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Content Management System (CMS) Report on Alternatives to Back-End
Submitted by eche on Fri, 2007-08-10 17:02.
The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), a long-time client, recently approached OpenConcept about content management systems (CMS) and the potential transition from what they are using now. CUPE’s website is currently running on a highly customized version of the Back-End (BE) CMS. BE’s existing, extended functionality is based on several modifications made by CUPE staff and contracted developers over the past few years.
However, BE as an open-source CMS is no longer being developed – meaning that no additional features or updates are being provided by the open-source community, and external technical support is limited. As a result, OpenConcept is investigating potential alternative CMS’ for the future of CUPE’s web presence.
This report looks at CUPE’s current BE content management system as a benchmark, and then considers three alternatives: WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal. Each CMS is examined in terms of three of CUPE’s most important criteria: (1) multilingual capabilities (also called internationalization or i18n); (2) end-user usability; and (3) developer usability.
We’ll be using the default installations for each CMS (along with the minimum amount of add-ons as possible, except where necessary). Additionally, we take a brief look the CiviCRM customer relationship management system and investigate its capacity for integration into the alternative CMS’. CUPE’s current equivalent to CiviCRM is called “Luiz.”
All alternative CMS’ examined here are part of the open-source community, and are based on PHP backed by mySQL. Sample default installations are available as indicated.
The report is written for a semi-technical audience, and concludes broadly: in terms of CUPE requirements, there will necessarily be customizations made and new modules developed for which ever CMS is selected. Given the broad-based community dedicated to open-source, and the quality of the codebase, Drupal seems to be the most likely candidate for CUPE’s future web presence.
With Drupal 6, the smooth
With Drupal 6, the smooth new installer will get your web project up and .... The Drupal 6 branch is maintained by Gábor Hojtsy with the help of Dries. It will surely make the difference.
Joomla! 1.5 is out: now what?
Now that Joomla! 1.5 is stable, do you have any updated comparison?
Unfortunately, not at this time.
Sorry Daniel, haven't had a chance to look at it or spend the time doing an updated comparison.
Drupal 6 i18n changes
An overview with pointers to more information about the i18n changes in Drupal 6: http://buytaert.net/reaching-out-with-drupal-6 ... Built-in support for i18n makes the choice for Drupal future safe, even if you start with Drupal 5 now.
It might be worth your effort to look at Drupal 6
Drupal 6 has had extensive improvements in the i18n area, to the point of not needing a contributed module to allow for translation of node content, and translations being directly integrated into the content creation interface.
I agree w/Adrian
I think Drupal 6 has much better capabilities with translations. We played around with i18n for several client sites about a year ago and I wasn't very impressed. Drupal 6 translations seem to be a priority again, so we'll let you know how it goes when we install Drupal 6 and play around with it... ;-) *Brian
Thanks for your comment
Thanks for your comment Adrian. Drupal 6 and Joomla 1.5 have some great things in store for the CMS community. As Mike alluded to below, for this report we wanted to compare stable releases, and it would have been a little unfair to compare Drupal 6 to Joomla 1.01 or Joomla 1.5 to Drupal 5.
Hopefully we'll get a chance to do another report once the new production releases are ready to go and made available.
It is sweet!