[Typo3] Opensource CMS Evaluation Question

Geoff Deering geoff at deering.id.au
Thu Jun 23 03:16:17 CEST 2005


Saranyu Lavanyakul wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I am absolutely new to open source CMS and community. As I am working 
> on a CMS project for my organization (in Education field) and 
> evaluating a few open source CMS systems.
>
> I would like to ask for your suggestions on the evaluation and systems.
>
> The current situation is we run four websites on two web servers both 
> on Windows Server (btw, we do not expect the CMS must run on windows). 
> Existing sites have custom applications using JSP with Macromedia JRun 
> on one server and ASP and IIS on another server. Major parts of the 
> sites are static such as news, articles, course description, faculty 
> directory, etc. The primary purpose of the CMS initiative is because 
> we have a lot of information shared among those four sites such as 
> news. They appear on each site with different look and feel. We want 
> to manage single source of content and capable of publishing it to the 
> four websites. Another requirement is we want to maintain the ability 
> to run those existing custom ASP/JSP pages with the CMS system.
>
> So I kinda envision that the CMS should be on the back end separated 
> from the live site, storing the content on the CMS and be able to 
> generate static page and send to the live server.
>
> The open source system that we are currently looking are Apache Lenya, 
> Typo3, OpenCMS and Midgard. Currently it seems to me that none of them 
> capable of our requirement out of the box. As I am trying to find a 
> way. I have a few question would like to ask for your suggestion.
>
> - From the requirement above, do you happen to know any open source 
> system that can fit well?
> - If you have experience with Apache Lenya, Typo3, OpenCMS or Midgard 
> could you please share a bit on the how it compare to each other and 
> amount of work that need to be done to do the functionality that we need.
> - Any resource or suggestion for me at all.
>
> Thank you very much, I really appreciate your help.
>
> Regards,
> Saranyu L.


I think there are a lot of things to take into account, especially when 
working with EDU web sites, and also the various users that may need to 
post content.  You need to gather the business, user and functional 
requirements and take it from there.

You should look at systems like Knowledge Tree 
(http://kt-dms.sourceforge.net/) or Forrest (http://forrest.apache.org/ 
or http://forrest.apache.org/0.7/index.html), that are able to transform 
and manage documents first.  Keep in mind document and web site 
versioning, and being able to edit documents in a usable way, and 
maintain web standards and accessibility.

Maybe it is good to look at the experience of other universities trying 
to build standards compliant web sites, which are an important aim of 
EDUs (http://www.monash.edu.au/groups/accessibility/).

http://www.usability.gov/accessibility/

Regards
Geoff Deering



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