Recently I evaluated dozens of open source CMS packages, specifically a PHP/MySQL flavour (good ol’ LAMP). So many either missed the mark or totally overwhelmed it: however, one hit the nail square on the head.
There seems to be several types of open source CMS packages.
These are:
- Enterprise level – slick and professional with a truck load of features. Specifically we’re talking Plone, Mambo and Drupal. Great if you’re after a portal or have a site of mammoth proportions.
- Faux Slashdot – columns galore, polls, almost every useless portal plugin you could think of. Great for overwhelming your users with useless information as well as giving site administrators a virtual tool box of odds ‘n’ sods to play with that probably won’t achieve anything useful. I’m not saying Slashdot itself is necessarily representative of this – but essentially being a news portal (and a well run news portal), it suits it.
- Hobby CMS – put together in spare time, mostly as a pasttime of the developer, and probably not going to be any real use to anyone unless you’re interested in a simple starting point for dissecting a CMS
- Etomite – the only CMS with any real shred of quality that caters for those under the enterprise mark
I won’t rant to much about the short-comings of many open source CMS packages – as Jeffery Veen has written an excellent article discussing the issue at length.
Digressing – as part of my final year university project, I had a propose a CMS package for the Murdoch University Careers & Alumni Office.
I’ve worked with a variety of commercial CMS packages – namely Interwoven Teamsite, Microsoft CMS (oh boy, don’t get me started on that one) and a proprietary CMS built in-house at a former employer (again, don’t get me started). I was very interested to see what was on offer in the open source world.
Our contact there insisted he wanted to control his content, however staunchly opposed learning HTML. Not in an arrogant way, in a practical way – he had other fish to fry. This is really the key of a good CMS: any person within an organization with a base knowledge of web and IT should be able to jump in and start publishing content just as they would with a word processing product.
With this in mind, I started looking for a system with the following features:
- Effective WYSIWYG editor, preferably Javascript over Active X.
- Simple image and file uploading (and insertion into content)
- Intuitive interface that lets you get right into creating and editing content
A great place to check out many of the CMS packages mentioned above is at Open Source CMS, where you can gleefully fiddle away with the admin and client functions of nearly a hundred different CMS tools. This site was invaluable in helping me find the correct system for my needs – or rather forcing me to look harder after finding no suitable candidates.
I did more digging, and soon came across the trail of something called Etomite, which was no longer on Open Source CMS because it was (at the time) apparently going proprietary.
After finding it and installing it on my own server, I felt an ecstatic combination of relief and excitement. Finally something that was small enough not to overwhelm the modest requirements of my client, yet built professional enough to instill respect into its users.
I have yet to fully explore Etomite‘s full capabilities, but so far the most attractive features are (in addition to the requirements I mentioned above, which Etomite satisfies perfectly):
- Publish date settings – so you can automatically set content to appear or disappear depending on date
- Slick interface – one of the best user interfaces I’ve seen on any web product
- Search engine friendly URL’s
- Valid XHTML 1.1 pages (and nice clean code to boot)
- Multiple author/user management
- Page statistics, both realtime and collated
So far, it’s looking good. I start developing with Etomite soon, and plan to document any further opinions on it, which I’m hoping will be positive. So stay tuned.