Feb 28
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!
February 28th, 2007 at 8:11 pm
Excellent quick comparison, thanks for doing the hard work in getting it all together. I’m now going to take a much more detailed look into Joomla for a CMS for an upcoming project.
March 1st, 2007 at 1:44 am
You forgot EE - http://expressionengine.com
It has the easiest template system I’ve found so far, especially when you find you can embed things.
You’ll have to pay for one of the licenses to get a forum/gallery module etc.
March 1st, 2007 at 7:19 am
[…] Cygon reviews 7 content management system. He quickly highlights the postives and negatives of each CMSs. As I would also agree with him Drupal seems to be excellent choice, but Themeing and Forums can see much more improvement. The next choice seems to be Joomla, but haven’t used it yet. […]
March 1st, 2007 at 8:25 am
And there I was under the impression I had written more of a rant than a review
My personal top three would be Drupal, Xaraya and Joomla, in that order!
March 1st, 2007 at 9:45 am
Nice walkthrough. Some of them seems like you know them more and your observations on them seems on the spot. Others looks like you didnt try them out.
Your TYPO3 observations: I couldn’t have said it better.
About Joomla, Xaraya and Drubal, Exponent - I’ll have to take your word for it :o)
About Umbraco - this is where you took a wrong turn .o) It’s especially great at dynamic content. It’s engine does perfect mashup of any xml ressource and others need some work. And the way Exponent lets you use widgets - it’s just called macro’s in Umbraco. It’s got a great api.
I’ve used it for many intranets. All you need to know is XSLT (and not some homebrew scripting language).
You’ll need to try it out once more :o)
Kindly,
Jesper
March 1st, 2007 at 10:51 am
[…] In it’s (Umbraco) current state, it’s only really suited for a mostly static site […]
You might want to spend a little more time testing Umbraco. There is in fact a working webshop pluging in beta at the moment, and I do believe a forum package is on it’s way too.
One of the things that amazed me when I first started developing sites in Umbraco was it’s incredible flexibility when it comes to expanding it, and the speed with which you can create new and advanced functionality without having to dig into some kind of code.
Plus how often is it you see such a rare things a an open source CMS developed in .NET?
March 1st, 2007 at 1:36 pm
Looks like I did umbraco unjust. I thought it was limited to defining content types and setting up some .xslts for skinning.
Back when I tested it, I didn’t quite understand how it’s supposed to be used. I just watched the demo movies on the Umbraco site, and it appears that you’re absolutely right. I’ll take a another, closer look at it asap!
March 1st, 2007 at 2:40 pm
If you need some help during the Umbraco testing, theres a whole community waiting to help you out over at http://forum.umbraco.org/ - happy testing! =)
March 1st, 2007 at 5:58 pm
Just an FYI with drupal. You aren’t stuck with a fixed set of regions and you don’t have to make your own engine to have your own set of regions.
In a themes template.php file (for PHPTemplate themes) you can setup custom regions for that theme fairly easily. The documentation is in the handbook at http://drupal.org/node/29139
March 1st, 2007 at 7:37 pm
if you are looking for extensibility and complete design frreedom, UMBRACO is definitely your answer. On initial install (which takes all of 3 minutes) you may find yourself wondering where to start, but that in itself is where the beauty lies!
css management separate from template management, separate from documentType Management and a simple scripting language to manipulate an engine that creates easliy modified xml output… it is a dream come true.
the folders and files metaphore of the admin really eases the learning curve for clients to begin managing their own content. I would defefinitely have to say that this CMS has definitely arrived.
part of me wishes it would stay a secret, but another part of me can’t wait to see it all over the place:)
Great roundup of the who’s who in CMS for the ‘every-man’!
March 3rd, 2007 at 11:01 pm
I have seen your walkthrough about the different product. I can accept some of your observations, but others looks like you didnt try them out enough.
My personal view about Umbraco - We have been using the product to build our website in the last year and the product have been going on a steady curve in the best way.
We have been able to build a worldclass website running 8 different languages and integrated a very nice e-shop solution with the product.
The benifit of the product is the flexible standard components combined with the standard .net features.
You will also in the next version be able to direct send pages to translation and get the result back and put the translated text directly into the system with out any hard word on importing content.
I hope you will look at this product again with more clear eye.
Your faitfully
Gert Abildskov
Hasselblad.com
You’ll need to try it out once more )
Kindly,
Jesper
March 19th, 2007 at 6:41 pm
I jsut read your “rant” regarding Xaraya…
I’t’s funny really - a year and a half ago I was in the same shoes - scouting around for a CMS that would fit the bill for most things.
