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Closed 11 years ago.
What is the difference between custom building a CMS website and an open source CMS?
If you build the CMS yourself you have the great opportunity of going through all the problems and bugs that have already been encountered and fixed by the people the build open source CMS before. ;-)
Seriously, in my opinion, building your own CMS only makes sense if there is no open source CMS that you can customize to fit your needs. I think that you will have less trouble (and it will take less time) customizing some existing CMS.
Depends on what you need, how much time you have and how much coding experience you have. For example you could go and write your CMS, add only the functionality you need and keep it rather simple. But you'll have to debug it, take care of many issues like character encoding, security and you'll have to write even simple functionalities like an internal search engine. If you use something like Joomla, Wordpress or Drupal (just to mention the most popular ones), you'll have very well tested environments that have been patched for many security issues. You'll find hundreds of extensions like photo galleries, search engines, multiple language support. The drawback is that if you want to add something particular you have to spend time learning their API... but probably that would require less that coding something on your own... or may not. It's all about the complexity of what you need. You should try taking a look at one CMS API, I suggest a popular one so that you'll find plenty of examples on Google, then try to figure out how difficult it can be to learn and finally make your decision.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I'm looking for a meaningful task to learn Scala (something which is usable at the end and not only programming exercise), and I also have to make a forum, and I don't want to learn PHP... so I'm thinking about implementing an open source forum in Scala.
But does this make sense? Forums don't have high performance or scalability requirements... and also Java Hosting is more expensive, so even if my forum software is free, most people will not use it.
Am I missing use cases where forum written in Scala/Java makes sense, and is preferable over a PHP (or similar) forum?
I found for example this:
http://java-source.net/open-source/forum-software
But it seems to be abandoned, like stated here:
http://www.coderanch.com/t/497053/Ranch-Office/forum-has-been-built-JForum
So probably I'm correct that easy & cheap & slow is far more suitable for a forum = PHP?
I think an open source forum written in Scala would be useful if you can structure it in a way that makes it easy to integrate with existing web apps using the Lift and Play frameworks.
Your target audience should be anyone writing a web app in Scala who wants to tack on a forum. The prospect of using a php based solution won't be enticing to these developers, but neither will be reimplementing the wheel. You have a pretty compelling value proposition if you create a well written, easy to implement solution using the same stack that they are already leveraging.
It depends on the purpose of the exercise.
You want to learn Scala and need a project for exercise:
Anything goes, so does a forum. But it would probably be more interesting to get involved in some existing open source project. Think about the 5 first libraries you would probably consider for a project (logging, testing, web framework) check them out, find one that is open for contribution. Grab a bug or feature request and try to implement it.
You want some forum
Forget it. Use some existing solution.
Somebody forces you to write a forum
If things like being hostable on almost arbitrary webspace isn't a requirement, go ahead use Scala.
You want to prove the power of Scala to yourself or somebody else
Go for something more challenging (Big Data, Akka ...)
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Closed 10 years ago.
I am exploring CMS tools Alfresco and Liferay, but cant decide which is better for Web Content Management.
Please help me decide which tool to use for web. Opinions and suggestions are welcome.
Just use your favourite search machine and voila I've got topics covering this question:
e.g. here
If you can't decide, go for the pragmatic solution and just pick one.
You'll have to decide if you rather like the Content- or the Portal-centric approach - e.g. what else other than CMS do you expect from the solution you choose. As you ask for opinions: I'm tending to prefer a portal (but then, I'll have to disclaim that I work for Liferay) because it can integrate quite a lot more functionality - and extension is done through a well known standard interface (portlets). And I'm typically seeing requirements that ask for more than just content management.
Integration of both products is possible, but it's an additional effort that needs to be done - and you'll have to understand both. There are many people doing that, but if one solution goes 95% of what you need, you could save yourself the integration work.
But if you really want some useful answers here you might want to give more information about what you actually want to use them for, because personal opinions and suggestions might not help you with your personal requirements if you leave them unknown.
This blog post should be helpful enough as to WCM in Liferay. Talking about WCM (not Document/Enterprise content management) I would go with Liferay, because it is really easy and quite powerful, especially recently after a few new features were introduced (very cool web content staging and versioning). Alfresco is good for enterprise content management, but I wouldn't choose it for WCM, the Spring Surf and Spring Web Scripts it is using was quite hard to get used to.
