Section E.3. Recommended Open Source Content Management System Projects

E.3. Recommended Open Source Content Management System Projects

The projects we focus on in this section include:

Plone

Plone is a content management system that can be used as a portal, a document management system, an intranet server, an extranet server, or a collaboration server.

Drupal

Drupal is a content management system for building dynamic web sites for a broad range of projects, from personal weblogs to community-driven sites.

OpenCms

OpenCms is a content management system that can be used to build complex intranet and extranet sites quickly and cost effectively.

E.3.1. Plone

Plone is a turnkey content management system that is built on the powerful and free Zope application server. It requires minimal effort to set up, is deeply flexible, and provides a system for managing web content that is ideal for project groups, communities, and intranets.

Plone is good at many things, including workflows, content classification, and asset management. Users trying to build web sites focusing on digital media assets, collaboration, and even a custom project management site will benefit from Plone's strengths (see Table E-1).

E.3.1.1 Product strengths

• It offers good management defaults out of the box.

• It is standards compliant with XHTML, Dublin Core, RSS, and others.

E.3.1.2 Product weaknesses

• Many useful features are available via add-ons instead of via the core application.

• It is a big, complex system with a steep learning curve.

Table E-1. Plone basic facts

License	GPL (dual licensing scheme under consideration by Plone Foundation)
Home page	http://www.plone.org/
Version evaluated	2.0.2 (released May 20, 2004)

E.3.2. Drupal

Drupal is an open source platform and content management system for building dynamic web sites offering a broad range of features and services, including user administration, publishing workflow, discussion capabilities, news aggregation, metadata functionalities using controlled vocabularies, and XML publishing for content sharing purposes. Equipped with a powerful blend of features and configurability, Drupal can support a diverse range of web projects, from personal weblogs to large, community-driven sites.

Drupal's key strength is its flexible content classification capability, available via its taxonomy module. It is possible to assign every content item multiple classification keywords and then to build complex views of content based on this classification. Users building dynamic web sites where multiple views of content are a primary feature or a requirement will benefit from Drupal's strengths (see Table E-2).

E.3.2.1 Product strengths

• It features a powerful taxonomy and content classification system where content items are nodes and they can belong to multiple categories.

• It offers a mature code base that is actively supported.

• It is well documented, and is easy to install and configure in a few hours.

E.3.2.2 Product weaknesses

• No standardized PHP templating system is in use (e.g., Smarty).

• It has a relatively steep initial learning curve.

Table E-2. Drupal basic facts

License	GPL
Home page	http://www.drupal.org/
Version evaluated	4.4.1 (released May 1, 2004)

E.3.3. OpenCms

OpenCms helps users create and manage complex web sites easily, without knowledge of HTML. An integrated WYSIWYG editor with a user interface similar to that of well-known Office applications helps users create the content, and a sophisticated template engine enforces a sitewide corporate layout.

OpenCms excels at building custom web-based content management solutions from scratch, especially if the system's functional requirements are atypical and the system doesn't fit into any one popular category, such as portal or intranet server. The administrative interface is window-centric and has a low learning curve. The main window resembles Windows Explorer, and OpenCms provides a functional WYSIWYG page editor (see Table E-3).

E.3.3.1 Product strengths

• It offers a mature, widely deployed code base.

• It is very portable (it is Java and XML based).

• It is easily extensible via a modules API.

E.3.3.2 Product weakness

• Templating should better leverage open standards (e.g., JSTL, Velocity).

Table E-3. OpenCms basic facts

License	GPL
Home page	http://www.opencms.org/
Version evaluated	5.0.1 (released January 9, 2004)