Raible Designs

Building a website with an Open Source CMS

I think the open source community has done an excellent job of figuring out how to create frameworks for developing web applications. But what about websites. You know, the web presence that every company wants - for minimal cost. For most companies, it's nothing more than 5-10 pages that tells a bit about the company, show some management folks and tells you how to get to their offices.

I've developed many websites over the years, many that were static, but more that were dynamic. The unfortunate thing about all of them is they required someone technical to update them. Often, the client had to contact me if they wanted anything new on the site. I've often thought there was a better solution - and I think I'm at a point where I know what customers want, and I know how to provide it. The solution is a Content Management Solution (CMS). One of the biggest problems with static websites is they're not dynamic enough. A CMS can alleviate this problem by reducing the bottleneck that a traditional "webmaster" creates.

In my mind, there are a couple of things that make a good CMS: 1) it's open source (to minimize costs to the client) and 2) it's easy to customize. On the customization front, my demands are a bit more rigorous - mainly because I know what many folks want in a website. Here are my main criteria for a good open source CMS - when it's used to power a regular ol' client-updateable website:

Design customization: I should be able to customize all the (X)HTML that's generated using one or two files (like SiteMesh allows). It should be possible to change the look and feel of *everything* by modifying some CSS. It should also be possible to use Mike Stenhouse's CSS Framework to simplify layout choices for clients. Ideally, a web designer or regular ol' HTML person could do the customization.
Static-looking URLs: The site should look like a static site. The URLs should be all lowercase and end with .html. It should be possible to modify all the URLs to look as if all pages are static. Apache's mod_rewrite and the URL Rewrite Filter are great tools for making this happen, but it'd be nice if the administration of the application allowed for setting these rules.
It shouldn't look like a CMS: No login links, no registration links, etc.
Ability to easily add dynamic content: It should be easy to add dynamic content - such as RSS Feed headlines to pages.
Menu Customization: In the application, it should be possible to create menus (both main and local navigation) and configure a page to highlight a menu when a particular page is shown.
Versioning of pages: In case someone messes something up, it should be easy enough to revert back to a previous version.
Easy to use: It should be possible to train a marketing person (with little technical knowledge) how to use the system in 10-15 minutes.

For technical companies (such as Virtuas), there are a few additional requirements I'd like to see:

Articles with syntax highlighting: It should be easy to publish articles with code that's colorized. The Java2HtmlPlugin for JSPWiki is a good example of this. I currently don't know of any for XHTML, XML or scripting languages like Ruby or Python.
File Upload: For uploading white papers and other technical publications.

So I've started looking at open source CMS's that fill my requirements. Last weekend, I wrote a solution that fills all of these requirements using SiteMesh, JSPWiki, CSS Framework, Acegi Security and the URL Rewrite Filter. It only took me about 6 hours to complete, but after completing it - I started wondering if I really wanted to start another open source project and maintain it. The answer is no, I don't want to create something new - I want to use something that's already out there. However, since I do have something that satisfies all my requirements, I will use it if I can't tweak an existing OS CMS enough.

Here are a list of CMS's that I'll be looking at in the next week or so. If you're associated with any of these projects, please leave a comment and let me know how many of my requirements you satisfy.

I'm a bit hesitant on Daisy b/c it requires XSLT knowledge for design customization. Magnolia has long URLs and doesn't appear like a static site - and the PHP ones often have .php in their URLs. It should be an interesting investigation to see if these (seemingly) heavyweight solutions can solve a few simple requirements.

Posted in Open Source at Sep 12 2005, 11:48:14 AM MDT 49 Comments

Comments:

Have you looked at openCMS (http://www.openCMS.org) - it's jsp / java / tomcat / mysql, LGPL, and quite nice wysiwyg editing. There's some pretty good international support (most of the developers are European). I've rolled it out on some pretty big customer sites (Tommy Hilfiger's global sites, Tribeca Film Festival), and the reference list is pretty huge, if European. I believe it meets your criteria, above.

I set up a couple of screencasts on my site of openCMS in action- it may be worth taking a quick look. They are at:

http://www.watchdogsystems.com/opencms/opencms/demos/index.jsp

Posted by Tim Howland on September 09, 2005 at 07:45 PM MDT #

Another one for your list: infoglue (http://www.infoglue.org). I think it meets most of your requirements, except for the static-looking links ending with html. But this may have been improved in the latest version. We're still using version 1.2, and i've created a script which uses wget and some scripting to turn the website into a static website with simple static looking url's.