Strange thing is, I found Xaraya to be the only one that suited.
It’s hard work, damned scary and blatantly misleading in regards to certain things… not aimed for the faint of heart, the un-imaginitive or those that want something quick.
That said, I’ve built Sailing sites, estate agent sites, normal little business sites… all on the same system - not one is table based, or looks the same.
It may have it’s faults - but after a bit of time, effort, care and thought (plus large amounts of swearing, cursing and having gibbering fits in the corner)… the system does what you need, when you need it and exactly how you want it.
You can bend Xaraya around your little figure without php, and it generally validates itself too (which I’ve noticed some others fail on dismally).
To understand and apply any CMS system, in my view, requires ateleast either 6 Months of usage, or 10+ sites built on it.
I hope no offence of criticism is taken from this observation, but to create a fair view point, you would have to build the same 10 sites (or spend 6 Months), with each CMS.
Otherwise it’s which ever one suited you as a person… I cannot stand Joomla - doesn’t mean to say it’s a bad CMS… it’s great for little things etc., but I couldn’t dream of building a full on businss file management and accounts system with it!
So please, be a little more thoughtful when criticising… as it may not be the CMS at fault
(Note, this coming from a guy who spent 10 days wanting to cry because he missed a blatant link on a mambo site!)
March 19th, 2007 at 6:48 pm
… just to clarify (after reading what I posted!)…
Please don’t missunderstand the “rant” … thats your own words
Also, others, please don’t take the description of Xaraya being
“It’s hard work, damned scary and blatantly misleading in regards to certain things… not aimed for the faint of heart, the un-imaginitive or those that want something quick.”
“It may have it’s faults - but after a bit of time, effort, care and thought (plus large amounts of swearing, cursing and having gibbering fits in the corner)… ”
… literal - I’m not a programmer, and never dealt with MYSQL etc before trying CMS… I got in the same state with ALL the CMS’s I tried
March 19th, 2007 at 7:43 pm
@Autocrat: I tried to be thoughtful with any point of criticism I’ve given. But after all, it’s just a brainstorming of what finally made me move away from any given CMS. Maybe I should have clarified that in the beginning.
As for Xaraya, I’ve been toying around with it since the 0.9.something betas and I think my points are very valid. To make the categories refinement system suit my tastes, I would have to modify it, something not so easily done for such a central module. And SEF URLs simply are not foreseen in the Xaraya architecture, I would practically have to fork Xaraya’s codebase to properly implement that. Thus, Xaraya’s architecture is “flawed” from my point of view.
I’m not arguing that you couldn’t build the same fancy, strict validating, web 2.0 page with any of these systems. And I’m also not looking for the easiest way out, being a software architect, I am looking for something elegant in the style of Ruby on Rails (Ruby), the Castle Project (C#) or Symfony Web Framework (PHP). But it appears nobody has dared to pick up the design principles of these frameworks and built a CMS on them so far…
Well, I’ve still got Umbraco on my TODO list and I’ve got the feeling it might just be the exact tool I’m looking for.
April 11th, 2007 at 4:10 pm
Get a clue.
April 11th, 2007 at 7:22 pm
Start thinking instead of just jumping the bandwagon.
April 14th, 2007 at 12:47 pm
“Start thinking instead of just jumping the bandwagon.”
..
“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…”
Start looking at files and not making assumptions.
a) Most of the stuff in the root is legacy stuff which is being removed, not everybody has apache so you can’t just mod_rewrite it.
b) e107 has one of the best security records in PHP OSS CMS-land, and it’s not for people trying, better than Joomla by a long way, even though e107 has a comparable install base.
c) No classes? look in e107_handlers, even if e107 wasn’t 95% OO code, wth difference does it make? Drupal wouldn’t know OO code if it was bitchslapped by it, yet gets a clean bill of health.
Like I said, get a clue, actually bother to look at stuff before you comment.
April 14th, 2007 at 5:16 pm
Thanks, that’s criticism I can accept. As I said before, maybe I shouldn’t have used the word “review” in the post’s title, because it’s merely a list of the those impressions that made me move away from one CMS and towards another.
Regarding E107, I actually took a closer look at the code and I honestly can’t say that evidence like hundreds of entry points (even if they aren’t in the root directory), code that looks like it just grew into place, a file named ‘class2.php’ with 1.5K lines of code and copied code blocks wherever I look (DRY principle, anyone?), in short, everything smelling like bad coding practices, would do anything to reinstate my belief in this CMS.
Sorry, I’m really willing to reconsider my opinion if it is unfounded, but E107 just doesn’t seem to be something I personally would bet my money on.
