I'm looking for some sort of CMS system to implement here in terms of "documentation" system.
Now, I'm not to sure about which system(s) would suit my needs best, so I thought I'd come here and type up my requirements so you could help me in narrowing down all the different options.
One important note to make is that I'm not looking at a system where I can store certain documents (word, pdf, whatever). Rather at a system where I can type the "documentation"-text in some sort of post (like a blog).
Requirements:
- Multilanguage support
- Tagging
- Decent search support (tags, groupings, categories)
- Version-control of posts/articles
- Possibility of exporting post(s) to a pdf file
- Support for multi-user (usergroup X can only see those posts, usergroup Y can see others, etc...)
I know, these are some strange requirements if they're all combined, and I reckon most of you would perhaps say that I'd have to develop something like this inhouse rather then finding a descent working product out there (open source if possible).
None the less, I thought I'd at least ask the opinion of y'all.
Regards,
Tim
You definitely need a Wiki. It doesn't matter if it's for developers or end-users, it meets all of your criteria.
Things like exporting to pdf might not come standard but it could be accomplished using a plugin. I've used a few wikis in the past, mediaWiki, OpenWiki, Twiki and currently Screwturn wiki. They all have their pros and cons, they all work on different systems (apache, iis, sqlbased, file based, etc..).
I would suggest you doing a little comparison investigation to decide which wiki you like best. Whichever you pick will meet your needs.
Here is a comparison chart, hope this helps
good luck
-D
If you want to export to PDF with hi-resolution images maybe following answer will be help:
CMS and store hi-resolution images in generated pdf
Related
I am building a educational site for carpentry.
It will contain lost of articles and tutorials sorted in different categories.
I am looking for suitable CMS and/or theme.
The focus is on content and ease of organizing lots of links ion categories. So I don't care about beautiful visual design, but rather a neat way to organize a lot of information on a topic.
Thank you!
Hmmm what's the world's leading example of a lot of information on just about every topic? Wikipedia. And the software that runs Wikipedia, 'mediawiki', is free and open-source. You could try that.
It might take a bit of getting used to, since there's no hierarchy of URLs (so for example you dont have /tutorials/cabinets/tutorial1.html) but everything can be in multiple categories by tagging: [[category:tutorial]] [[category:cabinetmaking]] etc. And the power comes in search and rich linking.
I put this out as an alternative to the standard Drupal/Joomla/LAMP-stack CMSs that other people will doubtless suggest.
Educational site? Maybe you're looking for an LMS instead?
Check edu 2.0 at http://www.edu20.org/
If you don't need the specific features of an LMS - grading, testing, etc then Joomla or Drupal would easily be able to do what you are looking for. Both are very good at organizing content.
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I am working with a small team (2 others) of developers that are geographically dispersed, and I'm looking for good ways for us to collaborate on specs... We're thinking we might use Google Docs to write the spec in so we can all have access to modify it in a central location.
What have you done? What good ideas do you have?
If you have an intranet or VPN, I would actually consider installing and using a small Wiki for these specs.
Compared to Google docs you get:
Much better versioning and change tracking (IMHO)
Much easier to start new documents for subsections
An actual markup rather than WYSIWYG (a matter of taste, I prefer LaTeX to Word).
Possible to attach variety of other file types
Very easy to backup
Very easy to create an offline version
You don't have to worry about storing sensitive materials elsewhere.
The disadvantage is that it is not WYSIWYG, which may or may not be an issue to you.
Of course, you can pick a Wiki implementation that supports a better editor, and possibly even a synchronous collaboration one.
Google Wave - exactly what it's meant for - collaboration
IMHO, a word processor is the wrong tool for a programmer. A spec should be written in a plain text editor, and utilize lightweight markup such as reStructuredText, AsciiDoc etc.
The benefits of such an approach are:
There are excellent tools to manage plain text, that are already in the hands of programmers (VCS, automated build systems, diff, patch, programming editors, grep, etc.)
A markup language allow for expressing intent rather then formatting.
That in mind, a Wiki seem to be the obvious choice.
Personally my tool chain of choice is:
reStructuredText as the markup language.
Trac as a Wiki
Firefox + the it's all text extension
Emacs + rst-mode
The choice of technology is one issue and Google docs is a good choice IMHO. But the real challenge is how to manage the process e.g. divide the tasks.
My suggestion is to first make sure that the platform and all related technologies are decided-upon as best as feasible. Then, compose a a thorough table of contents. A well-designed TOC will allow you to divide tasks properly and not "step" on each others' work. From then on you each "flesh" out your assigned sections as well as review each others' work.
In effect, each TOC subsection becomes an atomic unit of work that can be assigned and maintained by an individual who is also accountable for said section(s).
Good luck!
