[2/15/2008 Update: If you want a more up to date view of the marketplace, consider buying Open Source Web Content Management in Java.]
[2/25/2007 Update: The original whitepaper has been taken down from the Optaros site. It is somewhat out of date but there still seems to be a considerable amount of demand for it. You can now download it here]
[9/29/2006 Update: I have started to add updated reviews on this blog. Here is an updated and more complete review of eZ publish.]
[My apologies.... With the re-release of our website, the back door that allowed access to the white paper without registration has been closed. Fortunately, this white paper has been published under the Creative Commons 2.5 license so there are other copies floating around on the web. Maybe under Google keywords Seth Gottlieb CMS Whitepaper?. Also I have also seen some of the individual project reviews reposted on SWiK. So, if you like your information free (as in "libre", not "free weekend at a timeshare promotion") you might consider checking these alternative sites.]
I just published an epic whitepaper where I discuss how selecting an open source CMS is different than a proprietary software selection and summarize 15 open source projects:
- Alfresco
- Bricolage
- Drupal
- eZ publish
- Lenya
- Mambo/Joomla
- MediaWiki
- Midgard
- OpenCMS
- phpBB
- Plone
- Roller
- Twiki
- TYPO3
- Zope CMF
The summaries are not to the depth that you would find in the CMS Report (which reviews Midgard, OpenCMS, Plone, and Zope) but they give a high level view of what the project is about.
Here is the abstract:
The open source community has produced a number of useful, high quality content management systems which presents an opportunity to deliver tailored content management solutions without the high licensing or management fees associated with commercially-licensed or hosted software. However, the sheer number of open source CMS projects and the ineffectualness of traditional commercial software selection techniques can make the task of finding the right open source software an intimidating challenge. The strategy of using feature matrices is particularly ill-suited to open source software selection. A more practical approach is to match your needs to a common business problem that others have solved using open source software and engage with the community to learn about their experiences in implementing the solution. Doing so will take advantage of the unique aspects of open source software: the openness of the user community and the transparency of the development process.
The content management use cases that are particularly well served by open source are: informational websites, online periodicals, collaborative workspaces, and online communities. This paper briefly describes some open source projects that have been successfully applied to support these use cases and gives techniques for how to engage with the community. While open source is frequently and successfully used as an alternative to custom development of unique solutions, the use of open source software will be the topic of another white paper or case study.
Feedback is welcome in the comments. If you want more information, feel free to contact me directly.
Related posts:
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- Packt Open Source Content Management System Award, 2007 Packt Publishing is holding their second annual Open Source...
- New White Paper on Open Source Document Management Systems [Unfortunately, this white paper is no longer available without...
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Nice work but it would be nice if you made transparent why you choose exactly the system you did. What made you exclude systems like the Magnolia Content Suite which not only is the only open source content management system that is based on the important JSR-170 standard, but also has been consistently praised for its easy-of-use? A recent Forrester report urges clients to require JSR-170 support from their vendors – none of the systems in your list match that requirement except (partially and reluctantly) Alfresco, which doesn’t even provide web content management to speak of.
Thanks for the comment. The projects reviewed are based on my personal experience. There are many very good projects that I was not able to get to. I hope to cover Magnolia and some other projects sometime in the near future.
Nice article, let just me put something right concerning eZ publish:
“eZ publish does not have the module development community that
Mambo, TYPO3, and Drupal have and most of the modules that are available are not open source.”
eZ publish goes beyond dynamic content storage as it also allows you to define new content types at run-time in the admin interface. In eZ publish, content definition is part of content management.
Hence, no need to create new modules just to store a new type of content, no need to do programming there. In eZ publish extensions, you define new views/designs/templates and business logic, not new content types.
This significantly reduces the amount of extensions you need to program. Nevertheless, there are over 300 contributions available online, and they are Open Source: http://ez.no/community/contribs
I just wanted to say thanks for a well put together paper.
I especially appreciated your analysis of different use cases for WCM. They were very well explained. Most other papers I’ve read are either very generic (“pick a product that meets your unique needs”) or ignore that area entirely. I’ve been struggling for a few months to clearly delineate the needs I’ve seen, so you’ve provided a welcome guiding light.
