Dec 26, 2008
If you have been playing close attention, you might have noticed that www.contenthere.net is now running on WordPress. Prior to the migration, the site was hosted on a combination of Blogger, Yahoo Store, and some hand coded HTML (managed in Subversion of course). That arrangement was fine but I ran into limitations with the integration between Yahoo Store and the rest of the architecture. There were no big show stoppers, just little inconveniences that I was getting tired of working around. Besides, I was itching to tinker - we techies get like that sometimes.
Selecting a new platform was fun because I got to be the client in a process in which I am normally the consultant. I was quite different from a typical Content Here client. First of all, I had no budget. Second, the president of the company (i.e. me) wanted the technology to be fun to program in. Third, I didn't want to choose a platform that I would recommend to my typical clients because I do not want to appear biased. Incidentally, the last point is a main reason why I have held off implementation of a content management solution for so long.
My first choice was the Django web application framework. I had done some prototyping on the platform and was really impressed with the cleanness of the architecture and how quickly you could build applications. It is a little like Ruby on Rails but in Python. Furthermore, Django has a popular e-commerce application called Satchmo. I installed Satchmo and was able to understand the code and make some quick customizations on it. What really killed Django for me was the lack of a good blogging platform. There are a number of simple django blogging applications out there but nothing seemed to fit the bill. The closest was Banjo but it didn't seem to be that well supported. There is actually a long standing discussion in the Django community about the framework's lack of mature blogging applications.
The next two finalists were Drupal and WordPress. I have built sites on Drupal and like the framework a lot. However, the commerce module always seems to be far behind the current release of the core. I also think that Drupal is a little bit more than I need for my simple site (a blog with a shopping cart).
My decision to go with WordPress started as a simple prototype. I was amazed at how quickly I could create a theme to match my old design. The commerce module WP e-Commerce looked pretty solid and I was able to quickly get it working with PayPal as my payment gateway. I also found some useful plugins to provide me the features I was missing in Blogger (like related posts, etc.). The thing that sealed the deal for me was the ease with which WordPress imported all my blogger posts and comments. I was even able to make the permalinks match the same structure as Blogger's for easier URL re-mapping (just a simple rewrite rule). Wordpress surely has its warts (there are plenty of places where the code gets pretty sketchy) but for a simple, reliable blogging platform with e-commerce capabilities, I am quite pleased.
Dec 15, 2008
Packt Publishing is looking to expand their already extensive library of open source books. Their recently published road map for 2009 includes eZ Publish Templates, Customizing Zope Sites, Apache Jackrabbit, Apache CXF, Openbravo, OpenEMM, Django e-commerce, Bazaar VCS, and Groovy dsl.
If you know these technologies and are interested in writing a book, you should email Packt at authors@packtpub.com. From what I hear from the authors that I know, Packt is a good company to work with and their royalties (roughly 11.25% of the cover price) are generous. Packt also contributes a significant amount of money to the projects themselves through their royalty scheme and their annual Open Source CMS Award.
Dec 12, 2008
I just finished reading Jeff Pott's new book Alfresco Developer Guide. If you have been looking for a technical book on how to develop applications on top of the Alfresco platform, this is it. Jeff wastes little time introducing abstract content management concepts or explaining the user interface, he digs right into setting up your local development environment. I like this approach but it assumes a solid foundation in both ECM and Java - if you don't have one, there are plenty of other books to start with. The expectation of some baseline knowledge saves the book from getting bogged down with introducing Spring, jBPM, and many of the other popular Java frameworks and components that make up Alfresco.
The book is written with a bias toward the document management end of the ECM spectrum but that makes sense for a book about Alfresco. Only one chapter (out of 9) is devoted to Alfresco's WCM component. The core strength of book is how it teaches developer to build dynamic web applications and services that access documents from the Alfresco repository (which may be the core strength of Alfresco too). There is great coverage on Alfresco's Web Scripts framework with plenty of interesting examples that showcase the flexibility of the platform. For example, there is a nice description of how to create an AJAX document rating widget you could put on another website.
Jeff's writing style is both thorough and readable. He has a nice technique of pulling up and explaining details in "What Just Happened?" sections. This allows him to run cleanly through a topic and then summarize and discuss some of the nuances of the steps.
Unfortunately for Jeff, his book (which covers 2.2 of the Enterprise Edition) came out right around the time version 3.0 was released. However, since he writes mainly about the API level, the book will stay relevant and accurate longer (Luckily API's can't change as fast as user interfaces). So, if you are a Java developer and are considering using Alfresco for building a "document centric web application," this book will help.
Dec 09, 2008
Janus Boye has blog post describing a new web content management system from Microsoft. Janus reports that the intent is to make a simple web publishing platform which is more suitable for external websites than its flagship MOSS2007 offering. The most notable aspect of the Oxite is not its functionality or its positioning, it is its license. Oxite is distributed under an OSI certified license: the Microsoft Public License.
