This is something we've been discussing this in IRC forever. I think we're all in agreement that using _something_ would be better than our current solution. The main sticking point seems to be what we use - Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress being the usual suspects.
Having played with all three this weekend my initial impressions are: * Drupal is all about structured content. It'll take longer to setup content types and vocabularies (structured tags) but we'll get more out of it. The admin interface is well laid out and made a lot of sense to me. * Joomla makes it easy to create "fancy" content out of the box with its rich text editor and media manager. The admin interface drove me crazy because you navigate with a drop-down menu and it locks it when you edit. In my opinion it's fancy at the expense of usability. On the plus side the installer setup a demo site so I had content to play with. * I didn't spend a lot of time with Wordpress, I was really just playing with 2.7's admin interface which is nice. I'm still not convinced about using it as a CMS though.
I'm going to play more with Drupal, see what I can do. I'm interested in other peoples experiences. Hopefully we can pick one and start migrating content. -- Paul Scott-Wilson (pscott)
I would recommend using Drupal. I have some experience with Drupal having managed a couple of websites using Drupal over the year, one with about a 100 active users adding content including news, blogs, and photos.
Unfortunately I don't have any experience with theming.
Last time we looked, localization remained the biggest issue for all three, and disqualified Wordpress.
Do we have any volunteers to help implement the look and feel?
Paul
On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 6:46 PM, Paul Scott-Wilson
<psc...@foresightlinux.org> wrote: > This is something we've been discussing this in IRC forever. I think we're > all in agreement that using _something_ would be better than our current > solution. The main sticking point seems to be what we use - Drupal, Joomla > and Wordpress being the usual suspects.
> Having played with all three this weekend my initial impressions are: > * Drupal is all about structured content. It'll take longer to setup > content types and vocabularies (structured tags) but we'll get more out of > it. The admin interface is well laid out and made a lot of sense to me. > * Joomla makes it easy to create "fancy" content out of the box with its > rich text editor and media manager. The admin interface drove me crazy > because you navigate with a drop-down menu and it locks it when you edit. > In my opinion it's fancy at the expense of usability. On the plus side the > installer setup a demo site so I had content to play with. > * I didn't spend a lot of time with Wordpress, I was really just playing > with 2.7's admin interface which is nice. I'm still not convinced about > using it as a CMS though.
> I'm going to play more with Drupal, see what I can do. I'm interested in > other peoples experiences. Hopefully we can pick one and start migrating > content. > -- > Paul Scott-Wilson (pscott)
i´ve been playing with both. mostly joomla because i run it in
foresightlinux.se
my experience says that joomla is easier to use and write articles and
stuff like that. The administration part is a bit harder than drupal,
but after you learned how it works, it all makes sence.
If we are planning to write howtos, guides and stuff too in either
drupal or joomla, then joomla is nr 1.
But are we talking to use joomla or drupal with maybe 10-20 pages,
then maybe drupal is better.
if we also use joomla and goes multi language, then i got no problem
to move my foresight site over there. it will go fast too. I never had
any issues with using joomla so far and is very happy about using it.
First is SCOPE, what exactly are we looking for the software to accomplish.
* Are we just looking for it to be an easy way to update and translation the
main site and children pages?
* Are we wanting this to be the one tool for everything (main site, how-to,
blog, etc)?
I am under the impression that we should use the best tool for the task.
This would mean using a CMS/Software for the main site, wiki for the how-to
and wordpress for the blog.
Second deals with Editors and Translators.
* How many content creators do we plan to have? If we keep it limited to
the main site we don't need that many but if we open it up to everything
then we will need a process to hand user permissions and signup.
* How are translations handled? Do they just select their preferred
language from the main page and it uses that for the site or what?
* How are the pages translated? Does this require a person to be a content
creator before they can create a page.
These are just some questions to keep in mind when evaluating a solution.
Kevin
On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 5:04 AM, tfors...@foresightlinux.se <
> i´ve been playing with both. mostly joomla because i run it in
> foresightlinux.se
> my experience says that joomla is easier to use and write articles and
> stuff like that. The administration part is a bit harder than drupal,
> but after you learned how it works, it all makes sence.
