, and there are currently 600,000 users - which means that you can just get on with it, somewhere someone has already worked on your problems for you.
As for expensive hosting, why not host in another country, I get US$5/month for DotNetNuke in the states, and I code from Australia.
Ive had some experience with Joomla. Highly customizable, plenty of plugins and one of the liveliest communities in development. It has a great admin panel also.
Well, as told by Tom Deleu, yes, though Drupal is very capable and strong CMS but it is tough and complicated to work on. Coming to another option of CMS that is Wordpress. Though it is very easy to develop a content based websites with wordpress but with very limited scope and flexibility.
As per your requirement my vote will also go to Joomla. It is very user friendly, optimized and a CMS you can rely on. Small applications as mentioned by you like "mailing system", "File system" etc. suits joomla more than others.