Looking for Open Source CMS and Portal Software Options

I find choosing a CMS incredibly difficult, and evaluating them is very time consuming and often frustrating. There are hundreds of options, one worse than the other. To date I have never come across a CMS that doesn’t have serious flaws. Even if a CMS looks good at a glance, once you start digging deeper you will always encounter problems with usability, accessibility, and front-end code.

Johansson, Roger. 456 Berea Street (2008). Articles>Content Management>Software>Open Source

Open Source Content Management System Market Share  

The survey shows that three systems have come to dominate the present market: WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal. Indeed, the numbers indicate that these three systems have opened up a large lead on the rest of the pack and have emerged as the dominant brands in the market.

Shreves, Ric. Water and Stone (2008). Articles>Content Management>Software

Review: Gartner Avoids OSS Content Management Systems

I received a copy of the Gartner report on the status of the web content management system market. I am always skeptical of such reports because they are geared towards those that work in a corporate environment. The reports are also made in a manner that allows the reporting company to remove itself from any responsibility if their information on the market climate is incorrect. Gartner did not disappoint me. But they do much to disappoint those that are putting a lot of energy and effort in to the OSS Web content management market.

Hiveminds (2008). Articles>Reviews>Content Management>Software

Five Reasons Why the Drupal CMS is Not Ready for the Enterprise

Many Open Source content management systems written in PHP want to be recognized by the business industry as being "enterprise" ready. This is not only a mark of prestige and status but places them in a position where large companies are ready to invest in the software as a platform for their projects. Drupal is now trying making its move to be enterprise ready but has a long way to go.

McDade, Carl. Hiveminds (2008). Articles>Content Management>Software>Drupal

How to Select a Content Management System

There's recently been a lot of discussion and considerable interest in content management systems. Buyers are starting to ask for these solutions from vendors with greater regularity and the buyers are clearly better informed than in the past. Still the issue that comes up again and again is, how do you know which content management system (CMS) is right for you?

Shreves, Ric. Water and Stone (2003). Articles>Content Management>Software

Changing the Way We Work

The CMS market really took wing with the liftoff of the LAMP stack and the growth of a supportive development community. Suddenly it seemed everyone was producing LAMP-based CMSes under Open Source licenses.

Shreves, Ric. Water and Stone (2006). Articles>Content Management>Software>Open Source

Improving Plone and Zope Market Acceptance  

The worldwide ecosystem of interested parties involved in website and web application development has become enormous. Accordingly, there are few unifying themes among the various parties other than the mutual goal of having a “good” website as the final product. However the definition of what is good is entirely subjective. Many other requirements such as the ability to leverage existing resources and a desire to integrate the new project with existing enterprise applications contend for attention in the decision process. To get a clear idea of how we might increase the buzz and attention for Plone and Zope, let's profile some of the interested parties.

Burgoyne, Robert. Plone.org (2006). Articles>Content Management>Software>Plone

Content Manangement Without A System

It is quite possible, in fact could be preferable, to manage content and distributed authorship without the use of a content management system (CMS). Regardless, it’s very important to have a process in place before you choose a CMS.

Robinson, D. Keith. Asterisk (2004). Articles>Content Management>Software

Don't Make These Mistakes When Buying Content Management Software

Most organizations don’t need content management software. Unless you have a very busy website with lots and lots of content being published, the return on investment is not there. The majority of those who do require such software need a very simple, streamlined solution.

McGovern, Gerry. New Thinking (2004). Articles>Content Management>Software

Making A Better CMS

This whole category of software desperately needs to be redesigned with writers, editors, designers, and site owners in mind. Here are my recommendations to the folks writing open source content management systems.

Veen, Jeffrey. Adaptive Path (2004). Articles>Content Management>Software>Open Source

Plone vs. Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server (MOSS)

CMS software selection with Plone and Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server (MOSS) as finalists seems to have become a pretty common case. This is true especially for “intranet/extranet” projects in which the primary focus is on web publishing and collaboration features. I’ve been asked several times to work on comparing the two and I’d like to share some of this experience. Also note that this can’t be a “vendor neutral” comparison because of my involvement in Plone; but I’ll do my best to highlight differences and strenghths of the two solutions.

francesco (2008). Articles>Content Management>Software>Plone

Ten Things To Consider When Choosing The Perfect CMS

Choosing a content management system can be tricky. Without a clearly defined set of requirements, you will be seduced by fancy functionality that you will never use. What then should you look for in a CMS?

