Date: prev next · Thread: first prev next last
2010 Archives by date, by thread · List index


I really think you need to do some side by side comparisons.  You can dress
Drupal up in any kind of clothes you want, so I don't think visual appeal
should be a factor.

I would set out some tasks that the CMS will need to facilitate and judge
from that.  I also think that you will find that using Drupal's solr search
and integrated commenting / discussion features will help to open up
participation by people.

I really think that it is important to look at Drupal.org and investigate
how it functions and see how  people use it to participate in the Drupal
project in various ways.  I think that it is probably the largest, most
visibly open, and active community of open source software development
around.  I think that this is a good model for participation in an open
source project and one of the great strengths of the project.

Go to:

http://api.drupal.org and see the documentation

Check out the amount of documentation and information is available for
configuring and managing Drupal.  Does silverstripe have the same?  What
other CMSs do?  Documentation and the ability to bring developers on board
that understand the CMS is important.  Drupals advantage is that it
standardizes development to a degree while providing the flexibility to do
what you want how you want, if you need to do it a specific way.

Anyway,  I like Drupal obviously, but this isn't blind love.  If I found
something that I could develop as fast with and not do boring forms and
reports by hand then I'd look into it.  Yes I know about WYSIWYG report
writers and form creators, but I like the fact that I can easily theme the
forms and add to them.



On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 11:20 PM, Benjamin Horst <bhorst@mac.com> wrote:

On Oct 11, 2010, at 10:43 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.

Agreed. I don't think our site is a use-case for which WordPress was
designed.

(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.

One demo just isn't enough to be sure! I think trying out a new CMS is a
major project risk.

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..

I was not referring to Drupal here. I was referring to all CMSs, indeed to
all software. If SilverStripe is so simple, then it's probably got
limitations you have yet to run into in your testing, but we'd likely
encounter when trying to build a large and complex site.

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.

[...]
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 think this would be a major mistake. My recommendation for Foswiki did
not seem to get any serious attention because someone just went ahead and
installed MediaWiki. Now in conversations we're talking about ways to work
around feature limitations in MediaWiki that would have been provided by
default in Foswiki (specifically its "Webs" feature that helps divide a site
up into logical content areas).

It seems the same is happening again here. You're advocating SilverStripe
and have already got people installing and testing it. Have you also
insisted they do the same with Drupal, in order to thoroughly compare and
contrast the two? If not, that should be a high priority.

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 :-)

I wasn't referring to the design, but rather to the features as explained
on the site's homepage.

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.

Same with Drupal from the editor / content creator side. However, I was
referring to the sysadmin side of the software. Working with a CMS that
people, including sysadmins, already know means we can avoid surprises and
breakdowns.

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)

They need to try both Drupal and SilverStripe (at least). If you aren't
encouraging them to do that, then we as a group are not performing
sufficient due diligence in researching the appropriate CMS for the site
going forward. (Testing only one possible option is just not enough.)

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)

I think the static pages question is a red herring. With memecached and
similar technologies, there's no performance benefit to static pages.

-Ben

Benjamin Horst
bhorst@mac.com
646-464-2314 (Eastern)
www.solidoffice.com


--
To unsubscribe, e-mail to website+help@libreoffice.org<website%2Bhelp@libreoffice.org>
List archives are available at http://www.libreoffice.org/lists/website/
All messages you send to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be
deleted.




-- 
*Thought Farm Productions <http://www.thoughtfarmproductions.com>
thoughtfarm@thoughtfarmproductions.com*
*(201) 691-7057*

-- 
To unsubscribe, e-mail to website+help@libreoffice.org
List archives are available at http://www.libreoffice.org/lists/website/
All messages you send to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted.

Context


Privacy Policy | Impressum (Legal Info) | Copyright information: Unless otherwise specified, all text and images on this website are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. This does not include the source code of LibreOffice, which is licensed under the Mozilla Public License (MPLv2). "LibreOffice" and "The Document Foundation" are registered trademarks of their corresponding registered owners or are in actual use as trademarks in one or more countries. Their respective logos and icons are also subject to international copyright laws. Use thereof is explained in our trademark policy.