In the last few weeks I've done some work on the website. While translating it, there were some things that struck me so I changed them. But our site is still far from perfect. It lacks a attractive design and some features that would be quite handy (e.g. select the language by hand, RSS-Feeds, a search) but are a little bit difficult to implement (at least if we want to do it in a safe and efficient way) or at least I don't have the time and skills to do it. I also noticed, that the format we use to save the content (it's just a php file containing HTML which is included in some kind of very simple template) leaves room for optimization (for both, the author who needs to write valid HTML and know about the things he can do with it (not all of us do know how to write clean and valid HTML (I do not exclude myself from this statement)), and the user, who might get malformed HTML or ugly pages because the browser has some bugs the author didn't know of). We also have the problem, that our site consists of many different components: there's the homepage, the wiki, emu, SVN, which looks very fragmented.
We could address most of this problems by using a CMS (content management system). Of course a CMS is not a Swiss Army knife for everything and it does raise several issues: is it fast enough to survive a slashdot, can we use our already existent database, how can we migrate, is it safe? The three commonly used Open CMS' are: Typo3 - the elder: -first release in 1998, therefore probably pretty safe by now -complicated to administer and design (has it's own template-language) -but therefore very powerful -according to some sites Typo3 needs a powerful server Joomla! - the most used: -easy to administer and design (at least the last time I used it) -very big community -had some security vulnerabilities in the past (hopefully this will have more or less disappeared with the ground-up rewrite in version 1.5 - the most vulnerabilities where in third party modules though) Drupal - the community focused (and therefore my favourite): -should be as easy as Joomla -has some features which are especially interesting for communities (like us - mozilla.org and other OpenSource projects seem to use it too) All of them are licensed under GPL, they all provide caching techniques to cope with high traffic, they all can use mySQL, other databases are also supported. It's important, that the functionality we want to have is covered with the standard modules as much as possible, third party modules are a major security risk. Looking forward to your comments Neo at NHNG P.S.: The question whether Joomla! or Drupal is the better CMS seems to be a question of belief. -- Follow the blue rabbit - The Freenet Project - http://freenetproject.org/ -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 252 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/devl/attachments/20080508/67b476b8/attachment.pgp>
