Helpful Talk

I am helping a friend build a website and the topic of which CMS software to use has come up. In previous articles here, posted about a year ago I compared Joomla, Drupal, Xoops, Life Ray, Typo3, Word Press etc as a CMS. Back then I decided that Drupal was the best fit. Find one article I wrote on the topic a year ago here. I went ahead and learned Drupal then built a community website that has 150+ users now. I also built a knowledge base system for my workplace that is being used and is getting very high reviews. It’s needless to say, I quickly became a Drupal fan.

Now, a year later, I decided to take a quick look and see what has changed since the last time I visited other CMS’s.. Also I am reconsidering using Word Press as a CMS for my friend’s project because Word Press continues to impress me, I love that GUI and simple upgrade process.

I am looking at Pligg, Joomla, Drupal and Word Press this time around. I quickly removed Pligg of my list, it just wasn’t mature enough, yet.

So, to start with, here’s a list I created on CMS Matrix, I did update it a little after I found a few errors. What’s interesting is that despite how far Word Press has improved in the last couple years, this list has information from 2007 and WP version 2.2.1 so it is very outdated. Keep in mind that as of the date of this article WP is at version 2.7.1

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CMS & Wikis, Web Development CMS, Drupal, Joomla, Pligg, TYPO3, WordPress, XOOPS

Recently I had to setup a Drupal website (Drupal 5.7) that needed to display pages with a location and a Google map. I could achieve that by editing node.tpl.php but I wanted to use Views and Panels instead.. Here are the instructions on how to get your Gmap view to work with the Views module and the Panels module.

Before we start I assume that you have installed the Views, Panels2, Gmap, and the Location modules.

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CMS & Wikis Drupal, Gmap, Google

If you’ve read my previous posts you’d know by now that I’ve been sifting through Open Source solutions for many years. In a way, I was looking for that Ultimate Super Solution to my every web need.

My Ultimate Super Solution (USS) would have been able to act as a Web Portal, a Blog, a Forum, a Knowledge Base, be Wiki-like, a Document Authoring tool, a Content Management tool, a Project Management System, and an eCommerce system. Additionally, it has to come with all the latest Social Networking tools, and be FREE.

Many stand-alone applications exist today that are excellent at what they were designed for. For instance, take Word Press, it is arguably the best Blogging solution today that is Open Source and free of charge. Additionally, phpBB and vBulletin were designed to be a discussion forums and they are arguably the best Forum solution out there today. Similarly, osCommerce and its cousin ZenCart are the best eCommerce solutions. For wiki’s I’d say that WikiMedia is the best Wiki engine.

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CMS & Wikis CMS, Drupal

As stated in a previous post, selecting the right CMS for you isn’t easy given all the choices out there. Since my last CMS post, I’ve spent countless hours researching and narrowing down the CMS options. I now have narrowed my choices down to Four CMS engines.

It’s time to start installing an testing each of these. I have already installed and tested phpNuke and dotNetNuke; to tell you the truth, I was not impressed. I attempted to install TYPO3 but it was a pain and after a couple hours I quit; but I’ll give it another shot this week. SilverStripe is off the list now since it’s not a 100% free of charge. I also found a CMS called BitWeaver that impressed me so I added it to my finalists list.

Before delving into these, it’s worth reading comparisons and opinions that others have written to compare these Four CMS options. The following is a list of comparisons between Drupal, Joomla, SilverStripe and Typo3 that other’s have wrote:

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CMS & Wikis CMS, Drupal, Joomla, TYPO3, XOOPS

Below you will see a comprehensive comparison between bitWeaver, Drupal, Joomla, Liferay, Midgard, TYPO3, WebGUI, Xaraya, and XOOPS:

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CMS & Wikis CMS, Drupal, Joomla, LifeRay, SilverStripe, TYPO3, XOOPS

It is undeniable that choosing a content management system depends on a variety of criteria that depends on the scope of your project. Choosing a CMS can be a long and difficult process, especially since there is a large number of content management systems available. In Europe alone, you have around 500 systems to choose from. Some of these CMS solutions are very similar and comparing them will require taking hundreds of variables into consideration.

The good news is, whether you are looking to manage content in a large corporation, university, non-profit organization, a small business or even a government agency, there is likely a well suited Open Source CMS solution for you.
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CMS & Wikis CMS, Drupal, SilverStripe, TYPO3, WikiMedia WYSIWYG Editor, WordPress, XOOPS

As explained in an earlier post, as of today, no fully functional and bug free WYSIWYG editor exists for MediaWiki and all the other wikis that support a WYSIWYG are not developed with PHP or do not utilize the MySQL database.

In my opinion, if you are looking for a PHP wiki that utilizes a database like MySQL, Mediawiki is your most feature-rich and mature wiki from the bunch and I’d go with that.

Development to integrate MediaWiki with a visual editor has started using both FCKeditor and TinyMCE. The FCKeditor solution is less developed for MediaWiki than the TinyMCE solution which functions better but remains buggy.

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CMS & Wikis CMS, Drupal, WikiMedia WYSIWYG Editor