CMS alternatives: low-cost tools bring high-end results
Christopher Fuller
Published: 06 May 2003 15:09 BST
If you're in the market for a CMS that will specifically be used to make updates to your company Web site or intranet, Cofax is a good place to start. Although it lacks the advanced document management capabilities of many high-end enterprise management systems, it's simple to install and its browser-based interface is easy to use for non-technical employees who need to manage content on your site. Screenshots, documentation, and examples of live sites powered by Cofax are available on the product's Web site.
Aegir CMS
Aegir CMS is an open-source project that's based on the Midgard application framework and written to run on Apache. Like Cofax, Aegir is focused specifically on managing Web-based content, though the underlying framework will provide you with greater capabilities should you decide to get under the hood to do some extra development. To that end, Aegir is written in PHP, so support for extending its capabilities is widely available. Aegir's one major downside is its dependence on a Linux/Apache/MySQL environment.
If the lack of cross-platform support isn't a problem for you, Aegir provides a good range of features out of the box, including a Microsoft-compatible in-browser content editor (popular with end users), workflow management, and site architecture management. This last feature, combined with Aegir's PHP source, makes the product significantly more flexible than Cofax, because you can expose the architecture of your site to developers and the content to content managers, all within the context of the CMS. Since Aegir is template-based, designers also get to have input through the CMS. In addition to a number of commercial sites, Aegir also powers the Open Source Content Management project.
Zope
If you're in the market for something more robust, you may want to take a look at Zope, an open-source, object-oriented application server written in Python and C. It runs on most platforms, including a variety of flavours of UNIX and Linux, and Windows.
Unlike Cofax and Aegir, Zope will provide you with a complete extensible application framework, in the context of which you can build not only a CMS for your Web site or intranet, but also a document management system for all of your distributed and archived data.
Zope is run entirely through a browser-based interface, making it particularly easy for end users to create, edit, delete, publish, and move content from within a GUI that resembles a Windows Explorer interface. The familiar paradigm of files and folders in a directory structure means a minimum of training and support to get employees up and running, and the object-oriented nature of the application means development time is also cut.
The application server makes extensive use of Document Template Markup Language (DTML), which might take a bit of getting used to, but is fairly straightforward and ultimately separates data, function, and presentation so that many of the problems that developers commonly deal with -- including database connectivity, persistence, and security -- are eliminated. Zope is also well known for its tight security (another built-in function) and extensibility, as developers can create modules for handling just about any type of data management.
Other sources available
So now you're ready to dig in and get started with a content management system. Of course, these are just a few of many options available, and you may want to look at some of the more "traditional" enterprise CMS products such as Documentum, Vignette, or FatWire if your needs are greater. No matter which product you choose, it's important to stay focused on achieving your business goals and realise that the software package involved is only one (often small) part of the equation; research, planning, and communication with other departments are the true keys to success.
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