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Know any good CMSes?

alejandrodelloco

23:56 / 02.08.05

Can anyone think of a good group-oriented CMS that I could use for a debate site that is not horribly ugly? Here are the features that I am looking for: Newsposts, forum, multi-user hotness, and maybe a wiki. Anyone used anything before that might fit the bill? I am a horrible elitist and I find most CMSes to be terribly ugly.

invisible_al

12:17 / 03.08.05

Have you considered a grab bag of apps? I find groupware CMS's like tikiwiki to be jack of all trades and masters on none. They do everything but they do nothing particularly well. I'd been struggling with trying to get it to do a weblog as well as the standard wiki and ended up getting wordpress installed which worked like a charm.

A fall of geckos

14:25 / 03.08.05

I like Plone. It's an open source CMS based on the Zope application server. It's easy to use to make simple fairly simple sites, but with a little work you can produce a wide range of styles/architectures.

Here's a few Plone based sites:

Oxfam America
The Election Science Institiute
AI Lectures from Tokyo
Jet Propulsion Lab

alejandrodelloco

00:12 / 04.08.05

Thanks for the tips. After some searching I think I may try out xaraya because it seems like I could do a lot with it, yet it lacks the kind of bloat that tikiwiki has. If it sucks, I might try that plone one.

invisible_al

07:54 / 04.08.05

Do you mean www.xaraya.com? Rather than a link to a picture of your good self

alejandrodelloco

16:49 / 04.08.05

Why, yes, I believe I would. Oopsy.

There is a story behind that picture though. A story for later.

lekvar

18:34 / 04.08.05

At the risk of being laughed at, is could someone explain, in small words, what a content management system does?

Other than manage content, that is.

w1rebaby

19:25 / 04.08.05

well, er, not a lot apart from that

Basically it's an application that sits on your server, receives content and displays it. Normal visitors can view the content in a nice form, get menus, search boxes, archive lists and so on. Authors can log in, enter stuff and have it appear all nicely dated and formatted to visitors.

That's very general because CMS is a very general term. Barbelith itself, for instance, is a CMS of a specialised type, as is blogging software. But the central theme is that the program can receive "content" (words, images, music etc, whatever it's been designed for), store it somewhere, and display it to people who want to see it in a specified form.

lekvar

22:33 / 04.08.05

That's kinda the impression I'd gotten, but I'd seen it applies to software development, Sourceforge for instance.

So, er, this is what PHP and such are used for?

alejandrodelloco

23:26 / 04.08.05

Right on the money. In the case of most CMSes, most of the data is stored in SQL databases, which the php script calls on and renders into a webpage. This is nice because it is more malleable than having to constantly update html stuff.

werwolf

06:38 / 05.08.05

mambo is a pretty good and simple cms. don't know how complicated you need it to be. otherwise plone is always a good choice.

lekvar

17:52 / 09.10.05

Just wanted to share something I found which is my new favorite thing ever: eyeOS. While technically a CMS, it is being billed as a browser-based operating system, complete with browser, chat, contact info, caledar, and word processor. Third parties are developing "applications" for it. You can upload and download files to a "home" folder directly from the interface.

It's only on version 0.8, and the calculator function has made my browser crash twice, I'm going to be installing this on my server.

Try the demo here.

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