Posted by Andrej on September 09, 2005 at 07:55 PM MDT #

Hi Matt;

I know nothing of the ones you mention, but I just learned of an Open Source CMS system from another developer last week, who says it is excellent.

Alfresco
http://www.alfresco.org/

He spoke with the CTO of the company and they are using all of the latest technologies: JSP, Spring, hibernate, Lucene. If you or anyone knows any thing about it, would appreciate the knowledge. Peter

Posted by Peter Delaney on September 09, 2005 at 08:38 PM MDT #

I have (and to a certain extent still am) going through the same pain.

I can add 2 to your list: Plone and Drupal. Spring just went with Plone and I just went with Drupal. Plone seems to be good at big corp. features but is hard to set up. Drupal is good a community stuff, but isn't as polished as I would like.

Drupal meets all of your features. but don't believe them when they say it will work on Postgres. You will be forced to use MySQL. And you'll need to get your head around bizarre features like Pages / Stories / Blogs and Book Pages.

Posted by Joe Walker on September 09, 2005 at 08:48 PM MDT #

If you want a minimal CMS that supports Java's JSR-170 standard and its implied interoperability then you might want to look at Apache Jackrabbit. It is still being incubated at apache.org but I have been very productive leveraging it for my persistence requirements. I remember seeing something about Magnoloia being built on top of Jackrabbit.

Posted by scott on September 09, 2005 at 08:56 PM MDT #

Drupal is great. I've actually been thinking of ways I could use Drupal for news, blogs, forums etc. and Appfuse for more database driven-custom features.

Posted by Tom on September 09, 2005 at 09:02 PM MDT #

+1 vote for the inclusion of http://opencms.org on your list!

Posted by Robert B on September 09, 2005 at 09:08 PM MDT #

Most of the web applications I had to write usually require a collection of various functionalities, such as a catalog, order processing, CMS, forums, user management system, etc.

Most of the CMS I seen so far are really standalone products or do not fit in with the Spring framework.

Posted by René on September 09, 2005 at 09:24 PM MDT #

We rolled out Plone about a year ago and now regret it. It gets quite unweildy and is quite difficult to extract your content should you ever want to migrate away from it. We've also had numerous performance problems with it.

Alfresco isn't meant for creating websites, it seems. We're evaluating it now for document management, and for that, it's pretty nice even if only a technology preview atm. But it doesn't meet any of your requirements.

Posted by Tim on September 09, 2005 at 09:27 PM MDT #

cmsmatrix has a facility to compare, might be worth a look. How did you go about choosing you're candidates for evaluation?

Posted by Niall on September 09, 2005 at 09:44 PM MDT #

Niall, thanks for the link to cmsmatrix.org. I never realized there were so many CMS's out there. The candidates I listed on the non-Java side are from Maria Winslow - a collegue of mine. I sent her an e-mail asking about the market leaders, and she responded with the 3 you see here (as well as Zope, which is more of a framework than an application). The Java ones (Daisy and Magnolia) are two that I've heard about and seen in the Java world. I've heard of OpenCMS as well, and even tried to install it about a year ago. It failed the 10 minute test miserably on my Linux box. I think I even gave it 30 minutes. ;-)

Posted by Matt Raible on September 09, 2005 at 10:24 PM MDT #

The Onion uses Drupal. http://www.theonion.com/content/message With the hope that "in the future, faster animations or streaming video that cannot be turned off may be possible"

Posted by Tom on September 09, 2005 at 10:29 PM MDT #

IMO, Zope is by far the best tool for this kind of thing. It can be used as a framework, but it can also be used out of the box as a CMS. I've built entire sites in a day with Zope, spent the next day training people on logging in and editing content pages, and was done.

No login links; when you try to access the manager, you're prompted for HTTP authentication. Set up headers and footers at the root level, and any document in child folders can use them as if they were in the current folder, or they can be overridden in a child folder. "Files" can be static HTML, image, or other files, DTML template pages, Python scripts that generate dynamic content, or whatever.

Exporting your data from Zope is easy enough, there's a standard tool to export to the filesystem (it normally stores everything in the ZODB database).

Plone is built on Zope, and does a bit content creation hand-holding, but was always more effort than it was worth for me to ever use on a client.

Posted by Mark Hughes on September 09, 2005 at 11:29 PM MDT #

Zope sucks. It tries to do too much and ends up doing nothing well.

