Content Management System

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Content Management Systems

A Content Management System (CMS) is a system used to organize and facilitate collaborative creation of documents and other content. It allows many people to directly contribute to maintaining a web site. See Wikipedia for more background.

The website CMS Matrix allows you to compare features on approximately 100 different CMS solutions. The "Search the Matrix" feature allows you to filter the list according to the features that you need for your site.

The website Open Source CMS Systems allows you to demo approximately 40 to 50 LAMP-based software packages. (LAMP means Linux Apache MySql Php - based).

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Plone

Cost: FREE: GPL license

Advantages: Easy to create events, news items, new documents, photos, and other files. It uses both HTML and an easy to use Structured Text for those who are unfamiliar with website design. Has many add-on products that extend features available. Very flexible security/permissions structure allows different people and groups in different roles to have control over different aspects of different parts of the site. Excellent standards compliance and accessibility. URLs are friendly to both users and search engines, rather than being littered with numbers and query strings. Supports syndication via RSS. Runs on Linux, Windows, Mac, BSD etc. Large developer community, and commercial support is available. Under the hood, uses modern object oriented programming concepts implemented in the delightful language Python.

Disadvantages:

• Uses Zope as the web server rather than or in combination with Apache. Steep learning curve for the webmaster. Resource-hungry on the server - requires over 75 MB RAM dedicated to your site which tends to cost from $15 to $40/month.

For more insights, see http://plone.org/documentation/faq/is-plone-for-me

Examples:

• Spindletop Unitarian Church
• Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Winston-Salem
• The Mountain Desert District of the UUA is developing their new site with plone.

To try it out, create your own free site at http://www.objectis.org/ or create your own account at a plone-based community site like http://plone.org/ For more flexible production hosting, you might look at http://zettai.net, http://interlix.com, http://quintagroup.com, or http://imeme.net.

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Drupal

Cost: FREE

Advantages: Not dissimilar to Plone but implemented in PHP. Is primarily intended for 'community' web sites where everyone in the community is contributing content (think Slashdot), but is probably well suited to doing a congregational web site as well. Easy to create news items, new documents, etc. Lots of additional modules available. Content can be written in HTML and structured text.

Disadvantages:

• Don't know yet...

Examples:

• Follen Church Society
• If you google "church drupal" you can also find quite a few churchs of other denominations using it.

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Mambo/Joomla

Cost: FREE

Notes: Mambo and Joomla share a common design heritage. In mid-2005 the Miro corporation set up a "Mambo Foundation" in an attempt to exert more control via their ownership of the trademark. This was strongly resisted by the Mambo developer community, which left en-masse and are continuing their development using the name "Joomla".

Advantages: Perhaps the most popular CMS. Developer community seems strong. Administration is done through a separate "back end" that avoids constraints of "front end" site visitor layout. Administration has a very approachable icon driven interface. Extensions are easily loaded remotely as the interface accepts compressed modules which it unpacks on the server after transfer. The programs popularity has resulted in good availability of extensions and experienced developers.

Disadvantages: The current 1.0 release is currently is in need of revision to achieve better compliance with w3c and accessibility standards. Improvements in these areas are a major goal of the version 1.5 release, however this is a major redesign with an uncertain release date. Due to the large amount of base design and extensions built outside of standards, it is not clear how readily or thoroughly the improvements will be achieved. Administration interface has been extended such that structure is not always clear and some functions lack the visual and logical clarity of the other sections.

Examples:

Mambo: 

• First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Ann Arbor

Joomla:

• The Church of the Younger Fellowship
• First Parish in Concord
• First Universalist Church of Rochester
• James Reeb Unitarian Universalist Congregation
• May Memorial Unitarian Universalist Society
• Southwestern Unitarian Universalist Conference Young Religious Unitarian Universalists (YRUU).
• Universalist Unitarian Church of Joliet

Contentor

Cost: FREE

Advantages: Contentor was designed for small to medium-sized web sites, typical of sites for/by small non-profit corporations or individuals. It was developed by a fellow UU, Earl Daniels.

Disdvantages: Unclear how much usage or support there is.

Examples:

• UUism.net

UU Template project

Cost: FREE

Advantages: Designed specifically for use by UU congregations with the purpose of creating new web sites for those that don't yet have one, but can also be used as add-on or in re-design. Supported by fellow UUs and there's an email list to communicate with other users.

Disdvantages: New as of May 2006; specs for future version being considered to improve it. Problems have been reported.

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