Open Source CMS

[James]

An excellent resource:

http://www.opensourcecms.com

Lets you try out the various opensource CMS, Galleries etc so you can decide which one to go for without having to install them all yourself to test them.

[David]

Thanks for that James - very handy. I just found SiteAtSchool (http://siteatschool.sourceforge.net/) and was wondering how much easier the Bentley project might have been if it had been around then.

I'm definately going to have a closer look at this as I may have another primary school site to do in the near future.

[Tom]

I have been re-investigating CMS recently. The choice is difficult and one can make another comparison between physical architecture and website architecture. If architects use a standard construction system, or even a lot of standard components, they are restricted by the standardization. But if they do not use standard components they have a great deal of extra design work to do and they run the risks of making design mistakes.

Website architects complain that open source Content Management Systems are (1) difficult to understand (2) difficult to adapt (3) inflexible. Many people, like David, therefore write their own CMS.

My guess is that website architecture with a CMS will become more like physical architecture with building products: (1) it will become easier to use standard components (like window frames, boilers and roof tiles) (2) there will be less of the all-or-nothing approach to the design of open source CMS (3) something like construction modularisation (of dimensions etc) will be used to make it easier for CMS modules to be combined in different ways.

[David]

I think the best policy for webmasters of large-ish sites is the one I've adopted (after hours of thought and research on the subject) for CADTutor. Contrary to what Tom has said, I haven't actually written my own CMS solution. What I have tried to do is to write the glue that brings together all the various modules together into a single coherent website. Granted, I have written some modules for myself where something specific didn't already exist but on the whole I've gone for standard solutions (vBulletin as a forum, ArticleLive as a magazine component, EmailManager as a mailing list manager and others) which are then woven together with my own scripts.

Such a modular approach is very versatile and although slightly more difficult to implement than an all-in-one solution, makes for a design that is unique and perfectly suited to function.

[Tom]

I misunderstood David's approach - he seems to have reached the same conclusion as me, perhaps because we both have a background in the more physical aspects of architectural design.

Le Corbusier introduced the Modulor (see Wiki entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modulor for aesthetic reasons, thinking that he was following Vitruvius. But the great construction industry push for modularisation was in the 1960s and 1970s. The idea was, and is, that using standardized dimensions would make it easier to assemble manufactured components (windows, doors, roof trusses, kitchen units etc). Perhaps we will see a comparable enthusiasm in the open source CMS 'industry' one day. If CMS modules were designed for easy-assembly it would not be necessary to use so much glue!