Seattle:Making sense of Free and Open Source Content Management Systems

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Penguin Day

Open Source CMS Notes (not yet cleaned up - fast dump - nancy)

  • Grunt stuff of website work – copyright dates, etc, can be dynamically generated. Remove grunt work.
  • Templates
  • When you use CMS, the meta content is managed by the system.
  • Most provide security /access rights for areas. Who can see, change, comment.
  • Dynamic content – one scenario is lets say you are working on the “about us’ section. You want a page on your mission statement. Traditionally you have to go to every other page in about section and add to the navigation. A dynamic site will be aware of this new content and update it for you. Important on sites over 20-30 pages.
  • Is that like cascading style sheets? Different concept. CSS. A centralized way of applying look and feel to site to keep definitions of how your site looks in one central file which is rolled out across the site. Benefit is similar. You don’t have to maintain navigation or site map in multiple places.
  • Templating – your development director should not have to know how to build a web page to do a press release. You define a look, and others can add the content. All they have to worry about is filling in the content. How it gets composed is handled by the system.
  • It’s also dynamic content. You can get the press release in the press release section can also show up on the front page for a defined number of days. You can set rules for content. So it is more than just design.
  • We’ve talked about templating, another useful thing is priveledges management. You have a user who has a certain role or group which defines posting, approving, publishing – folds into workflow. Who is allowed to do what.
  • For a lot of orgs, the goal is CMS should remove the bottleneck for your website. Not one single person who has to put anything on a web page, put on server, have things point. Creating and editing content, domain knowledge, easily translated into website publishing.
  • We use easy publish out of Norway. Benefit. People can code articles to topics and countries, and people all over the world can update the page together. Editors around the world writing on what’s happening in Iraq all showing up on the same page. Dynamically generated. To get away from web brochure websites to something more dynamic.
  • I’m here seeking knowledge. As we consider what to look for, interested in hearing what questions we should ask, what are the differences between the systems… how to make the decision.
  • Where the OS segment wins and then who are the players.
  • What is a CMS and how does it interact? Is it a webpage? Application that sits on a server, different people can access.
  • Imagine CNN.com. People write stories, they are fact checked, then the get posts. The journalists don’t design the pages, just type in the content, another proofs, another approves and then you can use it when you go to the site. The site map automatically updated. Mechanics vary among products. Server product, access through a web browser.
  • FTP – way of copying files up. CMS let you drag and drop and it’s on the web. Appears on your website. Different technologies make that happen. TO manage a website.
  • Different than document management? A lot of overlap between the two. Doc management tends to be more about my department creates hundreds of documents, want to smart share the doc drive. Don’t usually worry about appearance. In CMS the web is the first aly andinvolves HTML.
  • The way I describe how a CMS works – I’ll ask if you’ve ever gone online and bought something with a credit card with all these fields to fill in. You enter your URL site/admin, username and password, opens dashboard, the back end. Brings up different pages. Choose which page you want to work on, pops up a form with WISWYG editor, you put in title, content, might upload an image and attach file, then hit apply. You can then look at the page and see it immediately.
  • Why does opensource have so many CMS? Very broad field, there’s a CMS that powers Microsoft.com and small sites. Amount of features varies considerably. What powers your website also ties into other systems – accounting, etc.
  • I don’t think open source has more. It is a wide open field. I know of four proprietary systems created in my small home town.
  • From an economic perspective lots of demand. If you are a programmer it is a fun problem to solve. That’s why you see a proliferation. Not a justification to build your own, but you can see why people do it.
  • In the commercial sector theres a lot, broad endeavor that has grown out of many places. Documentum says we can do CMS. DRM says we can do CSM. KM says we can do CMS. Now they all say we do CMS.
  • One of the areas where open source is most vital. It rules the world for serving web content. Little incursion into HR management. CM is dominated by open source. A lot of that comes because in the open source world we focus on integration and agnosticism. We don’t care what you use, we’ll write something to hook into it. If you use DB to store member information, commercial CMS will interface with one or two DB, often ones they make. Most OS CMS will speak to 15-20 types of DB.
  • How do you figure out who is logged on, LDAP, authentication, how you keep track of users. Most commercial systems talk to one of those. WE talk to 10. We glue things together with different things under the head.
  • Three really large CMS systems, expensive, crush anything it its place. Vignette. OS tend to be in the mid range market. There are very large sites, but we aren’t powering CNN.com, but do Oxfam.org, government deptg sites – million page sites, not billion page market. We have significantly better support.
