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Closed 9 years ago.
Note: I have seen this and tried to take as much from it as possible; but I believe my context is different.
I am working on a small-ish project. Call it Foobar. I'm wanting to get this done more organised..I've tried a few projects, mostly as an unorganised programming-as-a-light-hobby student. I'm trying to get more organised; 90% of those projects went after I either failed to document at all, or because I lost them.
As such, I've been thinking about getting version control/hosting going. Not only will it organise me more, but (a big if here) if it gets anywhere into a usable state, it will be easier for people to get.
The two places I'm considering are Google Code and GitHub. From the question I linked:
Google Code:
As with any Google page, the complexity is almost non-existent
Everyone (or almost everyone) has a Google account, which is nice if
people want to report problems using the issues system
GitHub:
May (or may not) be a little more complex (not a problem for me though) than Google's pages but...
...has a much prettier interface than Google's service
It needs people to be registered on GitHub to post about issues
I like the fact that with Git, you have your own revisions locally
From this I'm leaning towards GitHub, as Google Code doesn't look appealing to me.
For a small hobby project - basically making community features irrelevant - are there features that should take me over to one side or the other?
I prefer Google Code since it's just easier for my small personal projects. At the end of the day, for free projects, it's hard to steal time from family, friends or other commitments and the key to making small free projects a success is being realistic with your time. (Elsewise, you get the "80% done" problem.)
Google Code now has GIT support.
Biggest advantage of Google Code is that you don't need a website.
- The frontpage of the project is enough.
- You can add simple binary downloads in the Downloads section.
- In comparison, GITHUB's interface is REALLY confusing to non-programmers. Your frontpage is full of technobabble and so unless it's a coder's tool, you'll need a separate website.
- Marketing's really good- You get a good rank on Google and often you'll be picked up and sometimes reviewed by other download sites. There's no sense donating your time if no one can find your project.
If it is entirely a coder's tool (not just a handy IT tool), then perhaps GITHUB is better.
You say "I believe my context is different", but don't give any reasons why it is. As such, I can't offer you any specific suggestions other than the generic pros and cons, which are outlined in various documents and tutorials online.
My suggestion: pick a program first (git, Mercurial, or SVN) and use it. Find a hosting site that supports the software (at the time of this answer, GitHub for git, BitBucket or Google Code for Mercurial, Google Code for SVN) and use it. If you run into problems, switch to another one.
I've used all three, and typically the problem isn't the hosting, but the fact that you need to learn the program itself. All of the hosting providers listed here will suit you fine until you have a specific reason why it doesn't.
I would go with Github. The single reason for this is, that Google code shows your email and your full name (name only if you have google+ i think). And you cannot disable this at the moment.
Let's split the problem into two parts: for developers and for users.
In fact, if just terminal users are considered, both google code and gitbud has friendly interfaces, and as we all know, google is more well-known towards those who do not program.
But when we turn to programmers, git is more fashion and more comfortable(question?).
So, personally I will choose google code if I am planning an terminal user oriented product and github of course if I want to involve lots of potential collaborators of I was developing an complete programmers' product, like a API something.
Related
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Closed 9 years ago.
First off please have patience for this long winded post. I wanted to get all the pertinent information (as I see it) out to you.
I have a decision to make and would like your input. I have recently taken on the task of taking over my daughter's skating club's website. They have a custom site written in asp pages and don't have anyone to support it. I want to move their site to a CMS system so it doesn't take a developer to maintain or make changes to it. We also want to add some custom pieces to it like a registration form for the club and some other custom pieces around marking down scores and viewing stats and such.
I am a .Net developer and have been developing in SharePoint for some time, but don't feel that SharePoint is a very good fit for them. Our current web host is GoDaddy. I don't yet have the details of the contract with them yet so can't comment on the service we have with them.
I have been looking at three CMS's at the moment. DotNetNuke, Umbraco, and Orchard. All are good and all have pros and cons as far as I can see. I am currently leaning towards DotNetNuke for the following reasons:
Umbraco appears to be a "create from scratch" system with no templates to apply (I apologize if this is incorrect, but it is based on the information I received). I am not a guy to develop the visual aspects of a site, so would rely heavily on templates and such.