I think it depends on
How heavily into writing the specs you all are
If you're likely writing at the same time
Whether you intend to publish the specs.
Google Docs is nice and easy to get started with. It's also great that you can now export folders all at once. Still, for something that's going to be published to the web, a wiki or general cms is a better presentation vehicle. A wiki will also integrate with your existing site.
If you've got small specs, primarily written by one person then use whatever tool is available where you're hosting the project code or website. If you're not likely to be editing at the same time then a wiki is good.
I've done the wiki thing, the passed document thing and the Google Docs thing.
The wiki thing has a low starting effort and lasts a pretty long time. At a certain size it does get to be a pain.
The passed document thing (writes, email, edit, email, etc) only works while one person is starting everything up. As soon as there are even minor edits then it sucks.
The Google Docs thing is fine until you have several docs and several editors or want to publish it online.
hth
This isn't programming related, but I've personally used Google Docs to write shared documents and found it easy to use.
I would suggest enabling Google Gears however, in the event that the Google servers go down momentarily or an internet connection isn't available.
For writing specs collaboratively, you could try Gingko.
It's a card-tree editor, which means it's a mix between index cards and an outliner, with real-time collaboration and full Markdown support (as well as basic LaTeX).
We are still missing several features (version history, comments, etc), but for some the benefits of having everything in a tree structure outweigh these drawbacks.
Writing specs with it is great, because you can create a card for each user story, and drill into it as much as you like (and organize them into categories if you'd like).
http://gingkoapp.com
I was wondering if there exists any open source frameworks that will help me include the following type of functionality to my website:
1) If I am viewing a particular product, I would like to see what other products may be interesting to me. This information may be deduced by calculating for example what other people in my region (or any other characteristic of my profile) bought in addition to the product that I am viewing. Kind of like what Amazon.com does.
2) Deduce relationships between people based on their profile, interaction with one another on the website (via commenting on one another´s posts for example), use of the website in terms of areas most navigated, products bought in common etc.
I am not looking for a open source website with this functionality, but something like an object model into which I can feed information about users and their use of the site including rules about relationships and then at a later point ask it questions described in (1) and (2) above.
Any pointers to white papers / general information about best approaches to do this, or any related links will really help too.
(I am the developer of Taste, which is now part of Apache Mahout)
1) You're really asking for two things here:
a) Recommend items I might like
b) Favor items that are similar to the thing I am currently looking at.
Indeed, Mahout Taste is all about answering a). Everything it does supports systems like this. Take a look at the documentation to get started, and ask any questions to mahout-user#apache.org.
For 1b) in particular, Mahout has two answers:
If you are only interested in what items are similar to the current item, you would be interested in the ItemSimilarity abstraction in Mahout (org.apache.mahout.cf.taste.similarity.ItemSimilarity) and its implementations, like PearsonCorrelationSimilarity. Based on a set of user-item ratings, this could tell you an estimated similarity between any two items. You'd then just pick the most similar items. In fact, look at the TopItems class in Mahout which can just figure this for you quickly.
But also, you can combine a) and b) by computing recommendations, then applying a Rescorer implementation which then favors items that are similar to the currently-viewed item.
2) Yes likewise, you would be interesting the UserSimilarity abstraction, implementations, etc. This would deduce similarities based on item ratings. Mahout however does not help you deduce these ratings by, say, looking at user behavior. This is domain-specific and up to you.
Sound confusing -- read the docs and feel free to follow up on mahout-user#apache.org where I can tell you more.
I am researching the same topic, as I'm working on a project to help people decide how to vote on California's complicated ballot measures. Here are some open-source collaborative filtering engines that I've found:
Vogoo (PHP)
acts_as_recommendable (Ruby on Rails)
Mahout (formerly Taste) (Java)
There's also a good overview of these engines here.
There are also the Duine framework and OpenSlopeOne.
But in my opinion, Mahout is still the best.
You can find a survey about Open Source Recommender Systems here:
http://girlincomputerscience.blogspot.com.br/2012/11/open-source-recommendation-systems.html
Hope it helps!
You can find a List of Recommender Systems here
I need to create a internal website and can't figure out if we should be writing our own, or using an existing framework.
Most of the website will essentially be a front end to a database. We need to have a number of people enter data into forms. We then want to be able to show different views of all this data -- including running small queries (e.g. how many resources do we have with attribute 'X'). As is usually the case with this, we will want to tweak the UI on a regular basis.
There actual data design is not a simple 1:1 mapping of resource to entry. For example, we might track several attributes for one item as the "base set of data" for that item. Then we could have several additional sets of data.
Imagine a recipe application. You might have a recipse for a starter. This could then be referenced by several other recipes that need that same information.
I feel like this is best suited for a general framework (Ruby on Rails, Django, etc), but I wonder if it might not be good for a "traditional" CMS platform like Drupal? I specifically mention Drupal since the people that would develop this have the most knowledge using php and MySql.