  • If you want to use word you can walk into any bookstore. In the commercial space 5 out of thousands have any external documentation. Many have no service providers outside of that company. Propriatary very closed in terms of service. We have a 1000 people who consult on our product, 7 books in three languages. Tend to have a broad internationally array of options for support and learning.
  • We win focusing on the out of the box experience rather than consulting ware. People who use open source want to play today. Lets try it out. We focus on doing things immediately. Joomla, Plone, Drupal work out of the box. Most will want to configure and most will want to hire someone to make it do what you want.
  • Configuring – you download plone it looks like plone. You want your logo. That kind of stuff you can change the logo. But if you want it to look very different, or use content that we have not talked about, that could be more time, the more esoteric, the more time. Spectrum from changing color, changing content type or functionality.
  • You’ve got Vignette, Documentum aiming at high space. Additionally because these CMS are considered products that should work and give immediate, they can serve a low end space. (The open source options).
  • When you use a CMS, you throw out Dreamweaver>
  • No, DW can edit HTML, great actually, and also for linking them together. You can have templates in DW. That latter part of site manage it isn’t so good at. CMS replaces that latter half. If the project you want to put up needs images and circles, you do that in DW, but it then goes into the template of the CMS. Can do some of this in CMS. Like a little tiny copy of word in your web browser or open office.
  • Almost all provide some of that capability, but not the level of Dreamweaver.
  • Set up, configuration. We work with clients who have never heard with open source and don’t care, they just want to update their pages. So instead of telling them to download, choose server, etc. A consultant can do in minutes, but if you don’t know mySQL etc you might benefit from help.
  • Here is a page on a Plone site. I have the ability to edit this page. Right here. Right in the browser. I can save changes as draft or publish.
  • Can also do it outside the web, edit the page in dreamweaver.
  • I edit in a geeky program. I can work through the web or not. It doesn’t matter.
  • If you want a particular look you can do that.
  • You want to control some things – color, logo – you can control what others can edit and what not.
  • Are you losing the benefit of free software if you then have to pay for configuration?
  • If you don’t need customization, you don’t have to invest in that. The real configuration comes in, Plone, Drupal, Joomla – where we know how to add various types of content. If you keep track of 10 unique things, you have to configure to track that. Customization. You don’t have to.
  • Here I can add a generic webpage, but keeping track of my 100 international partners that way, I’d have to change the structure of the page. Fields for name, spokes person,e t. Create a template.
  • Still have to customize a commercial package too.
  • Think about Filemaker Pro or Access. Has an address form. IF that works, no configuration needed. But we have unique things we want to keep track of.
  • Comparitive costs – I work for a graphic design firm. People say we want a website, we want a CMS and we don’t know what to use. You can pay 30,000 and $3000 month. In open source there is an upfront amount for design work, $6-7000 for customization. Then oncxe they pay that there is a functioning site. Could pay a retainer or not.
  • It would be interesting to know what the smallest and largest project, and what or what did’t work. Costswise.
  • The biggest aspect in terms of work – simplist, wordpress, we put a banner up there, and trained them how to put in their content. 20 minutes. Complex – CMS has to interact with CRM system, data has to synch for publishing, a lot of interaction, 20 different dynamic components, side navigation, blocks, graphics, goes on infinitely, pushling thousands of pages. My own system. Wordpress and plone.
  • The cool thing why we use OS CMS, it can really fit a spectrum of budgets and organizations. Download, tech savvy and be up and running. After that you can take the CMS core, multiple tens and thousands of dollars, congress, auditing, accessibility, securituy. Same engine, but many more layers. We’ve worked with orgs that had a website. We like the design, has to look identicdal. We can do that with a CMS. That actually can take more time than design from scratch with a design firm.
  • Section 508 requirements. It is a joke about accessibility. The bar is so low, it does not guarantee a positive experience. Alt tags for images. Doesn’t mean a diff abled person has a good experience. OS tends to really care. Certification process from Europe for accessibility for blind people. Propriatary space there is not enough of a market to get that kind of stuff going. Those of you with federal funding, that is an issue and OS is ahead.
  • How easy is it to break the accessibility by using Dreamweaver. If you use the templates we provide, … here is a site that looks pretty, the whole look and feel is all done through technology called CSS, completely useable by someone, even when you want to change the CSS. If you violate the template conventions, you can break that accessibility. We try and give you enough control.
  • Naked Plone without CSS doesn’t look like anything. What this means is I can make it look attractive merely by applying stylesheets. If you tried to do by hand, could be hard for a blind user. We give you some tools not to break that.
  • Propriatary systems have a roadmap of features. Set. If you need French translation and it is a deal breaker, open source CMS are a great fill for that void. Get a couple of developers and they speak French, work with Plone and it happens. We ship with 50 human languages. Can alter the language interface at the user level. If you have the ability to translate your content, we help you manage that. So you can manage your content. You havfe 17 things you still need to translate.