April 14th, 2007 at 5:47 pm
Nope, I happen to agree, I just wanted to point out that everything you originally said was baseless
e107 is most definately not without it’s problems, but a lack of OO? nah. It’s not insecure either, though no project is infaliable, the way e107 works makes it pretty hard to get anywhere with finding security holes because it doesn’t rely on things like reg globals and magic quotes, and there’s allot of other procedures in place to make it more secure than everything else.
April 16th, 2007 at 11:34 am
There’s always this OOP and that OOP. I view something as ‘being OOP’ when it makes good use of polymorphism, abstracts and generalizes common concepts and bases its architecture on design patterns. The understanding of OOP in E107 generally seems to be more along the lines of using classes to replace prefixes in function names.
Code-wise, I don’t see any particular security concept at all. Judging from the code quality, it’s hard for me to believe that this codebase should be less vulnerable than that of other well-known CMSs, or even be on par with them. A quick google for “E107 security” reveals several recent issues as well as cases where even the E107 site had to be taken down because of critical flaws.
I still don’t think my original post was baseless.
May 25th, 2007 at 8:24 pm
If you look at the frsirt and secunia security advisories you will see the latest is almost a year old. All of those listed have been taken care of even if the Dev team has not contacted the security sites to alert them of that.
E107 was chosen as one of the top 5 cms’s available right alongside Joomla and Drupal in the PAKTC publishing contest which was judged by some of the best people in the industry. I remember one of the judges saying he felt that e107 was good enough to be used for any purpose he might want to use a cms for.
True, E107 may not be coded they way you like to see things coded but that doesn’t make it bad.
Your comment about e107 reminds me of someone who sees a food he’s never tried before and declares that because it doesn’t look like food he’s eaten he doesn’t see how it could taste good.
Before you judge anything you should try it out first.
May 25th, 2007 at 11:34 pm
Maybe it tastes good - maybe E107 has a great interface, lots of useful modules and does exactly what I want. But as a matter of personal taste, I simply don’t want to judge a CMS purely by what I see in my web browser.
When I need to roll my own modules/extensions/plugins, I will inevitably come into contact with the code. Whether these guys use OOP or whether they do it the procedural style is a matter of taste, agreed, but what I see in there is plain and simple bad coding.
I personally set code quality as top priority. And if, in the future, I can find the time, I will readily dump Drupal and roll my own website CMS using Ruby on Rails, Symfony or Monorail - or possibly Umbraco, if it some day runs on Linux.
–
I admit that I haven’t checked the security thing thoroughly enough. A quick google “e107 vulnerabilities” brought up lots of reports, but you’re right, I can’t find anything that has happened in the last 12 months. Looks like it has been reviewed and debugged so thoroughly it works as it should and is secure. That means it’s a fine choice for people trying to simply run a web site.
Just once more, this was never meant to be an objective review. It’s a list of reasons right out of my head why I dumped some CMSs and took a closer look as others, nothing more. The post title is badly chosen
July 11th, 2007 at 11:31 pm
Djeezz, a nuke review of TYPO3! What would be the reason I am in love with TYPO3 for like seven years and being really involved in the TYPO3 community for so long? It is because I like the tutorials of a danish guy called Kasper who built this system. Who gives a fuck about an accent or the way he is dressed? Sorry, but your review seems very very shortsighted. This is a framework that I have used to build sites for a huge university and a union each having like over 20 subsites and have a huge amount of backend and frontend users. Owww I am sorry you want a click and go system
Then use Drupal, Joomla or whatever and build your tiny website. If you want Enterprise Content Management you will have to put some effort into that.
gRTz
ben
July 12th, 2007 at 7:50 am
Let’s just say it smelled so bad I didn’t like it. If the author doesn’t have a feel for what usability means I tend to assume everything else is made in a likewise manner (yeah, always these assumptions!) And that it still needs that obscure far-outdated imaging library to work properly doesn’t speak for it being a modern and agile project in my eyes.
I know Typo3 is being used for professional sites and that there have been several books written about it, but as you said, I’m just building a tiny website and don’t want to invest that kind of time.
If I actually were willing to spend months building a site, I’d still prefer a modern CMS that’s suited for agile development like Ruby on Rails, Mojavi or Symfony. I think Typo3 just doesn’t match up with me, I can’t see an elegant architecture, something like a driving idea or even just a solid framework in it.
October 16th, 2008 at 11:07 pm
[…] by: Cygon @ http://cygon.nuclex.org/2007/02/28/another-cms-review/ […]