what's a good cms for web shops ? I've always used Drupal so far, but I haven't ever developed webshops. I saw there are Magento and a Drupal module Ubecart.
I actually would like to know a "known, easy to use webshop framework so I don't have to take care abuot security issues.. etc
thanks
I have been using both Magento (community edition) and Ubercart depending on client's target hosting preference. I must say that Magento has some impressive functionality and flexible as it has been around for a while. However there are some serious problems with this. Upgrading Magento to the latest version is a complete nightmare and have a good chance of needing to reinstall. Building your themes in Magento is so convoluted, it takes so many inheriting files to create a simple layout change. There is cummunity support, but most of them screaming for help as I remember. Magento model is "make money from support". So I found that they are not so quick to help on the forums.
With Ubercart it is refreshing to see the amount of active help. I think this is important if you are new this. If you are already familiar with Drupal, then I would say stick with Ubercart. It is much simpler to manage than Magento.
They are both good with application security, but you will need to setup your own SSL cert anyway. I've played with some other carts such as Zen and OS Cart, but found them inferior compared to Ubercart and Magento.
There are more than 500 of them. shopping-cart-reviews.com has a search by parameters feature, does a good job.
If I where you, I would compare open source packages like magento and ubercart against hosted ones like our own SolidShops.com.
Check out my blog post about magento (and open source ecommerce packages) versus hosted ones. I've outlined when to go best with open source / hosted depending on your situation.
We've built SolidShops.com specifically for web designers that need an easy and flexible platform for building small to medium sized stores. It's hosted so you won't have to install, update, secure, backup, ... a thing
Design is 100% flexible if you know html and css and it's a breeze to set up.
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I have requirements to establish a CMS system for enterprise and it has to be java based open source, I found out that liferay has CMS capabilities but I'm not able to find any detailed description of the features introduced on its CMS , also I found some people are talking about integrating Liferay with Alfresco ! does this mean that Liferay is not a complete CMS ? appreciate if anyone can guide me through this and provide me with any resources detailing liferay CMS features
Yes, Liferay has CMS features - coming from a portal background the CMS is only one of the many features delivered out of the box. A portal typically is an integration platform for any kind of application. If you ever only need CMS, it might be that "pure" CMS products offer a bit more of functionality, however, many people are very happy with the CMS functionality Liferay provides. And if you're not, it's typically easy to extend (this is the point of a portal).
Systems that start being a CMS and want to extend that with applications (who doesn't want that) typically have a different mindset - "everything is content" - and naturally your application feels a bit more like "content". The portlet standard, together with the additional APIs that you have available, is a nice way to start.
For CMSs the way to go is typically a proprietary API to extend it. In a portal, a CMS is one of the possible applications available.
Regarding Alfresco: Yes, you can combine it with Liferay. While Alfresco tends to come more from the Content-side, Liferay comes from the portal/integration side. I'd ask you to evaluate both first and see if you are missing vital features in any. Then evaluate which pain you'd like better: 1) Add the missing features you want in the system you decide for, or 2) integrate both systems and run them both. Of course, the optimum result is if only one of the two is sufficient for your requirements. Then project into the future and try to find out what you'll miss first.
There is no correct answer to this question, it all depends on your requirements, experience and ability to learn and administrate one or both of the systems.
Disclaimer: See my profile to detect my implicit bias - I hope to not stress it too much in this answer.
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.
I've been asked to develop a product catalog for our company. We have maybe 20 products, but I'm not sure where to start.
I have some PHP experience and Wordpress CMS experience. I was hoping for an existing framework or solution so I wouldn't have to start from scratch. Anyone have any ideas?
I'm not looking for an ecommerce site as we are NOT selling anything through the site. Its just a showcase.
Especially if you don't ever want to sell: Don't use a framework. Use Wordpress! Create a site for every product, and link them appropriately. Use a theme that allows you to group sites.
This way you work with a CMS you are familiar with, you have the advantage of all the Wordpress goodies (permalinks come to mind), and you don't have to code much at all.
Opencart is a great solution can be easy moded as product catalog
Check their forums