evaluating CMS'

[Nicholas Faiz]

Hi,

I'm trying to evaluate some CMS' out there for a couple of projects.

I'm aware of Radiant, Mephisto, and BrowserCMS. Radiant relies upon its
Radius templating heavily, and I want to use another templating
language. Mephisto is a bit too dusty these days - not even sure if it's
up to Rails 2.3. BrowserCMS seems a bit restrictive on the browser
versions it relies upon.

The other option is, of course, to build my own CMS, which I've done
before. Just wondering if anyone can recommend others I may not be aware
of and which they have used themselves?

Regards,
Nicholas Faiz

[Dr Nic Williams]

I am intrigued by Tim Lucas's CMS-by-Github approach. It was sweet.

--
Dr Nic Williams
Mocra - Premier iPhone and Ruby on Rails Consultants
w - http://mocra.com
twitter - @drnic
skype - nicwilliams
e - dr...@mocra.com
p - +61 412 002 126 or +61 7 3102 3237

[Tim Lucas]

On 01/07/2009, at 1:36 PM, Dr Nic Williams wrote:

> I am intrigued by Tim Lucas's CMS-by-Github approach. It was sweet.

...which was: give them access to github and let them edit haml files
directly via the github web interface. Git pull redeploy the site (or
just the markdown files) on post-commit or via a URL.

This is really only good for editing bits of existing content, not for
creating lots of new content.

-- tim

[Julio Cesar Ody]

Nicholas, is that for your own use? In which case I'd wager a "hacky"
way to post is fine (as opposed to a web interface + rich editing).

For a recent project I created a post via capistrano thing that worked
really well. I'd create a directory with a text file in it (first line
becomes the post title, the remaining becomes the body), a folder
inside called "photos" means the photos you wanna upload along with
the post, then go

$ cap mytaskfoo DIR=path/to/post_dir

uploads post_dir to the server, runs a rake task to pick it up, and voi'la.

http://github.com/juliocesar/3weeksinbrazil/blob/7784cabeed0781989790f1f104b1a0c5bf9c8715/Capfile

Alternatively, have a look at
http://github.com/kubicek/marley/tree/master. I unfortunately found
out about it too late, otherwise I'd have gone for it.

[Nicholas Faiz]

Righto - thanks. Right now I'm looking at how hard it is to hook other
templating languages into Radiant, instead of Radius. I'll probably go
with Radiant if that's feasible.

[Nathan de Vries]

On 01/07/2009, at 1:26 PM, Nicholas Faiz wrote:
> Mephisto is a bit too dusty these days - not even sure if it's up to
> Rails 2.3.

Mephisto is still being actively developed (0.8.2 was released this
year and works with the 2-2-stable branch / 2.2.2 tag of Rails). That
being said, it's more for blogging than for use as a CMS.

Cheers,

Nathan de Vries

[Torm3nt]

Even so, it's flexible enough to be used as one - I use it for all
content at my blog site, with great success. It has obvious
limitations, but for a blog site with tidbits of content that are not
blog articles, it works very well.


--
Kirk Bushell
http://www.kirkbushell.com
Follow me: http://twitter.com/kirkbushell

[Nicholas Faiz]

Julio - it's for a client, so it has to have some polish in the admin
UI.

Others, on Mephisto - yes, I run Mephisto for my website (http://
treefallinginthewoods.com) and helped contribute the Plugin API to it
ages ago. It isn't seeing a lot of activity that I've noticed - and it
does seem to specialize for the blogging space rather than generic
CMS.

Thanks for the response,
Nicholas aka biv

On Jul 1, 2:20 pm, Julio Cesar Ody <julio...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Nicholas, is that for your own use? In which case I'd wager a "hacky"
> way to post is fine (as opposed to a web interface + rich editing).
>
> For a recent project I created a post via capistrano thing that worked
> really well. I'd create a directory with a text file in it (first line
> becomes the post title, the remaining becomes the body), a folder
> inside called "photos" means the photos you wanna upload along with
> the post, then go
>
> $ cap mytaskfoo DIR=path/to/post_dir
>
> uploads post_dir to the server, runs a rake task to pick it up, and voi'la.
>

> http://github.com/juliocesar/3weeksinbrazil/blob/7784cabeed0781989790...
>
> Alternatively, have a look athttp://github.com/kubicek/marley/tree/master. I unfortunately found

> out about it too late, otherwise I'd have gone for it.
>

[Lawrence Pit]

Given the usual absence of any requirements I suggest Twitter. Great CMS. Even Britney and the PM appear to be able to use it.