Orchard sounds like it might be a good fit, however I have never developed in MVC before. Most of my .NET has been straight ASPX. I am not opposed to learning MVC and have had it on my list for a while, but I don't know if I have the time to learn and port over the current site.
Orchard also appears to be a bit heavy for a normal user (explaining content types and such). I want something others can take up when I pass on the responsibility.
So I am wondering what you all think. Even with learning MVC would Orchard be the best platform for us based on the information I have provided? Should I stay with DotNetNuke as my choice? I would like to mention that I did consider Sitefinity and would have had it at the top of my list, except we are a non-profit and don't necassarily have the budget for a paid CMS.
Thanks again and I look forward to your thoughts.
Well, the ultimate choice will vary on your business need. They all do the same thing, but how they achieve the goal is quite different.
Umbraco - It utilizes the Model, View, Controller (MVC) methodology. This obviously presents an assortment of benefits. However, the methodology to build a product can be quite extensive and even the layout to modify data can be quite cumbersome.
DotNetNuke - Uses a more familiar technology, Web-Forms. This has an assortment of benefits that go a long with it. Including a market, documentation, permission, and ease.
I've never used Orchard so I can't comment- but I can comment on the other two. To show you how I came to my conclusion to use which Content Management System hopefully it will point you in the best direction.
My project that I worked on required a lot of non-technical people to utilize our new product. It has a lot of functionality and features that were required; the biggest however was ensuring the following:
Ease
Intuitive
Control
Speed
Those were our four primary categories. I'll attempt to outline what each area means-
One of the largest pitfall of a Content Management System is that they tend to do more then you require. So the question becomes which product will bend while maintaining my core goals be. For that reason our company chose DotNetNuke because by nature DotNetNuke isn't a Content Management System it is a very powerful Framework.
What this particular product does is focus on a lot of key aspects so a developer doesn't have to waste a lot of time in maintaining but rather in developing.
Ease - A non-technical user is able to view a page; then edit the content in place on that page. Which allows you to incorporate a What you see, is what you get mentality. For the non-developer they get the all familiar Email or Word Editor.
Intuitive - In DotNetNuke 7 they've modified the menu structure for editing. You can actually disable other users to make it actually show less, do less, and still maintain the highest level of control. The user won't get lost in editing the page.
Control - Now this is what is nice, you can regulate each and every control for your user. So you can allow certain content to be regulated and other data not to be.
Speed - It has a market, so you can implement other developer modules. But it also includes a lot of documentation- it may appear cumbersome at first but is quite easy to pick up. Which makes the initial start time relatively painless.
But what do all of those mean to you?
Simple, it means you can develop a beautiful elegant page quite quickly. But since you can restrict several tiers of access you can ensure the page content can be edited by someone other then you- But it won't jeopardize any of your development / content. As you control whom and what is modified.
If your familiar with Microsoft .Net then it will be quite easy to learn; I'm sure other products can accomplish those same goals. But DotNetNuke did it easier which met our goals. It allowed us to not worry about excessive issues or support to enter our company; as the user understood it in such a way that issues don't arise.
That is why we chose DotNetNuke it will boil down to your preference. My experience with the product, community, and marketplace have made me love this product and not chose another. As I can leverage the Core API when needed; so Development, Maintenance, Administration became a breeze for whatever my imagination may produce. But should a developer ever not be present the site and it's quality will not hinder when I leave.
There is a selection of starter kits available in the package repository on the community website and also a few of them can be applied directly during installation of Umbraco. Also in the package repository you will find a wide selection of other packages which you can use on your site to enhance and add additional functionality.
It is true that Umbraco does not come pre-installed with "themes" as such like some other CMS's but this is the beauty of Umbraco, you have a clean slate to work from if you choose. It enforces no requirements on your markup or styling so there is absolutely nothing to stop you using a free or purchased template from any one of the template libraries online such as Creative Market, Template Monster etc etc.
Umbraco has an incredibly friendly, helpful and active community on both the forums and Twitter.
I work with all three and would tell you to use DotNetNuke over the other 2. The primary reason is that if you are developer, Orchard and Umbraco are fine... but you may or may not be the final or future content manager in the future of the club and want to be able to hand the site off to someone. DotNetNuke has the larger community and would be easier for the future admins to learn as well as get support for.
