[opencms-dev] To the developer team of OpenCMS

[Dr. Michael Schäfer]

Thsi is to the developer team of OpenCMS!

I had to evaluate OpenCMS for a group of possible customers who need a CMS
for their web sites or, with a more approriate expression, web site systems,
because each of them is responsible for quite a number of domains with up to
20.000 pages.

I am very impressed by OpenCMS. It uses standard technologies like JAVA and
XML and seems to have a clear, well-formed structure. Especially the
increase of speed since 4.1.44 is amazing!

Nevertheless, there are a few crucial questions:

1. There is no time management for the pages. I can't tell the system that a
certain page is valid not before a certain date and only up to another date.
Would it be difficult to implement this feature and why was it not
implemented until now (it is a standard feature of most CM systems!)

2. The project cycle is very consistent - well! But is it really necessary
that a user who wants to do a small change on one little page has to go
through: Create a new project - lock the page - edit the page - unlock the
page - publish the project? Is there any possibility to give users a quick
way to edit a page directly in the online project - maybe with a
pseudo-project created and re-published in the background?

3. searching and indexing is very important for customers with big sites.
Are there any solutions for this problem at the moment? You write about some
search engines (e.g. Altavista) at opencms.com. Do you have experiences with
them?

4. documentation is really a problem! Even as an experienced programmer it
will take hours and days until you know who the system really works. There
should be a small guide that tells me where to find API-calls. I do not talk
about a sophisticated documentation, just a couple of professional hints
like: If you want to add features to the "administration" area, you
integrate it at xyz - you should be aware that ... The navigation API ist at
... and has the following features ... and so on. This should be work of one
or two days for somebody who really knows the system. But it would help
developers to find a reasonable way to create good and necessary extensions
for the system. I think this will be crucial for really establishing OpenCMS
in the market.


Thank you very much for answering this questions. I would really like to
support your great project!

Michael