Posted by Alonso on September 09, 2005 at 11:34 PM MDT #

I've used a couple extensively. Zope used to be a favorite but its greatest strength and greatest weakness for me was the object database that it uses for storage as I ended up doing too much coding in web-forms and having to copy and paste things back and forth. It has been a while though and has likely improved.

A couple of sites that use Drupal in either exactly the way you mention or in very similar ways are Sierra Tarn a small business site and The Onion. It is not nearly as heavy on the eye candy as tools like PHP Website but I've given many people 15-minute demos over the phone and never had another question from them on using their site so even without the built-in polish it's pretty capable. A lot could be done to improve the administration side as it's often neglected in themeing and site creation. But there are folks actively working on it.

As I do each time I talk about Drupal I have to mention that it has absolutely stunningly great taxonomy features. This may not seem like a huge thing until you get into a site and realize how easy it is to have multiple ways to classify information and that those translate into ways of viewing content. For example by simple selection of a taxonomy term content on my site takes on a completely different theme (OK my themes aren't totally different but each uses its own graphics and CSS and they could be really different).

Posted by Joshua Brauer on September 10, 2005 at 01:38 AM MDT #

Please don't waste your time with Zope and Plone, or if you must, start your evaluation from the documentation and the horrible NIH object database, and take a look at the Plone authentication system if you want a laugh.

Posted by Anothermike on September 10, 2005 at 02:04 AM MDT #

Matt, I've been reading your blog with interest for many months now and appreciate your prolific contributions to the Java and open source community. Since I've some experience with Plone and Drupal (which have been mentioned by others) I thought I'd come out of lurk mode and attempt to give something back.

Plone is quite useful if you have to manage a large site with unusual content types. It's truly a "content" management system in the sense that you can create and maintain all the common content types, such as documents, files (this is the "file upload" feature you mentioned), photos, events, and news, but it also provides sophisticated facilities to create and manage your own content types. Plone is much too heavy a solution for the kind of 5-10 page site you talking about, I think. It's hard to find shared hosting providers for Zope/Plone, primarily because Zope consumes a lot of server resources. Plone is great, but not a match here.

Drupal meets many of the features in your list. It's PHP-based and easily available from most hosting providers. Like so many of its PHP-based CMS brethren (visit opensourcecms.com for a comprehensive listing with demos), however, it is heavily slanted toward use as a "community" site, where users can "join" the site and post entries in forums, personal blogs, etc. and the home page is a listing of the latest news, blog posts, events and so forth. With moderate effort you can make a Drupal site look like a static site, but it feels like swimming upstream.

In short, I'm still looking for the open source solution that meets your list of requirements. Though I've not used it, I think the Dreamweaver/Contribute commercial solution from Macromedia probably comes close. I don't think a Java-based solution will hit the sweet spot since affordable hosting of Java apps is difficult to find and probably outside the comfort zone of most of the web site designers who build smallish sites like the ones you're describing - though I'm sure many of us would like to see what you came up with. Maybe someone will build this thing with Ruby on Rails. Please post again if you find something that nails it.

Posted by Doug Evenhouse on September 10, 2005 at 03:07 AM MDT #

I had them all(we evaluated more than 200 CMSes), and they're all too complicated for simple users, so I wasn't able to use them for my customers.
They all fail the "10 minutes test" too :). If a CMS fails the 10 minutes test for a developer, than it will fail for sure the 3 days test for a customer (that's the most time small customers will invest in learning a CMS - but not full time in those 3 days). What's very bad is that for many of them even for developers are very hard to use/maintain/learn.

Here's one simple enough(it passes the 10 minutes test), very practical, and also fast and lightweight:
MeshCMS
It's based on SiteMesh (hence it's name), and thanks to SiteMesh the application is very easy to use and has no complicated concepts to learn for the end user.
The Sourceforge project is here for MeshCMS.
Even more - it has documentation (see on the site the 'help' menu item) - this is very uncommon for most open source CMSes.

My 2 cents: don't evaluate a CMS for yourself but for the customer - he's going to use it day by day not you :)(the CMSes in your list - all require constant developer interaction).

Ahmed.

Posted by Ahmed Mohombe on September 10, 2005 at 10:53 AM MDT #

Matt, I guess you have already a lot of info to digest from the comments above, so I'll keep it short.

