I'd like to start using a CMS. I've been building static XHTML/CSS pages for awhile, but want to get with the times.
I'm PHP illiterate as of yet, so ease of templating and availability of (free) modules are important factors.
From what I've been reading, SilverStripe or MODx sound like good candidates. What do you think?
Take 1 WordPress a day for 7 days.
Wordpress is a great choice(if not the best) if you want a blog.
For anything else i would suggest Joomla. Its one of the most widely used content management systems out there so there is tons of documentation and people who will gladly assist you. Its open source, which means its free. Easy to use, customise and extend. There are thousands of extensions(plugins) for it.
Templates (the sites skin(design)) are extremly easy to build, almost no skills in php are nessesary.
Take a peak at it at http://joomla.org
There is a great wiki with everything you need to get started at http://docs.joomla.org/
Related
I am looking to make a small website that will be used regularly by only 80 odd people. It would contain a home page with a few widget like parts (calendar, upcoming events, chat, news). It might have a forum, but that would be low key. It would also (if it is possible) have a link to google groups mail. I would also liketo include a jainrain style openid/google account login for the site as well as local login. The site would be in part multilingual, if only the back end in english and the front another language.
Now to the "please dont shoot me" part. I am not looking for a specific solution (drupal, plone, wordpress) - well not as much as a general direction. Hopefully this will be of use to others in the same situation in the future.
I know python (as well as other non web orientated languages) and have past experience with two several month projects using web2py. I have yet to use a CMS, but have installed and played around with wordpress and plone over the last couple of days.
To the question. Is a CMS the right choice for something of this style. From what i have seen of them i really like the bits that are done for you out of the box, and i can tolerate the learning curve - but wordpress for example seems a bit to article/post orientated, and CMS's look to be aimed to provide the average non-coding admin the ability to change the site. Which is not needed here. I have done quite a bit of googling and comparison shopping of the various CMS's out there, and get that you can use it for static pages also. But should i be looking in an entirely different direction altogether?
I imagine that a framework like django or web2py are beyond overkill (and would take way too long for the effort i want to invest). And that anything can be done with wordpress etc given enough effort. But is something of this size with these features suited for a CMS, or should i be looking to do manually or otherwise?
I get the impression that this is not the type of question that is liked here - if so at least writing it helped clarify the problem for me a bit.
Thanks - and don't shoot!
I understand your website will be very small, but never say "never". You should plan with taking into account the possibility that your site will get bigger, even if you and your clients are sure that the site will not get bigger. In other words: it's better to have a solution which works for your small site even if it will increase than having a solution which will not support larger traffic.
Also, there is absolutely no point in reinventing the wheel. It's better to use a CMS (especially because you can get pretty nice CMSs for free), because they already have nice features and their new versions will be even better.
"Thanks - and don't shoot!"
You're welcome... BANG :D
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.
let's say I want to make a forum that has pretty much all the functionality of a typical high end forum, like phpBB2, but I also want to add a few more features here and there. Maybe I want to add user reputation (kind of like what we have here on StackOverflow) and a button to sort threads or posts based on that in some pages.
Needless to say, I also want to do this without reinventing bicycles or rebuilding pyramids from scratch...
What is the professional approach to this? What would you do if you wanted basically a slightly tweaked, advanced web forum?
I would suggest that you take a look at Vanilla Forums:
http://vanillaforums.org/
I'm biased but I'd recommend looking at Drupal - you seem to want to build a customized system out of existing components and Drupal's module architecture lets you do this quite easily. There are lots of resources on the web for learning how to build community sites with Drupal that a quick Google search will bring up.
You can then use modules like the User Karma module to create a reputation system
Pligg, open source, seems pretty useful for features such as voting up and down posts http://www.pligg.com/about.php .
BBpress http://bbpress.org/ , integrates with Wordpress and allows for plug ins.
Also, https://stackexchange.com/ looks interesting!
We need a good CMS that supports data clustering (managing and storing data on different servers). By "good" , I mean : reliable , minimum bugs , the faster the better. (Oh , and it should make coffee :) )
If you want everything and the kitchen sink plus clustering/scaling support, I'd say Plone. Very big community, written in Python, uses the Zope stack so it has a built in application server. Etc, etc. I suggest taking a look at it.
Yes … kitchen sink + community + support: Plone. Development heading very much in the right direction.
Plone is in some ways a different creature from many other systems. Depending on the environment, ultra-high performance may require some attention but in the community there's great expertise to steer any attention that may be required.
http://plone.org/support | Chat Room is a great venue for diverse and honest advice on this subject. We regularly steer people away from Plone -- when some other system will better suit their needs.
I agree, and I think that you need to look for software to fit your need. I have a few sites that only get minimal traffic that run on WordPress, but I also admin a site that runs Joomla and gets reliable amounts of traffic.
Also, Joomla has a wonderfully customizable interface with extensions, plugins, themes and a fairly easy to use administration tool.
I am not sure about "Performance-oriented" means for you. There are sites with Drupal and Joomla that receives million of visits month after month, and do not need special configurations like data clustering.
I think you must ask yourself if you need all you said.
For reliability, and no bugs or minimum bugs i can stand for Joomla.
I think the performance is a function of the hardware.
When you get to data clustering levels, your better off doing some real testing of CMS systems.
Most of the bigger names support a lot of things.
MS CMS Server, DotnetNuke
Anything used by really large shops should work.