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Closed 11 years ago.
I have come across a fair bit of information on CI being a really flexible framework. Does Yii also allow great flexibility? And the ability to pick and choose when to use it or your own php?
Flexibility is very subjective, so this question is a bit vague.
From my experience I can tell you that Yii is very very powerful, but in most cases when you want to go into really advanced territory you have to do things "Yii's way". If you do, you will find that the pieces of the puzzle click together really well and things go smoothly. If you don't (because presumably you haven't realized yet what "Yii's way" is), it's going to give you a hard time.
I am using YII since 2 years. I use it with combination with Zend AMF and create backend systems for Flash campaigns, create HTML5 webpages, simple pages, different competition pages and and find it usable for every case you need. The main advantage that it is really structured, logical and fast. So because of that I am spending my time on creating application logic, not on setting up environment, setting up all requests, pages, subpages etc., MVC model + ActiveRecord saves my time here.
I have been using Yii for a year now and find it very flexible. You can add your own methods to any model or write components outside models. You need to be familiar with the MVC structure, Object-oriented programming and for writing components, you need to know how to register the component in the config file and how to call it the Yii way.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I am looking for some comments on Magnolia CMS.
Is there anybody out there having experience on Magnolia and willing to tell about?
I am interested in comments like usability, how fast to start with, potential problems, advantages, disadvantages (in comparison to other open source CMS).
E.g. I could not find out if Magnolia is able to use MySQL data or not.
Reason for my question is we need to build a community platform offering content, wiki, blog, news and user message exchange and all that stuff.
I have some experience on Joomla but not on Magnolia.
Any hints, comments, critics, warnings, recommendations are welcome!
Thank you very much!
Alex
BTW: I already found http://cmsmatrix.org/ which is a good starting point to identify features.
From a Java programmer's point of view, Magnolia CMS has a lot going for it. It has a pretty clean, easily extensible architecture. Lots of hooks to plug-in your own functionality, should you desire to do so.
Also, with the "blossom" module it allows for easy Spring MVC integration.
There might be other systems that provide an easier start, have more 3rd-party-modules or a bigger community. But if you are a Java developer looking for a solid base from which to implement you own custom stuff, you should definitely consider Magnolia.
Magnolia has some high server demands, steep learning curve and poor/limited documentation - you won't find many/any 3rd party books either. However, if you persevere with it you can create pretty much anything. It will work with a MySQL DB but you lose a lot of the main benefits of the system if you do not use the JCR DB.
You might want to ask this question on the Magnolia user-list where those that work on Magnolia projects will see it.
And yes, Magnolia is able to use pretty much any database as its persistence layer.
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Closed 9 years ago.
I need a free very simple CMS which i can host on my own server just like Cushy CMS www.cushycms.com. is there any ?
I recently wrote an alternative to CushyCMS because I wanted the open source community to have a free alternative.
Mechedit is an open source CushyCMS like applciation. Runs on PHP5 only though.
Orbis CMS is another open source alternative to CushyCMS. It's built on the same pricinples (simplicity, ease-of-use) and features a stylish interface, but is self-hosted and free.
SnappySnippets is a free and simple alternative; it is highly customizable and has a desktop interface that your clients will find easy to use. It is hosted so that you don't have to install anything
There are many questions like this on Stackover flow
for example:
link text
Just search for CMS
Good question which I was asking myself recently. This is a neglected corner of the CMS landscape. However, I did find:
this rather detailed and intelligent summary list:
http://www.matthijskamstra.nl/blog/index.php/2011/02/16/lightweight-cms-for-simple-projects/
a briefer but recently updated list of 40 lightweight CMSs http://www.abcphp.com/out/top-40-free-simple-lightweight-cms-|-vivalogo-resources/
Two other lists, both from 2012 and neither suggesting much examination of the products:
http://webdesignledger.com/tools/10-simple-and-light-weight-cms-solutions
http://speckyboy.com/2010/07/19/14-light-and-east-to-use-open-source-content-management-systems/
In case you're wondering, the project I was looking at using one of these for got a little more complicated and I ended up going to a more heavyweight system, with a simplified interface on top of it.
There's a lesson there. Many systems that will cope with complex needs (Drupal, MODX etc) can still be installed pretty quickly, and your users' needs are only going to grow more complex over time.
That said, I'd still like to think lightweight systems have their place. Let us know what you chose.