DNN will give you the development options you want, but give the content editors the easier system to work work... and keep you from having to support the site if you ever move on.
don't forget that Sitefinity does have a free community edition: http://www.sitefinity.com/try-now/free-asp-net-cms
it does have limitations, but for simple sites like this it might be just what you need, plus if they ever get a budget someday they could upgrade to the Small Business Edition by just buying a license and get more features and less limitations on the content and page limits.
worth a look.
otherwise, in my opinion your choice depends on who is going to be maintaining the site. If that is you and you'll always be in charge, pick whatever platform works best for you as a developer.
If on the other hand you have to make it drop-dead easy, pick the platform that is best for end users, that based on your knowledge of the user, would require the least amount of training (Sitefinity CE has my vote on that one!)
I hope this is helpful!
I would highly recommend going with DotNetNuke for the sheer reason that the community and available modules for the platform far surpasses any of the other options.
If you want to do MVC style development, you can with DNN using the WebAPI approach for services, but if you don't want to, you can skip that altogether.
The amount of Free and Paid extensions for DNN grows on a daily basis, available in the Store or Forge. You can also search both of these locations right from within the product itself.
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Closed 10 years ago.
We use Trac as our bug tracking / development / wiki system and I was wondering if anyone has experience and uses some of the Trac Agile/Scrum plugins or functionalities? Anything you'd recommend?
Or would it be better to duplicate Trac tickets as dead-tree user story index cards and a hand-drawn burndown chart?
Note that I found a similar question here. Though it's specifically about Scrum. They recommend Agilo. Has anyone tried Agilo yet?
With a collocated team, I'd always duplicate user stories on index cards. A wall of cards is much more collaborative and simple to use than any software tool. And what's most important, it's in your face.
The same is true for a burn chart. In my experience, a software chart gets online looked at by a small number of people, and typically is a pull medium. A big, handdrawn poster (that changes regularly) gets noticed by everyone, and serves as an incubator for ad hoc discussions.
It's also quite valueable to be able to point at them during your daily scrum meeting.
This is how we use Trac for our scrum like sprints:
We use the milestones in Trac to identify sprints.
There is a default Backlog milestone where we gather all new tickets.
Before each sprint we move tickets from the backlog the current release.
On the milestone page, we can add retrospectives and other info about the sprint using wiki syntax.
So just the default Trac functionality without any plugins for now to keep it lightweight. As we get better we may add features like burndown charts or maybe switch to another tool, but we want to get the proces in place first.
Answering late, but this more of sharing my experience with Trac+Agilo so far.
To quickly answer your question, perhaps Agilo is the best option available for Agile development with Trac.
Now comes to install and usining install was just very easy. We used their latest release 0.7.3.3. It installs flawless on Trac 0.11 and Python 2.5. Don't forget to install libjpeg and python imaging library. It would be useful to note that we used virtualenv which took a made things easier.
Further usage is very simple. For wiki I kind of prefer Trac's old clean look over Agilo's customization. Other than that all things just works.
On thier mailing list I have noticed that they are planning to offer multi-project support in future. In all I recommend Agilo plugin for Trac.
Yep, I installed Agilo on our Trac installation.
Seems very cool, includes nice burndown charts.
Unfortunately I left the company where I installed it before I could get any serious usage out of it.
Installation was a pain (Ubuntu Ibex) - I documented precise steps on the Agilo Google Group.
The problem (as always) is integration into the business end of things that PMs and CEOs like to see (e.g. estimated vs actual hours). There are (as has been mentioned) other products out there that cover this off (FogBugz covers this off I believe), but I (and the team) love Trac so we worked around this.
Oh, one more thing; it looks like it introduces quite a lot of overhead (i.e. you have to spend more time in trac to get the most out of it), but like I say I didn't have an opportunity to really use it in anger.
We used Trac before with a burndown plugin then went to Redmine. We've found Redmine to be miserable for repository viewing and the issue interface. We're actually looking to move back to Trac again.
Bitten is a Trac plugin for continuous integration that can be harnessed to do automatic builds on check-in, which provides a critical part of the Agile process (rapid feedback). I haven't used any other plugins for Trac personally, so I can't comment on them. However, the native Trac functionality of milestones could be leveraged fairly easily, I suspect, to be used as iteration markers (where each milestone represents the end of an iteration). Since milestones can be used to mark a 'due date' for features already, you shouldn't need much in the way of modification to use them as such.
