1. Choosing an Open Source CMS What are the major aspects of the decision to go with an Open Source CMS platform?
2. Community created/managed Free to use Community managed / group innovation Various licensing models (GPL, LGPL, Apache, BSD, MIT) – doesn’t really matter, but matters Open source is only the opposite of closed source. The idea of “vendor-provided” and “open source” solutions are not opposites. 2 Understanding Open Source
3. Cost Ease/Expense of Implementation No Vendor Tie in Control over destiny Contributions Openness Community Support Modularity Community innovation 3 What’s To Like about Open Source?
4. You have to pick the right community Where to Start? Lots of options that are hard to evaluate You will probably need consulting help Documentation/training may be limited Maintenance & Support should be taken seriously as an ongoing cost/activity Staying Up to Date Upgrades and patches Knowledge of the community Requires discipline to stick to the architecture model 4 Sounds good, so what’s the Catch?
5. 5 Stacking them up: 4 Popular OSS CMS Platforms WordPress is easy to set-up and use, which is great for small, simple sites, and blogs and comes with a hosted and non-hosted download yourself version. Joomla offers out-of-the-box strength, but may not be the best option for scaling to large traffic or multi-site configurations. Drupal offers a developer-friendly platform with advanced content management capabilities. It has a strong community support and the ability to scale. Plone is a powerful, but a technically demanding tool. Written in Python, Plone requires an experienced programming team, but is very flexible. Sources: http://cmsreport.com/node/543 http://www.goodwebpractices.com/other/wordpress-vs-joomla-vs-drupal.html
6. 6 Frameworks Ruby on RAILS is a framework for the Ruby programming language that is popular for many “web 2.0” SAAS site, but can be used to create CMSs. Like RAILs, django provides frameworks to build sites on top of Python. It is especially popular among publishers because its roots in this community. Zope is an open source web application server primarily written in the Python programming language.Zope includes a content management framework (CMF). Plone is built on top of Zope and adds the polished product aspect to it. Drupal can also be considered a framework to build custom applications on PHP because its architecture allows for enormous opportunity for customization, extensibility and 3rd party API integration.
8. Which is for You? A side-side comparison Source: CMS Matrix
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10. OS: Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows, and Mac OS X
11. a database, such as MySQL or PostgreSQL, to store content and settings.Source: Idealware report
12. 10 Understanding Drupal: The layman’s translation Drupal is an open source CMS with a social flare (read: web 2.0 pre-wired) It is flexible and lets you steal work others have done and pass it off as your own. Developers can do really cool things with Drupal. Its hard if you want it to be, but most of you will just see the easy stuff It works on everything your IT guys run – even Windows! Source: Idealware report
13. social networks blogs / wikis forums / comments content workflow taxonomy analytics search RSS ratings tagging users Social Publishing Software Participation-Driven Websites Social Publishing Systems Content Mgmt Systems Social Software Tools Source:
14. Flexibility of design and presentation Ability to totally customize editorial interfaces, workflow and content Easy to extend functionality because of its modular architecture Quickly add new features that meet your goals and objectives Proven performance and reliability in an enterprise environment Ease and efficiency of implementation 12 Why We Use Drupal
15. 13 Drupal Community and Support The Drupal community is a key differentiating factor for its success The Drupal community has built such a strong foundation of collaboration and support that “tens of thousands of people and organizations have chosen to use Drupal to power scores of different web sites, including community web portals, corporate web sites, social networking sites, personal web sites or blogs, and much more.” Source:
17. Resources Drupal: The New Gov 2.0 Site Builder? http://govfresh.com/2010/03/drupal-the-new-gov-2-0-site-builder/ 5 Government Sites Using Drupal Effectively for Open Government Initiatives http://govfresh.com/2010/02/5-government-sites-using-drupal-effectively-for-open-government-initiatives/ Open Source vs. Vendor-Provided Software: Comparing Them Side by Side http://www.idealware.org/articles/opensource_vendor.php Comparing Open Source Content Management Systems: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and Plone 60-page independent Idealware report that provides both an introduction to the topic of open source CMS options and a very detailed comparison of the most popular four systems. http://www.idealware.org/comparing_os_cms/
1. At the core of the system is the big bucket of nodes—the data pool. Before anything can be displayed on the site, it must be input as data. 2. The next layer out from the center is where modules live. Modules are functional plug-ins that are either part of the Drupal core (they ship with Drupal) or they are contributed items that have been created by members of the Drupal community. Modules provide various functionality to expand your site’s capabilities to include things like the creation of custom data points (fields) for your nodes; event calendars; e-commerce; programmatic sorting and display of content (custom output keyed off of any number of configurable parameters that interrelate your content) and more. There are hundreds of different options within the fast growing repository of contributed Drupal modules. They represent the work of everyone from individuals to large corporations who use and rely on Drupal and are working to extend its power and usefulness. 3. At the next layer, we find blocks and menus. Blocks often provide the output from a module, and can be placed in various spots in your template (theme) layout. Blocks can be configured to output in various ways, as well as only showing on certain defined pages, or only for certain defined users. 4. Next are user permissions. This is where settings are configured to determine which things different user types have access to. Permissions are assigned to various roles, and in turn, users are associated with those various roles in order to grant them the associated permissions. 5. On the surface layer is the site template. This is made up predominately of XHTML and CSS, with some PHP tokens sprinkled throughout to insert content from the system into the correct spots. Also included with each template is a set of functions that can be used to override standard functions in the modules in order to provide complete control over how the modules generate their markup at output time. Templates can also be assigned on-the-fly based on user permissions.