Re: [libreoffice-website] CMS requirements / suitability testing

Hi Benjamin, *,

On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 3:31 PM, Benjamin Horst <bhorst@mac.com> wrote:
> Sorry my response is a bit delayed. It's tough to keep up with the pace of things in the LibO 
> community right now! (This is good for us though!) Further responses inline below.

Well, that's true for all of us :-)

> On Oct 7, 2010, at 12:58 PM, Christian Lohmaier wrote:
>
> What is our current list of CMSs? I believe it is at least these: Drupal, SilverStripe, Plone,
> WordPress.

Well, WordPress is not on my (personal) list, it has been mentioned in
the wiki thread, but in my eyes, it is a blog platform, with addon
features, again judging solely from the demo available at
opensourcecms.com
Good for a site with fluctuating contents (blog, etc), but less so for
a site like ours.
And noone is actively advocating it as far as I can see.

> (From emails sent to this thread.) I have worked a little bit with all of these except 
> SilverStripe--in fact, this is the first time I have heard of it.
>
> Christian L: Have you built any sites on SilverStripe before? Has anyone on this list?

No. The demo site I setup was the first I did. And it was a pleasing experience.

> I think that past experience with a CMS is going to be even more important than setting up a 
> demo, because there are always "gotchas" that you don't anticipate unless you're working with a 
> system you've used before.

Well, I disagree. If it is so complicated to get right, then maybe its
not the right one..

> Major sites using Drupal include:
>
> spreadfirefox.org
> whitehouse.gov
> economist.com

Sites using silverstipe include
http://www.metlinkmelbourne.com.au/ (public transportation in Melbourne)
the 2008 Democratic Convention website
Well, I won't duplicate complete http://silverstripe.com/our-work/ here :-)

so http://www.silverstripe.org/community-showcase/ might be more relevant here.

> Further, who will actually install and maintain the CMS?

The cms itself? Well that could be that group already maintaining the
documentfoundation server (that would include me).
The themes, content, appearance, etc is of course subject to change by
a bigger circle, i.e. the website-group.

> [...]
> I would love to install a demo Drupal site, but I don't realistically have the time to
> do so this week.

Too bad - time is what we don't have. Several groups are eager to
start migrating/testing stuff out, even if it would mean
"beta-testing" a site. So I guess the first batch then will be a
silverstripe setup, maybe even this week.

> I looked at its homepage and it looks very nice--but we cannot discount the

Oh, I'm not to account for the design itself, I merely used copy and
paste with a few tweaks here and there :-)

> human factor. Do we have people who know it well already involved in our
> project?

That's the nice thing about silverstripe: it is pretty
straightforward. For those maintaining the pages themselves, there
shouldn't be too much of a problem.

> Do we have backup contacts we can ask for help from if need be?

And surely I won't be the only one involved in setting up the real site.
Currently a couple of peoples from the german-lang project are giving
it a try (both as user of the system, as well as server admin)

> Has it been used on huge websites and proved its stability and effectiveness yet?

See above, there are a couple of high-profile sites in their showcase.
Of course those featured in their "our work" section involve other
stuff, but they dive a brief summary on what they did for those sites.

But as silverstripe is able to create static pages very nicely,
performance should not be an issue. In the worst case one would have
to seperate the editor's area and what visitors see to different
machines and have stuff copied over via rsync (already available)

ciao
Christian

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