[Dr Nic Williams]

"Given the .. absence of any requirements" - I love that :)

[Nicholas Faiz]

I thought of that - it's ideal really, except that I need versioning.
Otherwise, spot on!

;)

On Jul 1, 4:06 pm, Lawrence Pit <lawrence....@gmail.com> wrote:
> Given the usual absence of any requirements I suggest Twitter. Great
> CMS. Even Britney and the PM appear to be able to use it.
>
> > I am intrigued by Tim Lucas's CMS-by-Github approach. It was sweet.
>

[Justin French]

As an alternative approach, I like to break a CMS down into three parts:

* describing the data model (which Rails is awesome at)
* presenting the content in views (which Rails does pretty well with
template language of your choice)
* managing the content in the data model (eerie silence)

So, have you considered using one of the "magic admin backend" systems
like Typus to handle the bit Rails doesn't do? To be clear, I don't
particularly like those magic systems, but one of them might work for
you or your clients!

Justin

---
Justin French
justin...@indent.com.au
http://justinfrench.com

[Nicholas Faiz]

There's also

* the hierarchical structure of content - for example, folders holding
pages, or sub-pages of pages. Something acts_as_tree or a nested set
will give you.
* basic security - some notion of which user can manipulate which
content
* versioning - not always a requirement, but usually. Not hard.
* workflow - draft/published status. Again, not hard.

In this case I'm going to make my own, I believe. I've only just done
so in a previous project. I might have ended up using Radiant, it's
possible to hack it to work with another templating language (I
think), but I think my client's needs are particular enough to build
from scratch, which isn't too hard with Rails (as you point out).

We'll see what happens.

Thanks for all the input.

N.

> justin.fre...@indent.com.auhttp://justinfrench.com

[Colin Campbell-McPherson]

I've rolled my own in the past. If you're going for a traditional
backend/front end approach you might look into active scaffold to jump
start your admin interface.

[Buzzware]

I have been getting into Radiant, and its a pretty good option if
you're a Ruby developer
and your clients just need a simple admin interface to edit a brochure
site, but with the
massive customisation ability that Ruby tends to provide. Its also
highly efficient as
content is cached and served statically eg. by Apache, not Rails.
Radiant is deliberately
bare-bones; without plugins there is no WYSIWYG editor (I chose the
FCKEditor plugin), and
you can't even rearrange content in the sitemap. Also checkout the
Chronicle plugin for
workflow and versioning.

However I just discovered BrowserCMS, and I reckon its a pretty big
deal for the
Ruby/Rails world. This is a commercially-backed product still selling
for $20K in Java,
being Open Sourced and rewritten in Rails. Even though its only left
beta this week,
its already way ahead of Radiant. Regarding browser versions, they
only apply to the backend
(the front end is up to you), and they acknowledge the backend issues
with Safari,
and are to be addressing that in the next release.

BrowserCMS seems to have most of the positives of Radiant plus
FCKEditor builtin,
workflow, user permissions, drag and drop sitemap rearranging, inline
editing and
a very slick looking admin interface (though not so obvious to use).
Being Ruby, I would expect all sorts of extensions to appear.

I have no connection with them, I'm just glad to see this almost-void
in the Ruby
ecosystem filled with a serious looking product.

p.s. for anyone trying the demo of BrowserCMS, they seem to have
forgotten to set the template
of the home page correctly. Set it to the Home Page template, and
things make a lot more sense.

[Nicholas Faiz]

BrowserCMS does sound promising.

I've never really found a CMS which could be used for every project.
If anyone has ever used Plone they'll know the cringe factor which can
eventuate from trying to achieve this.

I'll probably end up playing with BrowserCMS at some stage.

Cheers,
N.