I don't know of any project that handles all of your requirements (but I don't know all of the open source projects, of course)
I would add OpenCMS to your list; OpenCMS is more than a CMS, it's also a framework to build applications that interact with your Content DB. I haven't tried the latest version, and while the user interface may not be what you want, there's a lot of power underneath.
I'm biased of course, since I know the developers, but Daisy is pretty good as well. And you can always harness Cocoon (which is the engine that Daisy runs on) for extra functionality if you need something that's not in the box.
Daisy, Magnolia, Alfresco, etc.: most of these tools were developed with large sites and many editors in mind; if you're really after something for very small sites then the roll-your-own approach may well be the best way to go.
Need something really small? Try XM: "XM (XSLT Make) is a simple and affordable web-publishing content-management solution that takes advantage of XML and XSLT".
I have been involved in CM for my employer (a bank) for 5 years now, and we have developed our own inhouse solution for departmental intranet site management as well - not because there are no worthwhile solutions available, but because none of them met our requirements... But we also have a few JSPWiki sites up and running - If you're not afraid of a bit of tinkering, JSPWiki is a great base, even for a site that needs to be more than a Wiki (or that is not a Wiki at all).

Wout

Posted by Wouter on September 10, 2005 at 02:04 PM MDT #

Hi Matt, I was in a similar boat some time ago. I am an independent webapp developer, and I prefer Java (specifically Spring MVC, Hibernate, etc) for any "real" development. For coprorate web sites, I have found the Java community to be lacking in CMS offerings. After about 6 months of research and testing, I've come to the conclusion that PHP is a better language for CMS. I have settled on Drupal for most of my clients. There's a small learning curve to fully customize it, but it pays off. Really grasping its workings the first time gave me the same "ahhhh" feeling I got when I developed my first Spring MVC app; I think it comes from the elegance and simplicity with which Drupal does its job. It fulfills all of your requirements save versioning, but you could add that if you need it. For design customization (in Drupal: themes), you'll want to use the PHPTemplate theme engine. For static-looking URLS, Drupal has the best solution of any CMS I've seen. It has it's own URL-aliasing system. The last thing I'd mention: DO NOT USE Mambo or Joomla. You'll likely be extremely impressed with the UI at first, but very little of the internal code is XHTML compliant, which makes it impossible to make and XHTML compliant site. Also, the codebase is an absolute mess. There's very little organization, virtually no comments, and no code documentation. Drupal on the other hand has a Javadoc-like API: drupaldocs.org.

Posted by Aaron Longwell on September 10, 2005 at 04:33 PM MDT #

Cool that you're addressing these requirements, Matt. We have been fiddling around with Magnolia for a while and just deployed it for the first of our customers. It's looking good so far, so we'll probably use it again.

Magnolia layout is CSS only. Web-layer consists of JSP-documents (templates) with a nice tag library for accessing content if your not satisfied with the default templates. The content is decoupled off to the JSR-170/JCR (Jackrabbit is one implementation), and we smell lower TCO because of this.

It is a relatively heavy web-CMS, but has a few bonuses like searching, and version control is on the way (it's part of the JSR-170) and an internationalized/translated and pretty GUI.

Posted by Thomas Ferris Nicolaisen on September 11, 2005 at 02:00 AM MDT #

We are using Magnolia cms and it looks great. I have been able to set up the site http://www.tyneit.com and do a little bit customization(changing the header image and font size). Like all the open source stuff, the document is always not enough. So I still haven't got a chance to know how the system works and cannot do a big change. In conclusion, I like the software and want to spend more time to study it. It support utf-8 encoding and as you can see, my site is displaying Chinese correctly.

Posted by tyneit.com on September 11, 2005 at 02:35 AM MDT #

Matt, Maybe It will be good to draw attention to Blandware AtLeap CMS (https://atleap.dev.java.net) which is based on your child - AppFuse. Did you try to use it? AtLeap will satisfy all your requirements maybe except "Versioning of pages".

Posted by Andrey Grebnev on September 11, 2005 at 10:18 AM MDT #

You mentioned that Magnolia "has long URLs and doesn't appear like a static site." I actually chose Magnolia a few months ago because it allows you to select your own URL you'd like for each page, so it can have short URLs and appears exactly like a static site. See the magnolia site itself for examples such as:

http://www.magnolia.info/en/magnolia/about-magnolia.html

I think it has one of the cleanest user interfaces for allowing the client to manage their own content. Magnolia handles all of your requirements out of the box except for page versioning (that's available behind the scenes (JSR-170), but there's no interface for it yet).

