Looking at Content Management Systems (CMS)

[giza]

I'm looking at replacing my PHP codebase that powers claws-and-paws.com with a Content Management System. The reason being that the PHP code is nice, but it's showing its age, and I don't see the point in continuing to work on it when there are CMSes out there that do the same thing.

I've done some investigation, and have narrowed the choices down to Plone and Drupal. The first is written in Python and uses its own DBMS, and the second is written in PHP and uses MySQL. I have no problems with either technology. It's more of a question ease of use and potential impact on my server, seeing that it's a virtual machine with only 128 Megs of RAM.

I'm leaning slightly towards Drupal because it won't require me to set up Zope (which would be used for nothing else) and can make use of my existing Apache setup. (however, it forces me to set up MySQL, ugh) It is also the CMS for spreadfirefox.com, so I know it can handle volume. :-)

Anyone have any suggestions or thoughts or any anecdotes on these products?

Comments

[rustitobuck.livejournal.com]

Avoid Zope. It has some great concepts, but it is definately heavyweight and very complex. It won't run well inside Apache, so if you want features from Apache, you have to reverse proxy it. Plus, my experience with Zope is that you will like the first version you get, but then getting to the 'new better thing' (and everything is new and better; Plone is the new better CMF) is like a root canal.

The MFF website is in Zope and CMF (Plone's precursor). I regret that decision greatly. Sure, there was some cool stuff in there, but it was high maintenance. Trying to get a bulletin board installed and integrated with the user authentication system is difficult. The site is now a four-year-old CMF with too many patches to do an upgrade. Basically, it's now a do-over.

My suggestion is stick to LAMP implementations (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP). I've been using Mambo, a fairly lightweight, but flexible and popular PHP based content framework. Actually, I implemented the MFF registration system as a Mambo component, and got the user logins and session management for free. I even cheated and borrowed Mambo's database class structure for the registration system.

I picked Mambo after investigating several sites that review CMS systems, and that I'm too lazy to look up right now. The Nukes (postNuke and phpNuke) seemed too geeky for the business website I was building. Mambo, plus a browser-based WYSIWYG editor, was just the thing for my nontechnical client.

There are many more people using PHP based systems, so you'll find that they've already adapted phpBB into your-favorite-PHP-CMS-system, for instance.

So anyway, I was once a big Zope and PostgreSQL weenie, and finally figured out that going with the flow (PHP and MySQL) made life a whole lot easier. If I was given the choice between Plone and Drupal, I'd pick Drupal. Even though I've only spent one minute looking at their site.

[giza.livejournal.com]

Wow, I had no idea that Zope had that many issues with deployment, thanks for letting me know!

I used cmsmatrix.org (http://www.cmsmatrix.org/) to compare Mambo and Drupal, and they've got a similar featureset, which is good. Clearly more reserach is called for before I decide on which one to go with.