Looking for a good CMS 11

Posted by Warner Onstine Fri, 28 Mar 2008 16:54:15 GMT

I’ve been working on a project for a family member and need a good Content Management System for them to use. Here are my requirements:

  • Easy to understand interface
  • Generates URLs that are human readable - no blah.php?page_id=123 crap
  • Easily supports internationalization as the site itself will need to be translated into multiple languages
  • Preferrably Java (but open to Rails, and not really interested in PHP)
  • Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to create and edit site templates

What I’ve looked at so far has been:

  • Radiant CMS - too simple, with code embedded and no Rich Text editor that they won’t understand
  • Magnolia - Waaaay too complex, nice for an enterprise solution but not for what they need it for

Just downloaded Liferay and will be taking a look at that, Daisy and JBoss Portal. Another suggestion made to me was to possibly use Contribute, which I think I’ll have them download and try out to see if it works for them (but then I’ll have to do the whole locale thing through Apache).

I’ve looked at the CMSes listed here.

  • Jahia - ok, after relooking at it I may download it and try it out
  • Magnolia - too complex for my needs
  • InfoGlue - looks complex just like Magnolia
  • Apache Lenya - had a very bad experience with this in the past and the interface looks just as awkward to use as it did before - pass
  • Daisy - looks interesting
  • MMBase - no online demo and I wasn’t wild about the screenshots I did see, passing for now

What I’ve found so far with alot of these (just through using their online demo) is that the interfaces are very complex. I don’t know if this is supposed to go along with their “Enterprise” tag or not, and of course a fair number of them tout their JSR-170, 168 compliance. Ok, JSR-168 might be important to know, but do I really care if they are a fully compliant Java Content Repository? Nah, not really, I just want it to work and have a usable interface. Some may care about that but to me it isn’t a selling point. I respect the CMSes who put up an online demo, it gives me a chance to play with it first to see if it’s even close to something I want, those that don’t I look for screenshots, and most likely move on anyways.

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  1. Roger Marin about 4 hours later:

    You can try dotCMS http://www.dotcms.org/ it has a bunch of cool features, and we are just releasing up with version 1.6 give it a try!

  2. Tom about 12 hours later:

    Seems like a CMS is such an important concept that no one knows how to do. I feel your frustration.

  3. tom 2 days later:

    OpenCMS

  4. Warner Onstine 2 days later:

    @tom

    Yeah, I took a brief look at OpenCMS and found a few issues that stopped me from looking further:

    • Demo site didn't work (couldn't log in as admin to save my life)
    • The screenshots did not look intuitive at all (and the look and feel of it turned me off completely)

    It might be a perfectly good solution, but I just don't have time to download and play with each and every one of these. I need a CMS to show me what I need to know quickly so I can make a decision.

  5. hartsock 2 days later:

    I'm doing the same thing right now. I've got the same list, only one to add... What do you think of: http://www.dspace.org/

    I'm still evaluating myself.

  6. Warner Onstine 2 days later:

    @harstock

    I looked at DSpace as part of my UofArizona work a long time ago (we were looking for something to manage our digital collectionas). If you're looking for something to strictly manage content and versions I think that DSpace is fine, but it is definitely not a CMS in my terminology (i.e. - something for managing Web-site content). It is first and foremost a content repository and metadata repository (which is great for Universities who want to provide unique and constant URLs for data that will be referenced by other sites and publications).

    While it has grown it doesn't look like it's left this behind, only added some more stuff on top of. So, not for me (at least not this project). Leo was using it to store some of his books in PDF format to add metadata to them and make them accessible, but I don't know how far he took it.

  7. MV 2 days later:

    http://www.plone.org/

    -- MV

  8. MV 2 days later:

    http://www.nuxeo.com/en/ if Java is a must

    -- MV

  9. Harry 2 days later:

    Have you looked at hosting costs? As a Java developer, I used to prefer a Java solution, but couldn't find Java hosting that competed price wise with PHP/Perl. Have you asked them how much they want to spend?

  10. Warner Onstine 2 days later:

    @MV

    Hmm, hadn't really given Plone that much that - of course haven't looked at since I first started looking at Python. Wait, I'm misremembering I looked at Zope (the underlying platform to Plone). Alright, you've convinced me, I'll take another peek at Plone to see if it will fit the bill.

    Oh, and Nuxeo has that word 'Enterprise Content Management' which gives me the willies now - I think it means "We don't have to worry about having a good UI because we're 'Enterprise'", but I'll look.

    @Harry

    Same cost as if it were not a Java-based solution. I have an ISP that I work with for almost all of my hosting and they are very accommodating.

  11. Karsten Voges 3 days later:

    We chose Drupal http://drupal.org for our Community site http://iteraplan.org PHP so cheaper hosting although Drupal has some special requirements. Nice interface to put in the text and URLs can be specified. Another Option would be to use a blogging tool like wordpress.

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