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

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.

On Oct 7, 2010, at 12:58 PM, Christian Lohmaier wrote:
> I started this thread to
> a) collect requirements for a cms
> b) invite people with knowledge of their CMS of choice to comment.
>
> I can only say I picked silverstripe for my test because it was easy
> to find documentation about the Translation feature and subsites
> feature I took as initial requirements while looking out for
> alternatives.
> I visited many CMS-homepages, and all seem to hide the documentation
> on how to actually interact with the CMS deeply hidden when it comes
> to details -  silverstripe featured a video that convinced me to give
> it a try  (and I wasn't disappointed). So I'm biased, because I found
> a CMS that does what I need it to do, and does this nicely (IMHO),
> thus whenever I look at another CMS now, I'm biased and compare it to
> how that stuff is handled in silverstripe.
>
> > [...] Drupal is an extremely robust choice and deserves to appear on our shortlist of platforms 
> > for an
> > intensive comparison.
>
> Sure, it is on the list!

What is our current list of CMSs? I believe it is at least these: Drupal, SilverStripe, Plone, 
WordPress. (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?

Answering the same question for Drupal: I have built many sites using Drupal and I know others on 
this list have used it too. 

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.

Major sites using Drupal include:

spreadfirefox.org
whitehouse.gov
economist.com

For a great article listing these and others, read: 
http://sixrevisions.com/web_design/31-drupal-content-management-system-cms/

Further, who will actually install and maintain the CMS? What about designing the site's IA and UI? 
I think we can improve our homepage very significantly from the OOo homepage, and I'd like to help 
wireframe that out and build it.

> > If you're not familiar with it, that's not a problem. We can bring in people who know it well to 
> > address
> > any questions we may have, and possibly even to assist with implementation.
>
> See, that's the problem I have with Top-posting/Fullquotes. I thought
> I made it pretty clear that I asked people to create testing sites to
> play with the features of any CMS.
> As you and also Jonathan pointed out already: Many are highly
> customizable, highly complex to any arbitrary level - and of course
> you can always extend it/fix it yourself given that all CMS that are
> worth having a look are opensource.
> But that's also the drawback. You cannot just install and fiddle
> around until you got it right. You can do it for one CMS, but surely
> not for all.
> And  honestly, when you provide access to a demo site to let users try
> out the CMS, why use such a crippled version? Did you try any of the
> demo-sites mentioned here?

I would love to install a demo Drupal site, but I don't realistically have the time to do so this 
week. I have worked with all of the CMSs mentioned except SilverStripe (but I have looked at your 
demo site and been reading the documentation). I looked at its homepage and it looks very nice--but 
we cannot discount the human factor. Do we have people who know it well already involved in our 
project? Do we have backup contacts we can ask for help from if need be? Has it been used on huge 
websites and proved its stability and effectiveness yet?

Thanks,
Ben

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


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