Posted by Stuart on September 11, 2005 at 02:15 PM MDT #

Matt, what did you use for Menu Customization? Struts-menu? And how flexible is it to modify the design on the menu (vertical layout/horizontal layout, colors, font...)

Posted by Peter on September 12, 2005 at 09:12 AM MDT #

I said earlier that Spring was using Plone - I was wrong - they are using Drupal like me, I was tricked by their theme, which comes from plone. Give me a shout if you use Drupal, I might be able to save you some pain.

Posted by Joe Walker on September 12, 2005 at 10:58 AM MDT #

Matt - somebody else has already mentioned AtLeap, which is based on your own AppFuse, so you may want to check that out. I've never looked at it, but from the blurb I've read it seems quite impressive. Also, take a look at Cofax (www.cofax.org) - for which I was at one time a project member. It fits most of your requirements (if not all), and is very easy to set up. Its based on Servlets/JSP. It is used by a bunch of online newspapers, for which it was originally designed. Laslty, in the past I've actually made small modifications to Simon Browns pebble blog software (http://pebble.sourceforge.net). Although this is a blog system, its also an incredibly powerful and lightweight CMS. Again, very easy to set up and use. Modifications typically only need to be made to a single JSP. HTH

Posted by Lee on September 12, 2005 at 11:15 AM MDT #

Another CMS is InfoGlue (http://www.infoglue.org/) besides content managment also supports JSR 168 portals ( if you looking for portal support as well) I found a list of CMS with a bried description in this link (http://www.roseindia.net/opensource/cms.php) some of them already mentioned by the other guys; (Alfresco, cofax,Contineo, Daisy,eAdmin/OWX ,Infoglue,Ion ,Jahia,Magnolia,Open Harmonise ,OpenCMS ,RedHat CMS,webEditor,Webman )

Posted by Emmanuel on September 12, 2005 at 03:48 PM MDT #

From my personal experience, there is no open source CMS that can meet complex requirements(example: Ebay, version, amazon etc). You need to go for something like Vignetter, which is not open-source. Sad but that is the truth, in specific complex cases.

Posted by Kishore Dandu on September 12, 2005 at 03:58 PM MDT #

I use http://www.edgewall.com/trac/ trac for code highlighting/subversion/wiki/project management software development stuff and I found http://www.exponentcms.org on the aformentioned http://www.opensourcecms.com to be a simple way to setup an easy to administer/edit basic web site. I am interested in checking out some of the links mentioned in this thread. Combine those two solutions address around 70-80% of your requirements.

Posted by mal on September 12, 2005 at 05:26 PM MDT #

I am interested in seeing what you come up with Matt. I used appfuse as a base for expressplanner.com One of our tools is an event website builder that mimics the dreamweaver template functionality. I would love to add a more robust solution to the portal!

Posted by John Mark on September 12, 2005 at 09:08 PM MDT #

Would you mind releasing your CMS code so I can learn off it?

Posted by Edward on September 12, 2005 at 09:52 PM MDT #

Sure I can do that! I basically copied the process Dreamweaver uses for applying templates, etc. It isn't an advanced system - it simply allows for users to define templates (using dreamweaver mx markup!) When changes are made the system determines which other pages for the site change, etc. The WYSIWYG editor is FCKEditor. It has a few small bugs I am fixing right now. But I can release it if it is useful for you. It wasn't meant to be a standalone CRM though - infact it was designed around ExpressPlanner but it shouldn't be hard to change. If you are looking for a full featured CRM - then you want to look somewhere else. Send me an email - I'll work on getting code up on sourceforge.

Posted by John Mark on September 12, 2005 at 11:08 PM MDT #

I am also interested in your expressplanner, are you releasing the code for the opensource community? I think it would be, as an addon to appfuse, a great project to learn from.

Posted by -FoX- on September 13, 2005 at 12:11 PM MDT #

I switched from phpwebsite to drupal and have never looked back. for what u want to do, drupal can't be beat !

Posted by td on September 13, 2005 at 02:57 PM MDT #

95% of what you are looking for is available right now and easy to use with... wordpress 1.5. I was really skeptical but I was able to do a custom website with all the features you are looking for (except page versionning) in a few hours. With hundreds of plugins and templates, it's really easy to do. I have almost 8+ years of experience with CMSs and most of the time the big "lie" is how easy they are to use for the real person managing the website, the real user. Souped-up blogs are much easier to grasp then dumbed-down CMSs.

