Choosing an Open Source CMS

What are the major aspects of the decision to go with an Open Source

CMS platform?

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• 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.

Understanding Open Source

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• Cost• Ease/Expense of Implementation• No Vendor Tie in• Control over destiny– Contributions– Openness

• Community Support• Modularity• Community innovation

What’s To Like about Open Source?

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• 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

Sounds good, so what’s the Catch?

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Stacking them up: 4 Popular OSS CMS Platforms

Joomla offers out-of-the-box strength, but may not be the best option for scaling to large traffic or multi-site configurations.

Plone is a powerful, but a technically demanding tool. Written in Python, Plone requires an experienced programming team, but is very flexible.

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.

Drupal offers a developer-friendly platform with advanced content management capabilities. It has a strong community support and the ability to scale.

Sources:http://cmsreport.com/node/543http://www.goodwebpractices.com/other/wordpress-vs-joomla-vs-drupal.html

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Frameworks

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.

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.

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.

Idealware Comparison Chart

Source: Idealware: Comparing Open Source CMS

Which is for You? A side-side comparisonDrupal Joomla! WordPress Plone Django

Barriers to entry Medium Low Low High Medium

Language PHP PHP PHP Python Python

Structural Flexibility High Medium Low High High

Multi-site Management Ability High Medium Low High Medium

Extensions/Plug-ins High Medium High Low Low

Ease of Hosting High High High Low Medium

Functionality (Out-of-the-box) Medium Low High Low Low

Scalability & Security Medium Medium Medium High Medium

Investment Expense Medium Low Low High High

Source: CMS Matrix

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Understanding Drupal: The official explanationDrupal is open source social publishing software that empowers individuals, teams, and communities to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website.

It offers flexibility through vetted systems and tools that empower users to leverage previous community successes through modules and create unlimited new functionalities with a flexible architecture.

Drupal was also designed to allow third parties to create and customize new features and behaviors through APIs

The Drupal framework offers a sophisticated programming interface for developers, but few programming skills are required for basic website installation and administration.

Drupal is written in PHP and can run on any platform that supports:• a web server capable of running PHP (version 4.3.5+), including Apache and IIS• OS: Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows, and Mac OS X • a database, such as MySQL or PostgreSQL, to store content and settings.

Source: Idealware report

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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

blogs /wikis

forums / comments

ratings

tagging

users

social networks

workflow

taxonomy

search

RSS

content

analytics

ContentMgmtSystems

SocialSoftware

Tools

SocialPublishingSystems

Source:

Social Publishing Software Participation-Driven Websites

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• 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

Why We Use Drupal

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Drupal Community and SupportThe 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.”

> 2,000,000 Total Drupal downloads

> 250,000 Downloads per month

> 600,000 Community members

> 2,021 Developers

>400,000 Live Drupal websites

> 4,500 Drupal modules

>750 Contributors to Drupal 6

Source:

Source: Drupal.org

Drupal Layers: Architecture (or is it Marketecture?)

Resources

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 Plone60-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/

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/