From there, using tickets as user stories, and tying them to milestones (I'm sure this can be done manually at worst) would give you a basic method of tracking velocity and keeping the team aware of progress (and changes that need to be made as well).
We use the Trac wiki for:
List of requirements for each feature
List of technical specs (if any) for the features
List of Releases and their features
Deployed environments, with links to all instances
There's a macro for making web requests, so we can list which version, etc. each env have
(there's a GraphViz plugin which is quite helpful for simple drawings)
There's also a ticket in the ticketing system for each "feature", for keeping a gross backlog and the current/next sprint planned.
Then we write a bunch of cards during sprint planning for each feature.
There's also a more operational side to things. We keep one person each sprint on Ops, so we have one person who's dedicated to be interrupted by people outside the team. The rest of the team can focus on delivering features.
Each bug/ops task gets a ticket, but as soon as we start working on it, it gets a card and starts moving across the board. That way it gets visibility and we don't forget to involve the testers, etc.
Scrum is pretty tactile, so I don't think it would work great to put too much stuff outside of the physical working environment. But in the end your team needs to find a balance that works.
For something completely different, the best way to do Agile Development with Trac may be to simply migrate everything to Redmine. It supports Trac's core features with some extras including multiple projects, Gantt charts, forums, DCVS, etc. though it looks like it's not completely there yet. Some good things in the pipeline.
Daniel Srb (in the comments) has a redmind agile plugin he's been working on that looks promising. You may be able to contact and see if he's planning to release it (was a long time ago).
We've had success using two products in concert in the past, Trac for tickets, xplanner for planning.
Agilo for Scrum rocks, the latest versions are using client side generated charts, so there is no dependency anymore, much easier to install :-) agile42 just release a Pro version that enriches the Agilo experience with a nice and intuitive Planning Board, very cool screencast :-)
We recently started using Scrumban.
Basically a Kanban board, with the daily stand-up meetings covering the classic Agile Scrum questions - what did you work on the previous day? what do you plan to work on today? do you have any blockers?
We do this around a physical Kanban board, it is great for visualizing the work flow and for team synergy, but we also wanted a digital form of our Kanban board to be able to double check trac usage vs. the physical board.
In search for something that would work, I found this clever post on re-creating a digital version of the Kanban board in trac.
It is very straight forward and simple, I was able to easily manipulate this approach for our work flow, and you could probably tailor it to your Agile Scrum iterative approach (or if your able to ditch the time boxed approach, give Scrumban a try).
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Closed 10 years ago.
I currently maintain 3 websites all revolving around the same concept. 2 of them are WinForms applications where the website gives a few basic details, and download links. The third is a web application to query data. I also have a forum (SMF/TinyPortal) that has been serving as a tech support/news hub for the three sites. The download traffic is decent, but I don't get a lot of hits on the support forums
I want to consolidate these three entities so that I don't have to duplicate announcements, upload data library updates to multiple locations, and also provide a unified look to the sites.
Fortunately my hosting account has both .NET and PHP support, so I've been looking into Drupal, Graffiti, DotNetNuke, Joomla, Community Server, and more. However, it has been hard for me to discern between what features included, supported, or just not part of the framework whatsoever.
Does anybody have a good evaluation of these projects (and others too) and can evaluate them for features/expandability/customization/etc.? I'm not necessarily looking for a "what's your favorite" but more of a feature set / target end user type evaluation.
If you want to quickly compare features on CMS's, then take a look at CMS Matrix - has practically every cms known to man on there.
Edit
To be a little more precise, from the site
CMSMatrix is the number one content management system comparison site on the Internet. It allows users to evaluate over 950 content management systems in 135+ different categories.
Go with N2 if you want to get up and running in no time with a couple of nice features packed. Also, it is really targetted against extensibility and clean code.
http://www.n2cms.com
"Open Source cms" has tons of them, and running demos with admin logins
DotNetNuke:
very flexible
lots of community around it
community tends to be fairly technical and can be hard to find useful end-user support
can be difficult to upgrade and to keep current versions available
fairly easy to program basic modules for
100s of available modules (free and pay)
documentation can be difficult to find and sparse in detail
easy to skin so your sites can have a unified look
1000s of pre made skins available.
hopefully this is along the lines of what you are looking for.
