Hi,

Just received this on the oscom.org mailing list - thought it might be of interest to the XOOPS team in case you're not on the list...

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My name is Martin Streicher and I am the Editor-in-Chief of Linux Magazine. I am writing to ask (again, because I dropped the ball) how LM might cover the many open source content management systems that are available today. In the past, Gregor and I discussed having a competition of sorts, where each system could implement as many requirements as possible from a list of desirable site features.

Ideally, the implemented sites could be reused so the effort would not be wasted -- the sites could be samples provided with the software or even placed "live" on the web as a real site for something like a non-profit. Linux Magazine would not restrict the distribution of the sites -- we'd merely want a short exclusive on the feature itself.

Please drop me a line if you have thoughts or comments and we can try to pull something together.

Martin


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Martin Streicher, Editor-in-Chief
Linux Magazine
e: mstreicher@linux-mag.com
h: http://www.linuxmagazine.com
b: http://blog.streicher.us
r: http://blog.streicher.us/rss.xml

PR is good - but a who-can-implement-these-features-fastest competition is not the way to go, IMO.

Each CMS focuses on one or more key areas and handles things differently. Making a list of requirements, which does not favour one CMS over another is futile, I think. I mean - Mambo will have some advantages over XOOPS, but AFAIK XOOPS is so much easier to make special permissions for... and there will be a lot of these differences.

If Linux Magazine wants to make a comparison and come up with a list of desirable features for each (or all) CMS's then that is fine - but playing the CMS's out against each others will just make people competitive and "hold on" to code instead of making it simple, open and easy to work with - and that will be a loss to the CMS itself and the CMS world in general.

Also, the competitive nature of the requirements will encourage making short-term fast implementations with loads of shortcuts, which aren't really made with the future in mind, but merely to get a good review in the magazine.

Basically, I'd say that comparison is good. Pinpointing the weak parts of the CMS's is good. Suggesting features is good. Outright competition with a prize is bad.

I agree, however I think you have nothing to worry about in either case - XOOPS is pretty flexible. I tried to touch on that in my reply to the group, but if its a "contest" thing they want then they might not change their mind - best not to miss any opportunity IMHO :)

--8<--

Hi Martin,

I hope you don't mind but I posted a copy of your request on the XOOPS OS CMS site as I thought it may be of interest to them. After spending two years testing out most of the CMSs you can find on http://www.opensourcecms.com I've stuck with XOOPS due to it's ease of use and quality object-oriented design. Last year I showed it to BT and they now use it for their InsightExec Partner Portal at http://partners.insightexec.com.

Good luck with the article - many attempts have been made to compare all the systems, however as they change very quickly and every user's preferences are different this has been hard to achieve. The most exciting developments of late have been the OSCommerce integrations, providing fully integrated community, commerce, and content management. This is a great leap forward - three years ago I was providing similar systems to the likes of volkswagen.co.uk and B&Q's diy.com for six figure sums, now with open source I am providing the same level of functionality to SMEs!

All the best,

Steve Purkiss

Open for Organisations
discover open source software
http://www.open4.org

It's not that I am very concerned that XOOPS won't perform well - but I do know that we do not have the most responsive developers. Most of the devs have real lives which makes it hard to do something fast.

And again - making it into a contest will only encourage sloppy coding and half-thoughtout implementations. If that is really what Linux Magazine wants, then include me out (pun intended )

I do hope they will give the OS CMS's some exposure.

I thought the guy meant /they/ would be doing a competition and implementing the stuff or asking readers too, didn't mean necessarily the core developers.

Still, the best things take time - I hope XOOPS stays around long enough for my business to take off so I can put more time, effort, and money back into it.

All the best,

Steve

Quote:I read the "where each system could implement" as it being the system (i.e. its core devs) who should do the implementation.

I would never dream of comparing 3-4 CMS's AND implement core changes to each and every one of them. Would be a titanic task.

I guess it is up to the Linux Magazine to define their contest better - but from a main point of view, I'm against this contest mentality.

I'll send him a note and ask if he'll come along and clarify.

Does sound like something you might ask commercial systems to do, perhaps a better idea would be to have a series of small case studies for different types of sites - community or commercial, small or large, etc. Then the people who implemented the sites would do the work, get some recognition, and give the platform some publicity too.

It could even be a kind of competition on each one to put forward their best three implementations, or three which show the diversity of usage. I find showing blank installs not very effective - always good to show sites in context, gets peoples minds working...

Any other suggestions? (nice ones please :)

I think the idea of a competition is nice and not nessecarily a bad one. I have been following the oscom list for a while now (and saw this and oddb0d's post as well -thanks for the vote of confidance ) and what struck me is that OSCOM is looking for standradised technology implementations in CMS's, for editors, trackback, and some other features. Not a big list of wannahaves and hack them in as fast as possible, I think.

However, they're also talking about Zope and Apache Lenya, and I think they're a little out of our league, development capacity-wise. XOOPS has a small active developer community, which we're trying to expand (for one, by using the http://dev.xoops.org site I still think it's good to look at what OSCOM has to offer, as it could mean that XOOPS is more standards complient (which isn't a bad thing), and it also means we don't have to invent the wheel over again on some points...

Herko

Hello, all, and thanks for the comments so far.

Let me explain my goals and then perhaps a format and story will fall out from those.

At the moment, I am searching for a content management system to create a new site for a new magazine. Ideally, the same CMS would be used to eventually replace the underlying technology and processes that creates and runs linuxmagazine.com.

I'm technical, so I am not afraid of a little programming or server hacking to get something running. However, that time is limited.

Anyway, I have found some options in the open source world (don't want to spend money if I don't have to, or would prefer to spend it on customizing something), yet I am having a very hard time tracking down more options. The more time goes on, the more I find, thanks to people who see my postings or answer emails. I also realize the systems are very dynamic, growing and changing regularly.

Originally, the idea was to ask a number of CMS teams to create the best magazine site they could using their toolset. Obviously, the results would vary because the tools vary, but that's OK. There's also a range of requirements in the world and a range of pain to adopt the toolset. Some people commented that it would be better to focus on a non-profit web site, so one venture -- LM -- would not be the sole beneficiary. However, there's no reason to prevent all of the results from being open sourced as well.

I do think some kind of survey of the CM systems is needed.

The goals then are:

1/ Educate people about the options that are available.

2/ Identify the strengths and weaknesses of the (most) viable CM systems.

3/ Compare the open source CM systems to commercial counterparts.

4/ Try, via example, to show one in action for an interesting site.

I am open to suggestions on how to achieve these goals. I also want to help the opencms community achieve its goals.

So, more thoughts?

Martin

Thanks for enlightening us up on the situation Martin - hopefully someone in the community will see this and be of help...