Posted by Sylvain Carle on September 13, 2005 at 03:14 PM MDT #

Drupal is pretty cool, all right. I've used it a bit and have no complaints.

Posted by Rory on September 14, 2005 at 09:25 AM MDT #

I have a requirement to build an audio file management system. Baically store audio files sent via http and display them in web ui with some explorer widget etc. I've started looking at jackrabbit for handling into/out of repository part and maybe just slap a UI for the display with without use of spring. Any real world experience suggestions on other open source module that I might be able to use? Thanks

Posted by Kumar Pandey on September 16, 2005 at 03:08 PM MDT #

I know that you have a lot of additional CMS recommendations, but I've spent quite a bit of time scouring the web for quality CMS'es as well and this one deserves some attention: Web Gui: http://www.plainblack.com/ Good luck!

Posted by Joshua Jacobs on September 17, 2005 at 03:29 AM MDT #

Hi!

just to add that a friend of mine just tested how to configure and redesign CMS (this guy is a designer) and found Drupal was the best.

Just my 2 (euro)cents :-))

Have a good one

Posted by Gabriel on September 21, 2005 at 03:05 PM MDT #

re static urls: I think that Magnolia's approach is hard to beat, since the urls we "generate" are what we call "virtual static" urls - indistinguishable from static ones, which is what you want for marketing and search. On the other hand its straightforward to map other mechanisms to our structure (and has been done before), e.g. to use something like bla.com/show?page=1212

Posted by Boris Kraft on September 21, 2005 at 03:27 PM MDT #

I am looking for a web hosting provider that will host my web application built on top of magnolia. I am looking for an entry level provider as the application is in prototype stage and I dont expect a lot of hits in the first 3 months. Any recommendations thanks vivek

Posted by vivek on October 14, 2005 at 02:37 AM MDT #

Hi Matt, What light weight tools would you use to build a small site that can publish articles, blogging and provide RSS without considering CMS in nowadays(I have already made up my mind to use MeshCMS)? jspwiki for blogging and publishing artilces? Using roller for blogging seems to be too heavy weight, i.e. 13.5MB. You seem to have done this many times according to this blog. So I assume the practice u use might be the best and easiest way. Last thing I want is to do things the hard way. Thanks in advance. :)

Posted by 202.180.83.6 on October 23, 2005 at 07:03 AM MDT #

<em>> What light weight tools would you use to build a small site that can publish articles, blogging and provide RSS without considering CMS in nowadays</em>

I would actually recommend using a CMS. We chose Drupal for Virtuas. See my other articles on the CMS front.

<em>> Using roller for blogging seems to be too heavy weight, i.e. 13.5MB.</em>

The size of a Java application is rarely an indicator of it's "weight". Roller might be considered heavy b/c it's a database application and uses Hibernate/Struts, but it's also very stable and can handle a very large load. If you're looking for a file-based blogging engine (instead of database), take a look at Pebble or Blojsom.

I definitely like JSPWiki.

Posted by Matt Raible on November 10, 2005 at 03:46 PM MST #

Hi, Might sound dumb...but what the heck... I have just started exploring Open Source CMSs, essentially for building some familiarities with CMSs and some POVs. VEry much inclined to try Drupal. problem is despite attempting to install & configure Drupal for endless hours, I have been completely unable to achieve it. Does any one have any thing like "Drupal for Dummies", which hold my finger and walk be the whole path? Will greatly appreciate it. Prabhat, India

Posted by Prabhat on September 27, 2007 at 08:08 AM MDT #

It give better information about website development

Posted by shashikant on September 30, 2008 at 08:58 AM MDT #

I followed a similar approach when I started the IFCX.org web site. I used JSPWiki as the CMS thinking that I would add features via it's API. After starting to make changes within JSPWiki, I gave up that approach and use Ant and Groovy scripts to publish the public static site.

I don't recommend using JSPWiki as a CMS, but the technique (using a Wiki Category called "Publish") is worthwhile and the scripts may be useful to some folks. I've recently added RSS, a sitemap, and Typepad Connect powered comments.

http://www.ifcx.org/wiki/WikiPublishing.html

Jim

Posted by Jim White on December 28, 2008 at 11:02 PM MST #

and why not Xoops? ( www.xoops.org )

Posted by Defkon1 on January 07, 2009 at 10:58 AM MST #

I'd recommend checking out CMS Critic. There's a huge list of cms products there and the guy does reviews as well.

Posted by Robert Thompson on October 09, 2009 at 05:05 PM MDT #

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