[opencms-dev] Suitability of OpenCMS

[Seji Thomas]

Hi Matt,

Thanks for your detailed and useful comment. Infact we had done a
preliminary study of Vignette 5.x, Microsoft CMS, and OpenCMS. During the
study we listed out some 30 - 35 functionalities required of a CMS. More
than half the features are common among them. Vignette, and MCMS provide in
addition provides things like XML web services support, site
analytics(customer web site interaction, and usage), document management
etc.

What you have mentioned in the second para is true - developing web apps
using OpenCMS is faster. One can find modules developed in the Open Source
Community which can be adapted through modification to suffice application
needs, especially Lucene Search module, News and Weather modules. I have
downloaded the modules from http://opencms.al-arenal.de/ and need to
implement those. Finding a proper documentation for OpenCMS is very
difficult, but the development community mail group bridges this gap to some
extent.

Now the real challenge lies in bringing the client to confidence that
OpenCMS can serve their organizational needs. What I have observed with the
current application is that Vignette is an overkill for them both on
capability utilization, and cost front. I hope the application can be
redeveloped using OpenCMS.

One thing more I would like to know is whether OpenCMS API provides for any
Rich Text Editor that can be embedded on Browser, or is that feature if at
all available, a third party component.

Thanks,
Seji Thomas

----- Original Message -----
From: "M Butcher" <mbutcher at grcomputing.net>
To: <opencms-dev at opencms.org>
Sent: Tuesday, October 07, 2003 12:37 AM
Subject: Re: [opencms-dev] Suitability of OpenCMS


> Seji,
>
> OpenCMS is quite a bit different from Vignette, so a "line by line"
> comparison might not be the fairest way to approach the two. However,
> I'll try.
>
> First of all, OpenCMS is heavily optimized for Web content, which makes
> development time for Web apps faster than some of the other commercial
> CMS products I've used.
>
> Content Uploads:
> OpenCMS uses an XML format for much of its content. Most of the Web
> content is stored, managed and edited within the OpenCMS system (usually
> via the administration interface). Editors work directly on CMS content
> through their Web browsers.
>
> Uploads of other content is possible through a number of mechanisms. For
> the post part, though, external file formats (DOC, PDF, XLS) are simply
> treated as binary documents, and (aside from specifying metadata) not
> much is done with them. That said, there are a couple of reasources that
> the OpenCMS community has worked on to add on some capabilities (such as
> download catalogs and Lucene searching of PDF documents).
>
> Viewing/Uploading Content:
> OpenCMS handles files in a virtual file system (VFS), so navigating
> documents is done by clicking through a document hierarchy. There are
> also search tools to help editors find files.
>
> Site Searching:
> There are two or three (maybe more) modules to add searching
> capabilities to OpenCMS. Some provide search for published files, others
> search the CMS repository directly. All that I know of use optimized
> indexing as a method of searching (e.g. "periodic full text indexing").
> Again, searching generally only works for Web documents (and sometimes
> PDF), but AFAIK will not work on binary formats like Word and Excel.
>
> Scripting:
> OpenCMS uses JSP, XML Templates and Java classes to handle content. JSPs
> are probably the closest to TCL. OpenCMS is designed to be extended, and
> there are lots of ways to develop additional functionality. In the past,
> I've added on features to:
> - allow user registration over the web
> - integrate with third-party forums
> - add email notifications
> - search the repository
> - email web pages
> - integrate third party chat
>
> Others on the list have developed custom calendaring, news, article
> management, guestbook and weather modules which are available as Open
> Source modules.
>
> Any major CMS move will take time and resources, and data migration will
> be a big task. I don't know if OpenCMS will be much faster than others,
> but at least you have tools (and sourcecode) that will give a
> development team a leg up in expediting the process.
>
> Finally, In addition to the official website, you may want to look at
> http://opencms.al-arenal.de/ (a repository of additional modules and
> documents) and http://www.opencms-forum.de (the forums) for more info on
> the product and what people have done with it.
>
> Hope that helps.
>
> Matt
>
> On Sun, 2003-10-05 at 12:14, Seji Thomas wrote:
> > Hi All,
> >
> > I am having a web-site which is managed through Vignette Content
> > Management System 5.x. It has a content upload module through which
> > users of the system upload data to the system. The data may be text,
> > textfiles, pdfs, docs, spreadsheets etc. Apart from this there is
> > a content display module through which users can view content and
> > search for those uploaded items. The users can also subscribe for
> > various kind of mail alerts when a content of their choice gets
> > uploaded. The current system employs periodic full text indexing on
> > the database so as to speed up the search. The web-site also needs
> > search functionality - both static and dynamic content(dynamic
> > desirable).
> >
> > Vignette manages the site by way of running Tcl Scripts. How suitable
> > is OpenCMS for developing and managing a site of this stature? I have
> > mentioned only some of the major functions of the system. Since the
> > softwares currently used are costly and some of the aspects like full
> > text indexing has to be implemented more efficiently the site requires
> > a major revamp without loss of data.
> >
> > Any opinions on this will be highly regarded.
> >
> > Thanks in Advance,
> > Seji Thomas
> --
> M Butcher <mbutcher at grcomputing.net>
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