Web Authoring Tools - Looking for CMS/Wiki/Weblog software with these features:

Author

Looking for CMS/Wiki/Weblog software with these features:

David Winter

2004-10-13, 12:15 pm

I need either a Content Management System, Wiki or Weblog software
with a fairly extensive following feature set. I will do my own
research, but maybe someone can recommend a product (commercial or
OSS) with the following features. I have put the more exotic stuff on
top of the list.

1) Nested categories for articles. These should be mapped to URLs, so
e.g. an article in category "life/food/pasta/" whould have the URL
"www.foo.com/life/food/pasta/1.htm".

2) Automatic generation of Navigation lists/pages from these
categories. Categories and pages should automatically be indexed in a
Yahoo-ish directory style.

3) Multilingual structure: It should be possible to switch
- page templates (navigation elements etc.)
- categories (see above) and
- content
to another language. I.e., I want to be able to build versions of the
site in other languages, allowing the end user to switch from the
English to the French version of a page. I guess this requires a kind
of abstraction layer, so "life/food/" is (automatically) replicated as
"la vie/manger/" etc.

4) Ranking: End user can rank a page's usefullness, top rated pages
can be listed on homepage ("Most popular articles").

5) Browser-based page editing (the usual, but should generate XHTML
compliant code, e.g. <em> instead of <b>.

6) Article length limiter: Administrator can specify a maximum length
for articles (max no. of sentences/characters)

7) User (Group) Management: Admin, Editor, Author roles (assignable
Read/Write/Delete/Publish privileges)

8) "Other articles by this author" - clicking on an author's name will
bring up a list of all articles he has written.

9) plus the usual:
- page templates,
- variables (date, author & article name etc.),
- a basic search feature.

I am aware that most of the big CMS can be forced to do all this and
more with plug-ins and heavy customization, but I'd prefer something
that does most of the above out of the box. I would be especially
grateful for recommendations based on personal experiences. And if
someone wants to pitch his own product/services, I'm ready to listen,
too :) . I have a *small* budget for this.

Chris Morris

2004-10-13, 12:15 pm

wintermute_101_nospam@yahoo.de (David Winter) writes:
> I need either a Content Management System, Wiki or Weblog software
> with a fairly extensive following feature set. I will do my own
> research, but maybe someone can recommend a product (commercial or
> OSS) with the following features. I have put the more exotic stuff on
> top of the list.
....
> I am aware that most of the big CMS can be forced to do all this and
> more with plug-ins and heavy customization, but I'd prefer something
> that does most of the above out of the box. I would be especially
> grateful for recommendations based on personal experiences. And if
> someone wants to pitch his own product/services, I'm ready to listen,
> too :) . I have a *small* budget for this.

With only a small budget, you're unlikely to find a commercial CMS
that will do that (you're looking at ~£40k or the equivalent in other
currency) for a fully-featured commercial CMS.

Of course, you may be in the sort of job where small means ~100k, in
which case you should have no problem finding both an appropriate
commercial CMS and a contractor who will do the customisation so that
it works out of the box for you.

Assuming that's not the case, that's a lot of features. I doubt any
OSS CMS will do all of them out of the box. Difficult ones:
- the decent TTW editor is rare (the OSS ones aren't really good
enough yet; there's commercial ones for anything up to $2000, which
look okay in the trial version - ones that work cross-browser are
even rarer)
- the multi-lingual feature I doubt comes by default on anything. But
if you're having different URLs, different content, then that's 90%
of having two separate sites, assuming that you can share an image
library between the two and the structure set-up step is short.

I'm afraid I don't have a recommendation - when we were looking for a
CMS here, none of the commercial ones had all the features we needed
(and the list of needed features keeps growing as more people start
using it) - we ended up building our own.

If you've got the programming skills and the time, I'd recommend that
- you can get exactly what you need, in theory. In practice the long
start-up time may be a killer; we were lucky in that the content
preparation also took a long time (and there was already an existing
site) so we had a good timescale to work in.

--
Chris