  • Areas we are not as strong: document management, where people can dump in content. We have solutions there, but not leading edte. There are some java a .netdocument maangeemtn. If youy have an enterprise commitment to java or dot net, less Open Source options.
  • I work for a school with a specialized library. Interested in having a library catalog. Could we make an OS CMS work with library catalog software. It is possible that someone has already written it. Hundreds of cataloging systems. If someone has written it OS can probably connect in with it.
  • There’s a project out of the OR state library system, solution based on Plone for libraries. Taken over by a combo of librariers banding together. Forgetting name. Can find out. Put it on the wiki. Process of linking up with catalog, trying to collaborate with other libraries. They can link up with some cataloging systems.
  • Database integration – want to talk more generically about it.
  • How many of you fundamentally care where your website data gets stored. Some do. All of us provide, when you create a webpage, most of us don’t care where that goes. For those that do care, have systems that need to interact or technical needs, can store in relational databases. Support most databases – OS and proprietary. Out of the box we don’t use any of them.
  • Got the impression if you have Plone you are using mSQL, Drupal has one – most have a native default, but can change it. If you want ot grab this from LDAP and that from relational database can do that.
  • For most of us that’s an implementation detail that is geeky. But it is safe, accessible. Staying with default is most common option.
  • Strengths of different OS CMS and questions to ask.
  • There are hundreds. 4-5 have matured that people consider. A lot of the choice is religious preference of your IT staff. I almost never bid against my os competitors. It’s a programming language choice, what its written in. For good or bad, that is what differentiates.
  • Primary contenders, Drupal – CivicSpace connected, Joomla – open source variation of Mambo, a commercial product that was sort of open source; Plone , java based new Alfresco, not for small orgs, big complex.
  • Big vs small. Deal size. How much pay for consulting. Alfresco nothing under $100K.
  • Java is larger, used by large enterprise, what large sophisticated IT orgs are using to build serious internal apps. Tends to have less open source stuff.
  • NTC Open Source CMS panel – couple of ppts, address http:// - on the wiki
  • Explosion of tools, tons to choose, opensourcecms.com 100+ to confuse you. Often lower acquisition cost, but customization, design, consulting you need to think about. OS gives you direct access to the code.
  • Can see strong content delivery on a webpage, but content production – user interface – most CMS don’t do a good job of workflow. Plone does. Not like Vignette.
  • Community of development for add on and bug fixes. OS there is a developer community, can search extension directory and add for free rather than have it customized. All of the OS products have dozens and hundreds of domain specific add ons.
  • I want to know the differences, I’d tell you don’t worry. We tend to have the same benefits. Aesthetic differences. Plone focuses on edit replacment directlyf in place. Plone. Internationally – we are more European than America. Different number of languages between products. Plone focuses out of the box, Mac of the CMS space.
  • Difficult question. “Ours is XYZ.’ Joomla – 5 years of experiences. We started with Nuke, now find the user admin experience is Joomla. Depends on what you want. Easy this or that, integration with this or that.
  • Get someone to take you on a back end tour and see what feels comfortable for you. Relaly walk through and demo.
  • Things that look free and really aren’t. Look at books and documentations.
  • If you are doing community centric site, users publish, talk to each other, Drupal has a lot of tools and dominant. Straight publishing, admin user interface is not so good on Drupal.
  • Plone pretty easy to use, straight forward. PITA to change templates and reconfigure.
  • Haven’t done Joomla, but the UI interface is not confusing, installation not that difficult.
  • Install time – I’ve installed Joomla while you are sitting here. Getting up is find, making usable – god only knows. Heard Joomla is easiest for quidck up date.
  • We are doing a poor job with language about our project. Same words, different meanings. Documentation so you can compare.
  • If you are doing a really basic site, Wordpress
  • OS on cutting edge of integrating new products, hook into Google search, firefox, in general, if you are looking for integration with other web services – strong.
  • Samantha Moscheck – experience of installing all products, depends on how your mind works and feel good towards. Less overall diference, more intuitive choice. All of the mainstream OS CMS provide substantially similar benefits. What your developer prefers. Not a whole lot you are going to do wrong picking among us.
  • There are smart moves you can make. In your city there is a little company that does Joomla and Drupal install, pick who is better doing support locally. Find out what the community is around this system – online and locally. Who can carry on the work.
  • If you are curious about where user groups are, ask us.
  • User group meetings are less scary and much more fun. Encourage you to go to them to get a sense of product and support.

Thanks to our facilitators!