[haiku-web] Re: CMS

On 2006-03-22 at 00:12:38 [+0100], Waldemar Kornewald <wkornew@xxxxxxx> 
wrote:
> Hi Charlie,
> which CMSes would you suggest? You said that you have much experience on
> this topic. We have spent waaay too much time on this and still only
> Plone seems to be easy enough to use.

It is also feature-complete and tried and tested. It can also be slow as a 
pig under heavy load but there are ways of dealing with this.

> Our CMS requirements can be found here:
> http://www.haiku-os.org/wiki/index.php?title=Website_Team
> 
> Could you please suggest a few good CMSes? Thank you.

I didn't want to get involved in the CMS debate but for some of the things 
you want I cannot think of any free CMS apart from a Zope-based solution 
such as Plone.

The Plone guys have put a lot of effort into making it easy to work with 
Plone. But you also have to consider the needs of the site maintainers and 
in my experience none of the alternatives come close to Zope for add-ins 
and stability. As I've said, you can use Mailboxer to integrate mailing 
lists, XUF to hook up to external memberships. As it's sitting on a 
full-blown application server you can write what's missing fairly easily. 
There is a bug-tracker as well.

I haven't looked at the competition for a while but apart from OpenCMS or 
Typo3 I haven't heard of many systems that have enough developers around 
them to ensure viability. I've been able to do everything I need with Zope 
and I can only recommend a system that I would be prepared to work with.

Just look at the add-ons you get for Zope/Plone:
http://plone.org/products

From what I've read I think that the proposed site is similar to 
http://www.dzug.org which uses Zope but not Plone.

A key issue for any system is maintainability. I'd rather do without a few 
features for a system that I knew I or someone could and would maintain 
than go for an all-singing, all-dancing system that I can't maintain.

I consider neither general internationalisation nor tight forum/e-mail 
integration to be mission critical. You might want to have a few articles 
in different languages but that doesn't need a full multilingual CMS. Forum 
/ e-mail integration requires a common storage system which is kind of 
difficult if the mailing lists are hosted elsewhere. However, there is a 
Zope Product which stores e-mail in an external RDBMS but I think it's fine 
to run Mailboxer next to zForum and just tell the catalog to search both.

My biggest problem with this that Trac does not run as a Zope Product. But 
having had experience of both and the fact that both are written in Python 
means that maintenance and presentation level integration should be 
possible. I'm fairly certain that Trac can be run from within Zope 3 which 
would be the best solution.

We don't have a lot of resources to put on this so if you're going to do 
the most work then I'd be happy to go with whatever you want and simply 
focus on making Trac do what we want. Other than that: please let us go 
with Zope.

Charlie
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