On Wed, Jun 15, 2005 at 11:29:05PM +0100, Rachael Beale (CSS-Discuss) wrote: > http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=CssFriendlyCms > http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200503/content_management_with_plone/ > http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200409/open_source_cms_recommendations_wanted/ > > At work, we're looking to replace our proprietary CMS (which mainly > plays nicely with CSS, though occasionally picks up its ball and goes > home...) with an open-source one in the next year or two, so I'm also > interested to see what people think.
I've been working in an almost exclusively open source environment for the last 6 years, for a company that's built and customised/extended a goodly number of OSS CMSs for some fairly big sites. Until a year or so ago I'd have said that most off-the-shelf OSS CMSs were only marginally better than their proprietary counterparts in terms of CSS and HTML quality (although vastly more standards-compliant). The gap, however, has been widening with every passing month. In my view Plone leads among the more feature-rich (portally) packages and WordPress among the simpler ones. Although I didn't find Plone that difficult to get to grips with, I'd concur with the general tenor of Roger Johansson's observations. Plone's two biggest negatives, for me, were its relatively slow performance on low spec kit and the none-too-semantic character of its default HTML (far too many divs and spans for my liking). The latter is, arguably, something you'll find in most complex off-the-shelf packages, given the intrinsic difficulty of coding the sematics programmatically ... which is a good reason for giving simpler packages like WordPress a chance if your needs are modest ... and for choosing open source extensibility if they are not. I was seriously unimpressed by the HTML (and hence the CSS) in the version of Mambo which I evaluated a few weeks ago, but that may have been dated (an occasional hazard with stock Debian packages). WebGUI seems to have more features than any other, but its new-found affiliation with CSS has the feel of being an after-thought (I tend to prefer styles to be linked-in rather directly embedded in the page head). Bricolage is, perhaps, the most capable of all the packages that I've evaluated, but its management infrastructure could be overkill for any but the biggest sites and companies. I'm told that its excessively fine-grained workflow has been simplified somewhat in recent months ... not before time. Having throw in my tuppence worth, I'd be interested to hear other people's recent experiences. Dave ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
