On Mon, 28 Aug 2000, Christian Jaeger wrote:
> Hello!
>
> I don't know a better place to discuss this, please tell me if you know
> (mailing lists preferred).
>
> Here at ETH Zurich (swiss federal institute of technology) we want to build
> a daily online journal. One of the suggestions (mine) is to build it with
> perl. It should be based on XML, and the idea is to make also the authoring
> / workflow / content management / user management parts of the system web
> based. The content should be modular: pictures, text, audio etc. should all
> be independant content elements with their own history, preferably with
> possibility to spawn children from parent elements (i.e. original picture
> and derived lower resolution pictures). For publishing, several elements
> should be composed together. Another non-trivial part is a good user- and
> group or role based user management. Suggestion for Text markup is a (pod
> like) plain text markup which is converted to XML for storage, with the
> possible option to fully go with XML when editors are really ready. For
> publishing of the articles I'm planning to use in some way AxKit (source
> should be taken from database), and Mason for the administration parts.
Well you've pretty much just described my plans for AxKit-CMS...
> Now maybe that's a bit a big project - I don't even really know yet. (My
> estimation for the whole project is 280 days of work - I'm hoping to solve
> this with 5 programmers until the end of november.. never done something
> that big :-(). Now what I would like to know:
>
> - is anything like the mentioned things already existent? (mainly: database
> based content management system, and something of a sophisticated user
> management) (We would probably even pay for it if that matters)
Well there are lots of pre-existing content management systems. See
http://www.camworld.com/cms/ for an overview of a few of them. The only
perl ones I know of on that list are MediaSurface and Interwoven
Teamsite. Both are horribly expensive (though maybe cheaper than your 280
programmer days). Mason has a CMS, which Linux Journal just did a write up
all about. I haven't used it so I can't comment, but the article is at
http://www2.linuxjournal.com/lj-issues/issue77/4168.html
> - are things like these in the interest of other people, too? (Some weeks
> ago, in the discussion about templating, someone mentioned Zope and that
> perl should have something like that...) Would it be possible to get
> together and build such parts as open source? Preferably in a good modular
> fashion so more people can profit from it..
AxKit is building something like this right now. We have the skeleton
framework in place, its just a matter of time now. We would _very_ _much_
appreciate funding or manpower for the project. We have strong long-term
goals for the project, not just something we want to dump in the open
source community. Mail me direct if this is something you're interested in
doing, and we can talk business off the list.
> Maybe someone of you knows Vignette Storyserver? We have the option to get
> the source code of a Storyserver based online journal - although it
> requires modifications, and it's not XML based yet. So an idea is also to
> port this (TCL code) to perl, and reimplement required Storyserver
> functionality in perl. Any comments on that? (I don't know Storyserver yet)
Don't do it. StoryServer's architecture is not focused towards XML like
AxKit's is. And thats a huge undertaking (trust me from someone who is
working to port a product to perl from another language).
> The reason for not using Zope, OpenCMS or Enhydra, is a) I don't know them
> really :-(, b) some downsides are visible when looking at these solutions
> (i.e. Zope's user interface seems rather sub-optimal for use by
> journalists, especially as long as it's html based). (And we haven't
> succeeded to get OpenCMS to run until now)
UI's are always going to be a problem. See the discussion on the CMS list
about editing
interfaces: http://www.mail-archive.com/cms-list@camworld.com/
--
<Matt/>
Fastnet Software Ltd. High Performance Web Specialists
Providing mod_perl, XML, Sybase and Oracle solutions
Email for training and consultancy availability.
http://sergeant.org | AxKit: http://axkit.org