I usually lean towards wanting to use an existing platform, but am interested in other people's thoughts. To give you an idea of scope, I would imagine if we wrote this from scratch we are probably talking about 3-5 weeks of development.
Would you recommend writing our own, or using an existing framework? If you would suggest using something that exists what would you recommend?
Would you consider this to be best suited for a straight framework or a straight CMS?
Thanks!
It's possible that Drupal will be a good solution for you, though you'll probably need a few key additional modules like the "Content Creation Kit" (CCK) and "Views".
Unlike other web CMS systems (WordPress, Exponent, phpNuke), Drupal treats your entries as a "pool" of content, from which you pull various subsets for different areas of your site.
There is a lot of documentation for Drupal (almost too much), the biggest problem is finding the piece that's relevant to what you're trying to achieve. Diving on to one of the interactive IRC channels can be a good idea, as the community is quite helpful and is almost always willing to give you a pointer in the right direction.
The power, flexiblity and capability of Drupal is both its biggest strength and weakness - I know it took me a bit of effort to get my head around key concepts, and I'm far from being a Drupal Expert.
One last comment: Having written my own CMS from scratch, which I abandoned in favour of Drupal, I'd suggest your 3-5 week estimate is likely on the light side.
Stay away from Drupal for any site that requires customized functionality. I recently used Drupal for a website at work, and it was VERY difficult to figure out how to get it to do what I wanted it to do. There is a lot of documentation out there, but all of it is unhelpful -- it answers very specific questions about specific issues but does not provide any context as to how you would approach building the site as a whole. If you're a programmer, using a more general framework will probably work better, as CMS's are designed for a specific kind of site, and if you want your site to have non-standard functionality you are going to be fighting the system instead of working with it. If your developers are most experienced in PHP, try one of the PHP frameworks that mimics the architecture of Rails -- e.g. cakePHP or CodeIgniter.
CMSes usually make sense when you have a broad and potentially expanding array of different content types and modes you need to handle. Drupal has literally dozens. Given than you mentioned RoR, it sounds like what you need is more of a MVC style framework. Maybe similar to the sort of thing stackoverflow was built with. .NET an issue for you?
If you are really limited to 3-5 weeks, however, I think a Rails-based strategy makes sense so go with RoR or CodeIgniter
If Drupal can do what you need easily I would say go with Drupal. I don't know much about Drupal though.
Otherwise, what you describe sounds like a data driven web app or more like a reporting app. It sounds like you might have some very specific needs or that users might want very specific needs in the future. That is something hard to get from premade software since you have no idea what users are going to request. Since I'm a programmer I would probably want to build it myself.
Funny you should ask... I just came across this in SD Time's Linkpalooza this afternoon:
Ten free powerful content management systems…
There are at least 4 more mentioned in the comments to this post.
It seems to make little sense to develop a new one with so many from which to choose!
BTW, this is neither a recommendation nor endorsement of any particular CMS.
Treat Drupal as a framework. Core modules + CCK + Views is a good start to build on.
If you're doing something that you might want to expose to other applications, consider the Services module. A lot of interesting things have been done with flex frontends connected to drupal running services with amfphp.
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I'm about to start a project for a customer who wants CMS-like functionality. They want users to be able to log in, modify a profile, and a basic forum. They also wish to be able to submit things to a front page.
Is there a framework or barebones CMS that I could expand on or tailor to my needs? I don't need anything as feature-rich or fancy as Drupal or Joomla. I would actually prefer a framework as opposed to a pre-packaged CMS.
I am confident I could code all this from scratch, but would prefer not to, as something like a framework would significantly cut down on my time spent coding, and more on design and layout.
Edit: I should have been more specific. I'm looking for a Content Management System that will be run on a Debian server. So no .net preferably.
I think i may end up going with Drupal, and only adding modules that I need. Turbogears looks a bit daunting, and i'm still not quite sure what it does after it's 20 minute intro video...
TinyCMS doesn't look like it's been touched since... 2000?!?
I think the best is CMS Made Simple. Seems like drupal takes awhile to customize.
http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/
tinyCMS is about as barebones as you can get. (edit: fixed link, I had gotten a little click happy and linked to the wrong thing)
#modesty, I would definitely NOT use SharePoint, as it is anything but barebones. It is a fairly expensive product (especially when compared to the many free alternatives), and it has quite the learning curve to do anything interesting.
Woo, another Debian nut!
I think you need to be a bit more specific here, Forum != CMS. Is this for internal company or external customer use? What language(s) do you know/prefer? There's no point in recommending a Perl or PHP framework if your language of choice is Ruby. Do you need to plan for scalability?