> If we are planning to write howtos, guides and stuff too in either
> drupal or joomla, then joomla is nr 1.
> But are we talking to use joomla or drupal with maybe 10-20 pages,
> then maybe drupal is better.
> if we also use joomla and goes multi language, then i got no problem
> to move my foresight site over there. it will go fast too. I never had
> any issues with using joomla so far and is very happy about using it.
On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 09:31:37PM -0600, Paul Cutler wrote: >Last time we looked, localization remained the biggest issue for all >three, and disqualified Wordpress.
Drupal 6 has support built in. Translations of nodes are linked to a source node; when it is updated the translations are marked out of date.
On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 04:11:44PM -0600, Kevin Harriss wrote: >I have a few comments about this discussion.
>First is SCOPE, what exactly are we looking for the software to accomplish.
Things I'd like from a CMS we don't currently have: * Quick and easy updates * Publishing control * Better association of content - more than just "It's on the GNOME edition's page so it's about the GNOME edition" * More content, more often. If nothing changes people will stop checking * Feeds so people don't have to keep checking manually * Search so people can find stuff without coming via Google * A proper gallery with up to date images * Easy to use navigation * Lazy translations of content
>I am under the impression that we should use the best tool for the task. >This would mean using a CMS/Software for the main site, wiki for the how-to >and wordpress for the blog.
Assuming you mean "developer blogs", I agree. I still wonder how many people who'd want a blog don't have one already though. Project News should absolutely be part of the main site. Maybe even have articles destined for the newsletter appear on the site to show there is more going on than just churning out releases. I'm also thinking that a small FAQ section for questions related to the site would be good rather than sending people to the Wiki for questions like "What do I do with this ISO?", "What is a SHA1 checksum?" or "Why is my browser saying the Certificate for the Wiki is invalid".
>Second deals with Editors and Translators. >[...]
This needs more investigation into exactly what is possible. I can say that Drupal 6 will use short codes in the URL, so going to /sv/page would give you the Swedish page if there is one. Getting that to work for the frontpage seems to be a little more involved.
Regarding permissions, there is a separate permission to translate leading me to believe it doesn't imply you can create pages.
A related question is how tightly we restrict registrations (i.e. people able to comment but not create content)? Should it be considered a perk of being a member or is it enough to moderate comments? On the flip side someone contributing translations would be a good step at becoming a member. -- Paul Scott-Wilson (pscott)
As i also understands it, we want to have own pages for these
projects:
GNOME Edition, KDE Edition, XFCE Edition
That will give some more articles to write about also. If we want
multilanguage on site, it needs to be easy to write articles. Thats a
must, or it will go very slow to get other languages than english.
--
Tomas Forsman (TForsman)
On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 03:04:26AM -0800, tfors...@foresightlinux.se wrote: >But are we talking to use joomla or drupal with maybe 10-20 pages, >then maybe drupal is better. On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 01:22:39AM -0800, tfors...@foresightlinux.se wrote: >That will give some more articles to write about also. If we want >multilanguage on site, it needs to be easy to write articles. Thats a >must, or it will go very slow to get other languages than english.
What would you say gives Joomla the edge in making it easy? There are modules like FCKeditor[1] so editing is more or less the same. Joomla's "Article Manager" does give you more info than Drupal's "Manage Content" but a quick search found CMF[2] which narrows the gap.
Since we have you're install of Joomla at .se I'm inclined to suggest we set up a Drupal install for comparison.
It's all about writing an article. In drupal you got many features,
but hard to understand them. Attaching images is weird too, it gets
added after you wroted whole article.
But drupal seem to have better track system to see what changed on
articles and stuff like that.
drupal also got: Rich-text editing, but you really need to write some
articles in both to get the feeling that drupal isnt as nice as
joomla.
And easier to know where the article should be located in joomla, you
see sections + categories while you doing an article.
Im not even sure drupal has that at all.