Boag, Paul. Smashing (2009). Articles>Content Management>Software>Content Strategy

Comparing Open Source Content Management Systems: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and Plone  

In this report, we take a look at four different open source Content Management Systems—WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and Plone—and rate them on a variety of criteria, including system flexibility, features, ease of use and the availability of support. We chose these systems because they’re the most popular four in the nonprofit sector today, according to our analysis (see Appendix C for more details on our market analysis). We also dig a little deeper into what open source is all about, and how a CMS can help streamline processes. We even take a look at some vendor-provided systems, along with a few other open source ones, in case you don’t find what you’re looking for among the four original choices.

Murrain, Michelle, Laura Quinn and Maggie Starvish. Idealware (2009). Articles>Content Management>Software>Open Source

Is Corruption an Issue?

You might think corruption is mainly an issue in places like sub-Saharan Africa or Myanmar, but unfortunately I’ve been exposed to several cases of this inside the online industry.

Boye, Janus. JBoye (2009). Articles>Content Management>Software>Assessment

Comparison of Home Page Loadability Scores for Major WCM and ECM Vendors

YSlow assigns letter grades (A thru F) for a page in each of 13 categories of best-practice. I decided to run YSlow against the home pages of 35 well-known web content management and/or enterprise content management vendors, then calculate a Grade Point Average. The scores are posted below.

Thomas, Kas. Lulu (2009). Articles>Content Management>Software>Assessment

How to Integrate FrameMaker 9 with a WebDAV-Based CMS

With FrameMaker 9 comes a new way to work with files on a CMS (Content Management Server) that supports HTTP/WebDAV protocol. WebDAV is a kind of extension over HTTP which allows user to write files on Web along with usual viewing. Multiple users can collaboratively edit and manage files hosted on the Web server. Since many of today’s CMS servers provide users with a WebDAV route to access and edit files, FrameMaker 9 can automate the collaborative tasks by providing direct ways to view and make changes to files on CMS systems.

Adobe (2009). Articles>Content Management>Software>Adobe FrameMaker

Content Management System Pocket Guide - A Guide to Evaluating, Implementing and Deploying Content Management Systems  

Once you've built the business case for purchasing a CMS, this guide can serve as a 'field guide' for the evaluation, implementation and deployment process. It begins by analyzing the anatomy of a CMS project, going through the decide and buy, implement and integrate, manage and maintain and upgrade and enhance phases. As part of the first phase, this guide provides a very useful sample of a Request for Proposal (RFP) to help you evaluate content management vendors. The guide also underlines the importance of viewing content management as a process, not a product, and suggests working with a content management vendor who will become a core part of your Web site management team.

CrownPeak (2009). Articles>Content Management>Software

Hey Rocky – Watch Me Pull a CMS Out of My HAT    

When companies decide whether or not to adopt a CMS or continue using a HAT, there are many factors to consider. Perlin outlines elements of both CMSs and HATs that could help you determine which is best for your organization.

Perlin, Neil E. Intercom (2009). Articles>Content Management>Documentation>Software

Sitting on the Fence: Why I Sometimes Choose not to use Plone in Favour of Drupal or Wordpress

As an experienced Plone front end developer, people are often surprised when I often decide not to use Plone, in favour of something like Drupal or Wordpress. I thought it would be useful to explain why and how I make this decision. I know some of these points won’t be popular in the Plone community, but they are based on experience, and think this blog post will be useful to people deciding whether to use it or not.

Hurst, Rick. RickHurst.co.uk (2009). Articles>Content Management>Software>Plone

Do SharePoint Right Before SharePoint Does You Wrong

Microsoft markets SharePoint as an omnibus information-management platform, but like all software, it has meaningful strengths and weaknesses. People frequently label SharePoint a collaboration product, when in fact, it excels at some types of collaboration but virtually ignores other. SharePoint is useful for some Web Content Management scenarios, but poor at (many) others.

Byrne, Tony. CMSwatch (2009). Articles>Content Management>Software>Microsoft SharePoint

Plone vs. SharePoint, Round 2: A By-Platform Feature Comparison

An organization we at Reflab work with recently re-evaluated Plone against Sharepoint 2007; their main requirements are related to document management, where Sharepoint is for sure quite strong. What’s interesting is that they made the comparison also considering the different platforms and browsers their organization uses. Here are the results of their analysis and tests, they where so kind to share them with us, I checked them and translated them. I hope you’ll find them useful.

Ciriaci, Francesco. WordPress (2009). Articles>Content Management>Software>Plone

Tutorial: Turning WordPress into a CMS using WPML 

WordPress is fairly simple to set up as a CMS ‘out of the box’, but where it needs a lot of customization is for setting up ‘smart’ navigation and being able to serve up pages or posts in multiple languages.

Life @ iStudio (2009). Articles>Content Management>Software>WordPress