Cygon’s Blog

Some time ago, when I built my website (www.nuclex.org), I reviewed several content management systems (CMS) and finally decided to use drupal. Drupal has been nice, but there are still a lot of things (no good forum module or integration, breadcrumbs not working too well). Now I’ve got several other CMSs installed for testing and am thinking about whether to switch to one of them.

Xaraya

• A CMS should be intuitive to use. The entire navigation of a Xaraya site (prime examples are the articles by category view and the category refinement system) always hits the most undesirable, hard-to-understand way to present things with surprising accuracy. Just visit xaraya.org and try to get a clear grasp of the site’s structure for a start.
• Things like a module that provides downloads to the user being called the ‘uploads’ module further instill my awe at how efficient the developers are at breaking with conventions and doing things in the most unexpected way.
• Really bad SEF URL system. For once, there is no way to map an arbitrary URL to a page (which would make switching CMSs easier; see Drupal’s url_alias module; optimally each alias URL should have an option to report http 302 page moved to the user). The SEF URL path is hardcoded, you would have to modify your Xaraya distribution to get URLs like “news/2007/2/25/page-title”. SEF URLs are the responsibility of each module on its own, so the xarbb (forum) module will have your forums appear as “forum/category/c23″ and you can’t do a thing about it. The XLink module’s functionality is very limited. You can not make a short url actually become the url of a page, it’s just an alias for it and whereever the page is mentioned, you’ll probably see the old-style URL again (so you can be sure people linking to your page will probably use cryptic URLs)

Drupal

• The template system is too inflexible. All drupal themes have to provide a fixed set of regions: header, left_sidebar, right_sidebar, content and footer. You can change this by creating your own template engine for drupal, but then you’re responsible for maintaining it in and upgrading it to future versions.
• Drupal is much too lightweight. Being lightweight is not a bad thing in itself, of course, but drupal just doesn’t provide a robust framework. For example, there’s still no established way to handle files in drupal. One module allows you to attach files to articles that will all be stored in one directory when they’re uploaded, another will create per-user directories for the user’s avatar pictures, yet another will use a third scheme for storing images that are embedded in an article.
• There is no usable forum module in drupal. The forum provided by drupal looks unattractive and offers only the most basic functionality. You will have a hard time growing a community when people are appalled by your discussion area. Integration of external forums is also cumbersome most of the time.
• The url_alias module of drupal allows you to let any arbitrary URL point to any location in your page. This is outstanding. You can migrate from any other CMS with SEF URLs and just keep your old URLs working for search engines and other people linking to you. Even better, the first URL alias you assign to a page actually becomes the main URL for that page throughout the site.

Joomla

• The are no hierarchical categories in Joomla. Your site has sections and your sections have categories. That’s it. Two fixed levels. Well, the truth is that actually, most of the time, you don’t need more than that.
• Has a very professional appearance. New versions aren’t release nearly as often as for other CMSs, so you have much less trouble with outdated modules, not working templates and such. Plus, this kind of stability has attracted many commercial developers, leading to a wealth of high quality modules for this CMS.
• Lots of themes. Also, as an effect of aforementioned stability, there are lots of sites providing well designed, professional looking themes.

E107

• Consisted of a long number of .php files in its root directory. No classes, smells like unorganized copy & paste giantism. I wonder how many security vulnerabilities are sitting in there. Get away already…

Typo3

• This one makes me want to puke. I’ve heard professionals are using this, but I cannot understand why. What trust should I put in a CMS that is impossible to get installed 100% working (you need an antique version of some discontinued PHP image module to get Typo’s image features working as they were intended to). There’s no clear concept visible in the way Typo organizes its pages. Its writer seems unable to speak proper english. Buttons with important functionality are placed in tiny what must be 8×8 pixel icons under gigantic text boxes. It’s got its own page scripting language, TypoScript, to artificially increase the learning curve.

Exponent

• This is a pretty exotic CMS. There’s no admin area, you just browse around your page and edit anything you want and create sub pages whereever you want. Don’t just think “wiki”, this is something more, read on:
• Instead of modules providing a rigid design, you design by yourself where specific functionality of your website appears. For example, in the typical CMS, the ‘forum’ module will have a page that displays the forum and that’s it. In Exponent, the ‘forum’ module is a widget that you can put anywhere on any page you want.
• The missing admin area is a bad thing for me. Larger sites need a place where you can do administrative tasks in an efficient manner and get an overview of things instead of browsing around your page looking for things to fix.

Umbraco

• Ajax in its purest form. It’s really fun creating pages in this environment. You’re presented with a nice, interactive view where you can set up your pages, write content (in a state-of-the-art wysiwyg editor of course) and manage your site.
• In it’s current state, it’s only really suited for a mostly static site you want to edit in your browser. It doesn’t offer the required functionality to set up a community site, web shop or other such things.

I think I’ll stay with drupal for now!