What's wrong with Joomla or Drupal? I would argue that they can be successfully used on small sites. Maybe a framework isn't what you're looking for, maybe you just need a library or two (eg. PEAR?). If you need something smaller, maybe writing your own backend library that you can reuse for future projects would be a better solution.
For a one-size-fits-all framework have a look at Turbogears. ("it's a big hammer, that makes every problem look like a nail")
I've been obsessing over TikiWiki lately. Although it has "wiki" in the name, its full name is "TikiWiki CMS/Groupware" and it's an interesting piece of software. It has a real everything and the kitchen sink feel. It includes support for wiki, blogs, articles, forums, and files out of the box (and a ton of other stuff too). I think the real appeal to me is that most of the stuff can all be integrated together, wiki pages can include other wiki pages and articles (which is more useful than you might think). It's in RC stage for release 2.0 and is still missing a ton of features, but I think I might keep using it and contribute some of the features that are missing, it's a really interesting base right now.
The Mozilla support site is implemented using TikiWiki, for an example of a really beautiful implementation.
Drupal's include system should keep everything relatively lightweight as long as you only include what you need. Despite the fact that it comes with a smattering of modules, what you choose to enable is all that will be included at runtime. If you have to get under the hood and make modifications, I'm also a firm believer that Drupal is a more friendly and elegant system than Joomla. We use Drupal at my work-as much as a framework as a CMS-and it has proven pretty reliable in keeping development practices at a high level.
I realize I'm a couple years late to the party but I was looking for something like this myself and ran across this post while doing Google searches for 'barebones cms'. Along with this post, this turns up:
http://barebonescms.com/
There is also a forum on that site.
A similar combination could probably meet or exceed all of your criteria. Although, as others pointed out, you weren't particularly specific on the details.
While the original author is probably long gone, hopefully someone else finds this useful.
I would suggest PmWiki, it's something between a framework/wiki. By default there aren't even users, just different passwords, for different tasks, but using PmWiki Cookbook 'recipes' You can add additional functionality.
You can check their philosophy to get main idea what it's about.
If you want a Rails solution, Radiant CMS is a good option. It's simple, elegant, extensible and, of course, comes with all of the benefits of being based on Ruby on Rails.
if you are looking .net you can take a look at umbraco, haven't done much with it (company i work for wanted much more functionality so went with something else) but it seemed lightweight.
Edit : if the customer wants a tiny CMS with a forum, I would still probably just go Drupal with phpBB or simple machines forum, almost positive they can share logins. Plus tomorrow the customer is going to want more and Drupal might save you some work there.
Might want to check out Drupal.
Here are the details of the technology stack that it uses.
I have never used it so I can't vouch for the quality etc but definitely worth a look.
how about you use drupal but scale down and code it according to your needs.
definitely will be faster than code-from-scratch-with-framework
I have been working with Joomla for some time and I believe it one of the best CMS for starting off a Website. I have tried others a lot, But Joomla is better because it has Numerous Extentions (Components , Modules) and also its very Easy to Customize. You could also look at the Community Builder Extension for joomla.Other requirement like Chnage Fronpage Articles etc is a Breeze....
joomla.org
For some reason Joomla Does not Suit you try Drupal.
Wordpress is a very powerful but simple CMS.
bbPress is a very simple but integrated forum (easy, Wordpress user account integration with cookies and all).
Since you have programming experience you may find Wordpress to be the perfect match (PHP, MySQL) with plenty of plugins and hooks to help you achieve what you need. For example, there is a featured posts plugin that will put selected content on the front page.
I need to jump on the Umbraco bandwagon here. As far as ease of use from a developer standpoint goes, there is nothing easier than umbraco and v. 4 has full master page support and a tone of other stuff... and it's free.
For windows take a look at the DotNetNuke is asp.net based, free and open source and easily skinned and modified, there is also a thriving market in add-on modules. In addition most hosting companies offer it as a pre-installed application
Expression Engine is fantastic. It's free to download and try but you must purchase a license if you are making a profit with it.
WordPress actually has a forum plugin - it's nothing fancy but it's there. It handles user management et al and has a big community for plugins and themes. I think it is probably the easiest CMS to install & run (I've done some legwork here). There are plugins that update the core & plugins automatically (take that Drupal). I've tested these and they seem pretty solid. As usual - backup beforehand.
For .NET MojoPortal looks pretty good and is lighter than DNN. I saw the edit but thought I'd include this anyway since it looks like it's worth checking out.
Drupal is a language unto its own - I wouldn't tackle it unless you're going to do so with some regularity, otherwise it's just another different framework to learn. The uplink into my brain is at capacity already so I gently pushed it aside. The themes tend to look the same too.
Joomla may suit your users for usability.
I'd go for a pre-made framework myself because it would have a community and expansion capacity. What your client wants today will pale into insignificance tomorrow.