I've found that CMS Matrix (refer:iAn) can sometimes be a bit out of date but it is definitely a good starting place. Open Source CMS is a good resource (refer:mrinject). I'd lean towards something you can tinker with - closed source could back you into a corner.
If you're looking into .NET then MojoPortal is another option, as is umbracco etc. Search here on DNN and these others. I've found Drupal to be be more intimidating to approach. Also, it's forums are pretty basic. Joomla tends to want money for add-ins, as does DNN although there are freebies for both. Apparently the freebies fro Joomla can vary in quality - I never looked into it too closely.
I think the pick of the PHP crowd is Drupal - if you can invest the headspace for learning it. Drupal tends to be more developer-friendly than end-user friendly so if you're not a developer it is harder to grasp than something like Joomla. Apparently its codebase is better than Joomla.
Have a browse through the communities - you'll spend some time there so make sure they are to your liking.
If the site is quite simple then perhaps WordPress will suffice as it has a plethora of plugins and there are lots of template available for free or
I've been meandering down this path for a while now. My advice is to set up some test installs and roughly configure them to something that has what you want and then try using and and - important - try to break it. Installing them together on the same server is a good way to test the relative speed differences too.
Test drive them - it's the only way to tell which one works for you.
DotNetNuke out of the box contains a lot of features, content management, link management, documents list modules, forum modules, and items of that nature. There is also a very good third-party module and skin market out there for getting the enhancements needed to really get a full solution implemented.
With a little bit of time DNN can serve as a great foundation for a collection of websites. It also supports a multi-portal system that allows you to host more than one site off of the same code base which is very helpful.
The best part of all is that it is Free!
As you mentioned, there are plenty of options available, most of them have all the basic features. If you are looking for a simple setup, most may even be overkill for what you are trying to achieve. Which CMS you choose, may best depend on your preference for the programming language the CMS is using.
For some websites I maintain, I have used Typo3 (http://www.typo3.com/). The reason for my choice was the flexibility of Typo3, with its many (many!) plugins for all sorts of features, and for the ability to develop plugins yourself.
HTH,
J.
Assuming you're going open source, strong considerations are:
An active and knowledgeable community. <-- You don't want to be the only person able to support this CMS in 10 years time.
regular and simple updating techniques.
Your skill sets.
As a vendor, I find CMS matrix to be daunting. Its basically a list of every CMS under the sun, with a few generic ratings and reviews. Before selecting a CMS, I'd commit to a model first, then I'd investigate the various options that are available.
Open Source...has lots of user generated support, but often requires the assistance of outside developers for software maintenance and add-on installation.
Private installed solutions...can be easier to work with, but lock you in to one vendor for maintenance.
SaaS Model...still locks in to one vendor, but all updates are included and initial costs are minimal.
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Closed 11 years ago.
I am looking for a CMS that would be incredibly user-friendly and would have the following features:
really simple message board (no login required)
family tree
story telling area
photo section
news section
Is there anything out there like this that is really easily configurable? I've already messed around with Mambo and Family Connects, but I didnt like either of those. In the past I've just programmed my own websites, for lack of easily implementable features. However, I've assuming there's something I need out there just like this, that I can't find. Thanks.
I don't want anyone to have to login, for one. The is for a family website, and much of my family really don't know what a website is, let alone how to use one. I want a super simple website with huge buttons and not a whole lot of distractions. Family Connects is a good example of what I want, except the photo album is horrible. I want people to post messages without logging in or signing up, and haven't seen that ability in mambo sites I've looked at.
I can understand your stipulation that your users (family) shouldn't have to sign up - but without a sign-in, your site will be a free-for-all for spammers, hackers and other bored Internet denizens.
That said, my suggestion is to use WordPress for a front end - register your family members yourself, and use a very basic template - or better yet, create one.
I have created a CMS for exactly what you are looking for. My family uses it all the time and the majority of them are not computer savy. The only downside is that it requires a login, but like other people have said, their really isn't a way around that if you want your information to be private.