Feels i only got bad words for drupal. But it is good too.
> It's all about writing an article. In drupal you got many features,
> but hard to understand them. Attaching images is weird too, it gets
> added after you wroted whole article.
> But drupal seem to have better track system to see what changed on
> articles and stuff like that.
> drupal also got: Rich-text editing, but you really need to write some
> articles in both to get the feeling that drupal isnt as nice as
> joomla.
> And easier to know where the article should be located in joomla, you
> see sections + categories while you doing an article.
> Im not even sure drupal has that at all.
> Feels i only got bad words for drupal. But it is good too.
a user said this:
We know that drupal has versions management feature for articles, but
Joomla does not. Now with this extension, Joomla will have the same
power to give content items a version manager.
> On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 04:11:44PM -0600, Kevin Harriss wrote:
>> I have a few comments about this discussion.
>> First is SCOPE, what exactly are we looking for the software to >> accomplish.
> Things I'd like from a CMS we don't currently have: > * Quick and easy updates > * Publishing control > * Better association of content - more than just "It's on the GNOME > edition's page so it's about the GNOME edition" > * More content, more often. If nothing changes people will stop checking > * Feeds so people don't have to keep checking manually > * Search so people can find stuff without coming via Google > * A proper gallery with up to date images > * Easy to use navigation > * Lazy translations of content
I will start a high level scoping document this weekend, including a sitemap. I don't think it will be much different than what we have now, with the exception of of fleshing out our other flavors pages (XFCE, KDE, etc)
> Assuming you mean "developer blogs", I agree. I still wonder how many people > who'd want a blog don't have one already though. Project News should > absolutely be part of the main site. Maybe even have articles destined for > the newsletter appear on the site to show there is more going on than just > churning out releases. I'm also thinking that a small FAQ section for > questions related to the site would be good rather than sending people to > the Wiki for questions like "What do I do with this ISO?", "What is a SHA1 > checksum?" or "Why is my browser saying the Certificate for the Wiki is > invalid".
Drupal can handle blogging right within it. When I was managing a a Drupal site with about 100 users, a good percentage of them used Drupal's blogging engine. One thing I liked about it, is that if we had some kind of community news page, it is very simple to promote a blog post to that page as news, similar to how Slashdot promotes stories to their main page or DailyKos does.
I'd also like to second something pscott said in a later email, regarding news. Content needs to be added and refreshed to keep people coming back. Some kind of news or community news page - whether it's links to recent articles about us, an "official" blog with what is going on in Foresight, a newsletter, etc. I had started a Wordpress appliance a few months back, but Lance and I got hung up trying to build it with a specific error we were never able to overcome. I have a lot of passion in making sure we have timely news from the developer community to our users with first looks at what's coming, etc.
If joomla doesn't have revision control built in, it can't be
considered a CMS... IMHO :)
The core use of a CMS is managing content, which can't be done without
revisions... Having an "extension" that provides that functionality
might be good enough, but it really says allot about joomla that it
isn't a core piece of the tool. My biggest fear about using an
extension for revision control would be maintenance. What happens if
the developers of the extension abandon it, get busy and doesn't
update it, etc... we get left in a bind. And considering it is the #1
reason to even have a CMS system... it seems silly to depend on a
third party extension. Not that I have any opinions here :)
--Ken
On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 9:37 AM, tfors...@foresightlinux.se
> a user said this:
> We know that drupal has versions management feature for articles, but
> Joomla does not. Now with this extension, Joomla will have the same
> power to give content items a version manager.
On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 08:08:59AM -0500, Ken VanDine wrote:
>You said the revision control is better in drupal, is it bad in >joomla? Or just not as rich as drupal?
It's pretty lacking in Drupal too. There are optional node revisions but nothing that compares to what we're used to with the Wiki and Mercurial.
Now we're through the holidays lets get this back on track. I think once we have a public instance available it'll be easier to discuss things like theming and content. There are several Drupal rBO projects already but none look active. With guidance I can setup something for us to use, presumably in foresight-infra.rpath.org?