From poking around a bit, Oxite seems to be a project introduced by some MSDN developers who needed a platform on which to build MIX Online (Microsoft's big developer conference. Here is their description of Oxite). We all know that Microsoft's mainstream content management offerings would not be up to the task for this kind of open community site. I am guessing that the code was first released under the auspices of developer network education and code sharing. I am not sure if Microsoft has any business model behind the project other than to keep .NET developers happily buying Visual Studio. Still, the Microsoft developer community is huge and I could see them hungry to participate in a community project that would be an answer PHP projects like Drupal and WordPress. The code is hosted on CodePlex (Microsoft's version of Source Forge) and there are already 2,324 downloads since its December 5 release.
Dec 08, 2008
EDIT The Open Source Content Management in Java Report is now Free and on Scibd.
Recently, a couple of the products that I covered in the Open Source Web Content Management in Java Report have had significant upgrades. Hippo CMS was totally re-written for version 7.0 and Alfresco CMS advanced from 2.2 to 3.0. Other projects have had smaller point releases. I will soon start work on version 2.0 of the report but until I get it done, I will offer V1.0 at a discounted price of $350. The individual Hippo 6.0.5 evaluation and Alfresco 2.2 evaluation have been discounted to $50 each.
Also, you can now buy a report using the Discover Card - in case that was holding you back.
Dec 08, 2008
The Plone.net site has a very good case study on Discover Magazine's migration to Plone. The Discover Magazine site looks like a model magazine site: clean, careful presentation; lots of imagery and multi-media; registration only content; and synergy with the print edition. The article covers how Plone is used to manage content, user adoption, performance, integration with 3rd party applications, and content migration. It's a very worthy read if you are considering Plone for your news or magazine site.
I am also encouraged to see that the Plone.net site (which is targeted to business users) is filling up with content. There are 34 case studies and the Plone sites directory contains 1,442 entries. I know that this was a key strategy to achieve the goal of increasing awareness about Plone and it is impressive to see the progress they have made.
Dec 08, 2008
Back in 2004 (I still can't believe that I have been blogging that long!) I wrote a post that discussed the risk of buying into a web content management software market that seemed on the verge of a consolidation. A few months later I wrote another post about the attractiveness and potential risk of mid-market products that were innovating with a much greater pace than the upper tier vendors.
That consolidation hasn't happened and I am not sure if it ever will. There is still a concern about product continuity but it may be that the upper market products are riskier than the middle tier. Just look at events like the OpenText acquisition of RedDot, Oracle's acquisition of Stellent, and constant speculation about other upper tier companies. I am telling my clients to watch out for "portfolio" style software "enterprise software" companies.
Portfolio companies collect software products - usually by acquisition. They used to offer the promise of integrating their products into nice cohesive solutions but those solutions have (for the most part) not materialized. Their failure to build integrated solutions was not from incompetence; software integration was never the goal. These companies were looking to integrate customer bases, not technology. The problem with a portfolio company is that its strategy for a software product line can be at odds with the best interest of its customers. If a portfolio company has redundant or unprofitable products, it will try to eliminate them. Oracle doesn't want to own three portals. OpenText doesn't want to manage three WCM platforms. It wants to find a winner and slowly starve the rest. One day Serena decided that they didn't want to be in the web content management business. Because they have plenty of other products to sell, they could afford to lose interest in Collage. History tells us that the risk of a large company discontinuing a product is far greater than a medium size company going out of business.
My new advice is to be careful of companies that have a habit of acquiring products. If you become their customer, they might lose interest in the product that you bought and they probably will not integrate their disparate portfolio into a well integrated solution. Nevertheless, if you look at your requirements and you find that the best fit happens to be a portfolio product (the actual software today - not the promised integrated vision), you should still buy it. Just mitigate your risk by keeping the pay-off horizon below four years and having a good exit strategy. To quote myself from 2004:
Plan an exit strategy as part of the selection. Look for open standards and interoperability that will make the solution substitutable, wholly or in part. Make sure that your content is does not get locked up in proprietary formats. Stick with technologies that you feel comfortable supporting. Spread your bets. Your content will outlive any technology choice you make today. Plan for it.
That way, no matter what your software vendor does, your risks will be contained.
Dec 04, 2008
I regretted having to leave the Gilbane conference early because I missed seeing so many friends and colleagues but I had no idea I was missing this FatWire gaff of showing the Playboy as their reference site. I am sure that demo would have been compelling to some audiences but it flew like a lead balloon at the Gilbane. The worst part for FatWire was when the CEO told an offended audience member that she was wrong to be offended. I guess the age-old rule of presenting still holds: know your audience. You can see some immediate reactions on Twitter.
Dec 03, 2008
Change.gov, President-Elect Obama's transition website is licensing all of it's content under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. I think that is pretty cool but I was wondering who owns that content anyway.
Dec 03, 2008
Yesterday I presented a 4 hour workshop on selecting a CMS at the Gilbane Conference. I was pleased with the attendance and the audience's level of engagement. People were asking questions and making comments right to the end. Here are the slides.
I wish I could have stayed at the conference longer. So many colleagues/friends were in town and I could only see a couple of them before I had to shoot off to a client.