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CMS of interest January 7, 2008

Posted by Schollii in Software tools and toolkits, freeware, web.
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I have been looking for something more than a wiki lately: something that would allow me to have menus for pages created, to have a blog integrated, to have API documentation pages that could be edited by me (ease of use) and others (community input), and that would support polls and other such things. This crosses the line from wiki to CMS (content management system). Some notable CMS are:

  1. joomla:
    1. probably most popular, but apparently its permission system is very basic,
    2. it doesn’t support wiki-type community contributions, and
    3. doesn’t support versioning (a must for me)
  2. drupal: very popular, seems to have good permissions system, supports wiki etc.
    1. Uses a module system for extensions, it looked like there were 100’s of modules. This is both a pro and con as it can make it time-consuming to add a capability (first need to find if some modules support it, then see which one supports best, not always easy to find those modules).
    2. But can’t tell from docs if supports versioning of articles, will have to try it I guess. Demo on opensourcecms.com didn’t work well in Firefox but ok in IE.
    3. Extensive online docs and simpler UI seems to make it more approachable than the more sophisticated typo3
  3. cmsms (CMS Made Simple): seems nice and minimal which keeps it simple. Unfortunately, version only scheduled for version 2, and no wiki support mentioned (the cmsms site is powered by itself, but the wiki is by mediawiki).
  4. tiki CMS: like drupal/joomla but uses the tiki wiki for all features (blogging, polling etc). I think it looks too much like a wiki and not enough like a portal.
  5. typo3: very advanced, perhaps a better architecture than drupal,
    1. but steeper learning curve, not obvious what process to follow
    2. online help available but tends to be rather terse; no tutorials found

Comments»

1. Nico - February 27, 2008

TYPO3 has a every enjoyable wiki implementation (dr_wiki) – look for it in the extension library. And yes, a very steep learning curve indeed (it took me quite some evenings spread over some months to really get somewhere), but it’s really worth it!