Congratulations on getting slashdotted. Too bad about the mail server outage. Hehhehe.
Nice to see a focus on open source CMSes. I’ve used commercial CMSes in the past, but always quickly come back to my favorite CMS, TYPO3. Just to clarify, TYPO3 does come with versioning so you can make changes to the site without it being published automatically. It also integrates with the workflow.
I’ve just read the first part of your essay and I must say that it’s great. Some of my colleagues are thinking about creating a new onlene magazine and though we’ve been thinking of Joomla as the best option, I was doing some investigation to see which other options we had.
I think we’ve made the correct decision. Typo3 seems a little complex, Magnolia isn’t based in LAMP and eZ Pubish could be of interest, but the modular behaviour of Joomla atracts me.
Good Job, thanks for the great effort.
If anything, we on the Campsite team are a little bummed we weren’t included in the evaluation. Maybe next time.
Hi – Great article. Clarifies a lot of things very well.
What would your choice be to use an open source web CMS as a foundation to build a commercial CMS?
Kris,
Building a commercial CMS based on open source software will depend largely on licensing. If the commercial CMS is an ASP model (where you don’t distribute the software, you just let people use it), you can use pretty much anything you wish. If you want to license the software, you would be restricted to using open source software with a very permissive licensing scheme such as Zope. There are several commercial CMS build on Zope such as Axiom. The Apache license is used by Lenya, Graffito, and JackRabbit are pretty permissive as well.
If you do intend to license a commercial CMS based on open source, I encourage you to become a good citizen in the open source community of the project that you are leveraging. Contribute back bug fixes and anything else that you do not see as your unique value add.
Thanks, Seth. Very helpful.
Hello? XOOPS?, or Phpnuke?.
Why is Farcry always left out of these conversations? It out performs all CMS system currently out there, can be scaled to handle any ammount of users, open source, and flexible.
Have you ever seen Farcry, or reviewed it?
This may not be the appropriate place to ask this but since this whitepaper invoked the question, I’m putting it here. After reading the whitepaper, I think a business model around high-quality open source CMS makes more sense then the commercial CMS I currently work for. How would you recommend I go about starting my own company?
Just some small corrections about (Mambo)Joomla:
1. “…most of the core developers forking the code base to create Joomla…”
Not most, ALL!
2. “In-site editing is sufficient to make textual changes and is foolproof but does not give access to metadata and advanced publicashing features.”
Wrong, you must’ve missed the tabs under the text entry fields..
3. “Other visitor-facing functionality, … can be added by downloading and installing modules (called mambots) through the management user interface”
A bit of a mix up here, modules, mambots and components are 3 very different extension possibilities for the Core code. Modules are side blocks, mambots modify main content output before display, and components provide additional functionality such as you describe. For a more in-depth description of each, please refer to the Glossary: http://help.joomla.org/component/option,com_glossary/Itemid,213/
Hope this helps
Joe
I wonder what you think of WebEdition? Its a mature CMS (currently at v3.5.x) and based on PHP/MySQL. The official site is: http://www.webedition-cms.com/
Installers are available for Windows, Linux and Mac.
What attracted me to it was the portability factor: develop a site on a Mac (using MAMP or native PHP/MySQL), export it to a backup file using the builtin facility and then simply import it into your production server running on Windows, Linux or another Mac. Very nice.
Hope to see your review of it sometime.
Thanks for a great whitepaper!
Rock on!
peter
Author disqualifies himself by the selection of OS CMS Systems – the fact that he thinks of himself as an “expert” in WebCMS shows that CONFUSION 1.0 is the operting system working in his brain. Ridicolous.
Seth, you are a magnificent human being. Thanks for undertaking and sharing this authoritative survey. It had been a couple of years since I looked into using an open source CMS, and clearly the field has matured quite a bit in that time. Without your white paper and ongoing reviews I would have had a much harder time getting a feel for what’s out there.
– George L.
Thanks George! I am happy that it was useful to you.
Nice work i’ve seen only now!