It's this time of the year again - the Packt open source CMS awards. Yours truly has been in the jury in the past two years in the "PHP CMS" category, this time I was selected to judge in the "Other" category. So I had the pleasure of reviewing 5 non-PHP content management systems. Very impressive stuff!
Here are some observations (the CMS's sorted alphabetically, nothing to do with my verdict). They might be more on the negative side, but I had to find things I don't like, right, I couldn't just vote for all of them. And plus, in previous years the CMS developers sometimes would ask for any suggestions for improvement.
DotNetNuke
- click
- written in .net
- rich text editor
- free and paid (professional) version
- busy community forums
- a number of extensions/pluggins/modules conveniently sitting in the admin menu
- pages made up of modules
- needs a bit of work in the keyboard navigation, "enter" key behaves in various ways and not always intuitively
- needs a bit of UI and usability work, the UI is all over the place
- -1 for having to complete a form in order to see a demo (form includes phone number and "ok to be contacted by a salesperson?", many new services require less information to make you a full member)
- -1 for having to register in order to download
- -1 performance (no gzipping, no minification, multiple scripts and styles, no sprites, etc)
- -3 for sending me three emails shortly after registration for a demo
dotCMS
- click
- written in Java
- very slick
- versions - free, paid, on-demand
- pre-packaged sets of functionality to get started quickly depending on the type of site you're building (e.g. ecommerce, press center, etc) - pretty cool idea
- impressive list of clients - .edu's, gov, corps...
- highlight on "enterprise" features (sorry, hate that word), with focus on scalability. Hey, you can even buy the hardware, with pre-installed CMS
- -1 for having a 404 on many pages (global.js, also menu_bg on the demo site)
- +/-1 for performance best practices (some sprite use, but not enough, -1 for using gifs, +1 for gzipping, should compress the page as well, -1 for not combining components like css and js)
- built with many open standards, velocity templates, struts, +extra for using YUI base/reset/grid (wink)
- -1 for putting long text chunks in an image
- readily available demo
- nice CRM module with mailing list
- -1 for using dark text on a dark background ("Your search for "<i>skins" returned 0 results.")
mojoPortal
- click
- .net
- many auth options - ldap, oauth, etc
- free, some paid features such as support and advanced from editor
- could benefit from a sexier demo
- nitpicking: double htmlentities escape
- -1 for performance best practices (should gzip, merge css, js, etc)
- clean markup (although .net's viewstate bloat makes me uncomfortable), despite the few single quoted attributes
- inline editing (edit links appear as you browse the front-end) - ftw
- rich text editing with several editors
Plone
- click
- python
- slick and contemporary
- impressive list of add-ons
- excellent step-by-step tutorials, manuals and a free online book
- impressive client list, starting with (since I bitch about performance throughout this post) Akamai, the CDN provider
- +1 for performance best practices, could also gzip and minify css/js, +1 for sprites
- -10 for missing demo?
WebGUI
- click
- Perl
- one-click personal demo is a very good idea
- "site starter" that hand-holds you through setup
- -1 for not gzipping, etc
- +1 for the cheesy rockstar photo here
- -1 for white fonts on light blue background in profile pages (I left the default colors during setup)
- +1 for innovative admin console approach (accordion-style menu on the left, while viewing the front-end)
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