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| Website: Content Management Systems |
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| on Sunday, March 04, 2007 - 10:26 PM - 706 Reads |
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When I made the decision to create a website using a CMS in April 2004, I did my research to evaluate my options. I've not been completely satisfied with my choice in PostNuke, so I've continued looking for better alternatives... I was first exposed to a personal website using a Content Management System in October of 2002. The site used PHPNuke, and it was interesting and fascinating to me, based on the web development I'd done by hand in the past.
When I needed to quickly put together a website for my high school class reunion that a number of people could access and edit, I knew I needed something with a database. Since I'd never gotten around to learning how to use MySQL myself, I decided to try out a CMS. I knew I wanted something that used PHP & MySQL and was open source. I don't mind a steep learning curve, or complexity when I have the time for it. Plus, I had a number of website projects in the back of my mind, and thought that it would be nice to learn one CMS platform to use for all of them.
I started doing my research to find the best one for me. This is a brief overview (and my own personal impressions) of what I found.
Note, I have used the following two resources to gauge the overall popularity of a given platform at a given time. Not perfect, but should be good enough for useful comparison.
Google Trends, and This Alexa based popularity comparison
PHPNuke, (the first CMS I'd come across) was started in 1998, and quickly became a huge hit. Many of the developers, though, didn't like the code (insecure and not very well designed), and liked the guy who ran the program even less. The code was open source, so a whole bunch of software developers took the code in 2001 and started working with it to create something different. They called it PostNuke.
Then there were a number of disagreements over PostNuke which caused a number of people to take the source code and try to create new projects, including MD-Pro, Envolution, and Xoops. Then in August of 2002, there was a major disagreement that resulted in all of the developers leaving to start Xaraya. The remaining administrators of PostNuke seemed to have struggled both to find more core developers in a timely fashion, and also did things to upset and alienate the very necessary third party developers. These are the developers that code most of the non-core features of a CMS. Sometimes open sourced for free, and sometimes for profit.
Many of the systems popular today were available at that time. Typo3, Mambo & Drupal were all started independently in or around 2000. Wordpress was started in 2003. None of these had gained any significant popularity by April 2004.
In April 2004, PHPNuke was insecure and not worth considering, in spite of it's popularity. My options then seemed to revolve around PostNuke. None of the other PostNuke forks had gained much momentum at this point, either. At the time, I didn't realize that PostNuke was just starting a huge decline in popularity, which is still continuing. In retrospect, I'd probably have been better off with Xoops, because it's popularity was high and continued to increase for the following year, and everything I know about it's object oriented design would have been very nice. Xaraya also seemed very well designed, but was too new, untried and undocumented for me to want to use it at that point. I chose PostNuke, which I was mostly satisfied with, but as it's popularity waned, and third party development seemed even more lacking, I continued to look for better options.
From my perspective, hardcore programmers when developing a website that needs a CMS, seem to prefer to write it effectively from scratch. They only create the features that are specifically needed for that site, and optimize performance for exactly what is there with no extra overhead or complexity. For some of them it is faster to effectively rewrite things every time. Plus, they can keep their code proprietary, rather than use open source where they won't have as much control over their code.
My understanding of Xaraya is that it is one step below this in complexity. Rather than start over each time, this open source code is well organized and powerful, extensible framework. I've read experienced coders express that the freedom it gives them is almost unlimited. Unfortunately, it is also extremely complicated, which is why it isn't very popular at all, and why very few PostNuke users followed the developers over to use it. Without these users and third party developers, though, there are a lot of features and functions that are missing, even though the core code sounds exceptional. I don't mind complexity, but my coding skills are limited to hacking up what other people have done. Without more popularity and support, I'm stuck without many of the features I want/need with a CMS. I really wanted to learn and use Xaraya, but the deal breaker came when I wanted to throw together a quick site before I went overseas. There was no easy way for me to throw together a quick site with Xaraya. Everything was quite complicated from the get-go. After a couple weeks of fumbling, I gave up and went with PostNuke, which I knew and understood much better.
When I decided to revamp my website in the Fall of 2006, I again explored my options. I decided to throw something together quickly with PostNuke, again because I knew it so well by this point. PostNuke support had continued to decline, though. All the “cool” features have been promised to arrive in version 0.8, which is what the development team has been working on since at least 2002. It did seem to be getting more core developers on board, with a recently redesigned the website that looked significantly nicer, but it's popularity has continued to nose-dive. I suspect it will be extremely difficult for them to pull out of such a huge downswing in popularity. Even if version 0.8 is everything the developers want it to be, most of the third party modules I use were developed by people that have long since left PostNuke, and likely won't be updated for the new version any time soon. I'll certainly take a look at the new code, when and if it shows up, but I'm not betting on it at this point.
So, my other options...
Again, I want to be able to use Xaraya, but all of my objections above from a 2 years ago are still valid. The developers also don't seem to be very forward looking. They still seem to prefer mailing lists over more easily navigated web forums. They don't even properly implement RSS on their own front page!!! How does that bode for a project I want to use with up and coming technologies? This seems the perfect example of open source niche project with developers who are "scratching their own itch." It just highlights the need for a robust community of third party developers, which I just don't see in Xaraya right now.**
Wordpress seems like it would be great if I just wanted a blog, but I want a lot more.
Joomla, which forked from Mambo in 2005 when the developers didn't like the direction of the Mambo foundation, is an incredibly popular option, and is supposed to be extremely easy to get a good, usable website put together. I suspect that the community support is excellent, though I haven't spent much time evaluating it. My impression is that it is very user-friendly with lots of support, but not nearly as powerful as I want. Specifically I've heard complaints about it's permissions system, which is extremely fundamental to what I need.
Drupal is gaining in popularity. Not on the same level as Joomla or Wordpress, but has an active development community, has just released an excellent new version, and is currently more popular than Typo3, PostNuke, Xoops, and even PHPNuke. I found this article and this visual comparison between Joomla & Drupal specifically.
I've started using Drupal on a test site, and I believe that is what I will use for the next version of my website. I'm really impressed with how easy it is to write content the way I envision. I'm a little concerned that there are a number of modules that won't be updated to version 5 in a timely fashion, but so far it seems like progress is being made on most of the ones that I care about. I suspect this will be much better than for the major upgrade that PostNuke will release shortly. Hopefully Drupal will continue to grow in popularity, and will be sufficiently complex and powerful that I can learn it and use it for everything I need. I'll keep my eye on PostNuke's next release, but I suspect it'll be a sufficiently large change in what I am currently using that it won't be worth the time or effort for me to upgrade.
Note: **To be fair, I didn't do a very thorough evaluation of Xaraya in September like I did two years ago. My cursory evaluation was that things hadn't changed all that much, and certainly not enough. If I get too frustrated with Drupal's limitations, and decide I want to learn PHP well enough to program my own modules, I'll almost certainly move to Xaraya. |
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