CMS Advice

From: Andrus Adamchik (andru..bjectstyle.org)
Date: Fri Oct 28 2005 - 17:41:53 EDT

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    This post is more related to Cayenne community rather than Cayenne
    technology...

    I've been looking for an easy to use content management system for
    ObjectStyle.org web site (and of course for its Cayenne part). Our
    current system (aside from Confluence and Jira) consisting of XML
    files that need to be checked out from CVS, edited by hand, and then
    rebuilt with Ant/Velocity, clearly outlived itself. There is lots of
    other choices out there, though none seem to be good enough to
    warrant the switch. Features I am looking for are the following:

    1. Content posting by authenticated users. This includes online
    editing of any part of the static site.
    2. Support for 100% custom templates to ensure the site is structured
    and looks the way *we* want it.
    3. An ability to grab external RSS feeds and post them under news
    section (right now we can't even scrape our own blog).
    4. We need to be able to maintain User and Modeler Guides in one
    place and then publish them in two places - on the web site and as
    part of release documentation.

    Confluence (not sure about the new versions) won't work - it doesn't
    address (2) and (3). Most open source CMS's are written in PHP
    (surprise!). I have no prejudice against PHP, aside from the fact
    that it only works with MySQL, so I evaluated a few packages. The
    winners were Drupal and WordPress. On the surface Drupal addresses
    all the requirements except for (4), but I quickly got lost in its
    configuration menus. I didn't feel like I gained any productivity
    compared to our current checkout/edit-by-hand/deploy approach.
    WordPress had nice UI for publishing (and a lot of nonsense
    surrounding it), but didn't allow to embed RSS. I even invested some
    money to do a pilot project integrating Drupal, WordPress and our
    current Velocity templates, but the result was simply too complex to
    maintain.

    So now I am doing what I should've done long time ago - asking for
    community advice. Anyone knows of a simple CMS that satisfies all the
    requirements above and is still simple to use and maintain? Open
    source systems that work with PostgreSQL are preferred. Of course
    commercial programs that would donate a license to an open source
    project would work too.

    Alternatively if you have experience configuring systems like Drupal
    (if I am not mistaken, Spring uses Drupal, and their site is not that
    bad), and can volunteer to do a prototype of a Drupal site (and help
    me with a "mentality switch" part), please let me know.

    Thanks
    Andrus



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