Adventures in Open Source – CMS Systems

It’s been a long time since my initial flurry of posts and a lot of new things have come along, uncommented upon.  No more.

One of the big new things for me is Joomla. In case you don’t know already, Joomla is an Open Source Web content management system (CMS) written in PHP and using a mysql database (also open source).  The natural home is on some Linux server using a standard LAMP stack (Linux, Apache web server, MySQL and PHP), though it’s pretty straightforward to host it on a windows server too if you had too.

Content Management Systems (CMS) In the old days, anyone wanting to publish to the web had to learn HTML, then figure out how to create content with the right mark-up to fit in with whatever web site style conventions were in place, add the necessary navigational links etc.  This was great for the few people who could do it well, but created an unsurmountable barrier to entry for non-geeks – writers and others generally more skilled at creating something worth reading.  In the simplest sense, this is the role of the CMS – let writers write and let designers/programmers design and program – oh frabjous joy!.  Being a geek myself, another feature that really floats my boat is that in publishing content, the author gets to specify how long it should remain.  No more publicity for passed events.

There are a number of competing CMS’s out there.  Choosing any one is a little like getting married – you will make a huge investment in learning time and content development for better or worse.  In general, there is no easy way to move content from one system to another so you’d better get it right first time.   In Windows land, the big hitters are all super-expensive commercial systems – there are some open source and/or shareware systems but the user base is so very, very tiny that it would be risky to bet the farm on any of them.  In the Linux tent though, there are some very well established competing systems – each with certain advantages and disadvantages.  And a dedicated set of advocates for each.  Ignoring the little guys, the three big boys are Joomla (formerly Mambo), Drupal (I love these names) and Wordpress.

Wordpress.  Clearly the king in terms of number of installation, Wordpress was originally focussed on blog creation where it excells (This blog is managed by a Wordpress installation on a shared linux host – I spent no more than 15 minutes getting everything setup from scratch before posting real content – Brilliant).  Apparently, Wordpress can do much more than simple blogs, but it is so well entrenched in this area of excellence that few people use it for anything significantly beyond the core blog area.

Drupal.  This is the new kid on the block, and seing as how young the block itself is, this means very new.  (Correction – I imagined that the low-adoption rate of Drupal was because it is so new, but it turns out Drupal has been around longer than any of the others – it’s just growing steadily while the others have taken off like a rocket) From what I’ve read, Drupal is faster and cleaner than the existing versions of Joomla, but has a much steeper learning curve for administrators and designers.   This seems to agree with my experience, having gained some experience with the older Joomla, the install process for Drupal was equally simple, but from there on, I had no clear way of adapting it to my needs.  There were relatively few add-on components and few resources on the web for wuestions any newbie (such as myself0 would have.  By contrast, Joomla has an enormous following, matched by the thousands of open source components and templates writtent to work with it.  Almost any problem can be solved with a simple Google search as there are literally thousands and thousands of people who have run into whatever situation you might find yourself in.  It’s nice not to be alone.

Joomla. I have to confess a bias in all this – Joomla was the first and only real full-function CMS that I have had to work with, and it works so well that I haven’t given the others as much attention.  Sorry for the bias – blame history.

Joomla was developed as a split-off from the simpler Mambo CMS which I’m told is still being developed and has it’s band of dedicated followers.  The first version of Joomla was so similar to Mambo, that all the extension components for Mambo worked on Joomla too – this was a great advantage, helping Joomla hit the road with a much enhanced set of capabilities beyond the core functions that come is Joomla itself.  After a short while though, shortcoming in the API became a problem so a near complete re-write was produced and remain (at least for the time being) the standard for today.  This new version (Joomla 1.5) came with an optional system::legacy plugin, providing a n API bridge so that components written for the original version of Joomla would still work under Joomla 1.5.  For majority of compnents, this wedge worked well enough, still most compnents have been re-written to use the native Joomla 1.5 API.

Nevertheless, there are many thousands of open source components available for Joomla, something no other CMS can boast.  And the number of developers, designers and writers practiced on Joomla so far outstrips the other CMSs as to make Joomla THE dominant CMS with an ongoing level of investment unmatchable by any other system commercial or open source.

I’ve been writing and maintaining components for Joomla 1.0 and more recently for Joomla 1.5 which, once the initial learning curve has been reached seem simple and efficient to adapt to just about any purpose.

I did a Google trend search (this is the subject of another post, but if you don’t know about Google trends – check it out now).