Anyway, if you are still looking, try http://www.familycms.com/
I've been using http://www.myfamily.com/ and it fits all my needs. It includes:
Pictures (with option to order prints)
Discussion
Family Trees (free from ancestry.com)
Videos
Files
Events
I've setup CMS Made Simple a couple times now. It's all PHP and you can edit it to your heart's content. Give it a try.
CMS made simple seems to die according to this study about content management systems found on MytestBox.com
But if it's just for a family website...
maybe you can try other CMSs which any web hosting company provides (like Joomla or Wordpress).
These can be installed in several clicks (especially Wordpress - you can build a good site in Wordpress and it's very easy to maintain it).
For a family website I thiknk Wordpress is the best and enough (lots of plugins and skins can be found for it on the web.
If you're going for a family website you do have the option of removing the usernames/passwords/accounts by setting it up as an intranet site. Then you can browse it at home or from selective addresses.
I recommend geni.com. It's much better than Myfamily.com
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Closed 10 years ago.
The company I work for is wanting to add blog functionality to our website and they were looking to spend an awful amount of money to have some crap being built on top of a CMS they purchased (sitecore). I pointed them to Telligent's Community Server and we had a sales like meeting today to get the Marketing folks on board.
My question is if anyone has had issues working with Community Server, skinning it and extending it?
I wanted to explain a bit why I am thinking Community Server, the company is wanting multiple blogs with multiple authors. I want to be out of the admin part of this as much as possible and didn't think there were too many engines that having multiple blogs didn't mean db work. I also like the other functionality that Community Server provides and think the company will find it useful, particularly the media section as right now we have some really shotty way of dealing with whitepapers and stuff.
edit: We are actually using the Sitecore blog module for a single blog on our intranet (which is actually what the CMS is serving). Some reasoning for why I don't like it for our public site are they are on different servers, it doesn't support multiple authors, there is no built in syndication, it is a little flimsy feeling to me from looking at the source and I personally think the other features of Community Server make its price tag worth it.
another edit: Need to stick to .net software that run on sql server in my company's case, but I don't mind seeing recommendations for others. ExpressionEngine looks promising, will try it out on my personal box.
I've done quite a few projects using Community Server. If you're okay with the out-of-the-box functionality, or you don't mind sticking to the version you start with, I think you'll be very happy.
The times I've run into headaches using CS is when the client wants functionality CS does not provide, but also insists on keeping the ability to upgrade to the latest version whenever Telligent releases an update. You can mostly support that by making all of your changes either in a separate project or by only modifying aspx/ascx files (no codebehinds). Some kind of merge is going to be required though no matter how well you plan it out.
Community Server itself has been very solid for me, but if all you need is a blogging engine then it may be overkill. Skinning it, for example, is quite a bit of work (despite their quite powerful Chameleon theme engine).
I'd probably look closer at one of the dedicated blog engines out there, like BlogEngine.NET, dasBlog or SubText, if that's all you need. Go with Community Server if you think you'll want more "community-focused" features like forums etc.
You can also take a look at Telligent Graffiti CMS.
http://graffiticms.com/
It supports multiple blogs and authors.
Update: It's now open source and available at http://graffiticms.codeplex.com/
Community Server 2008.5 lets you add several members that can post articles. Also with
Community Server 2008.5 you now have wiki's along with forums and the blogs. This probably has one of the better web based admin control panel's I seen in a while. This let's you easily change several things including the site's theme (or skin). To me it is one of the most scalable applications I have seen in a while. We are using it for our site http://knowledgemgmtsolutions.com.
Skinning is pretty straightforward, and the sidebar widgets aren't very difficult to create (if you don't mind building controls in code). The widgets also allow options for the users to customize them in the control panel very easily. I doubt you'll find a strong community of widget builders for Community Server however. Nothing compared to the dev community for blogs like wordpress.
I recommend starting templates from scratch and adding in CS controls as needed, to get the markup you prefer for styling and to use only what you need.
Setting up different roles for users to post to different blogs is also very easy and requires no coding. You can have blog groups, and allow only certain users to post to certain blogs.
Sitecore's Forum module is powered by Community Server and integrated with Sitecore CMS.
Expression Engine with the Multi-Site Manager works great for that kind of situation.
Have you had a look at the Shared Source blog module for Sitecore?