[opencms-dev] Getting Started

[M Butcher]

Bob,

OpenCms is a content management system. Essentially, it is a tool to 
manage the process of creating and publishing documents. It focuses on 
workflow, the editial process, project management... the sorts of things 
you would need if you had a full editorial team. While many users on 
this list use OpenCms (successfully) for small sites with only one or 
two editors/writers, it is really designed for a larger content team.

It is not necessarily a portal app such as Xoops or PHPNuke. Those 
applications are intended to create quick-and-easy websites loaded with 
generic features. They tend to focus on delivering lots of functionality 
with little or no effort, but (in my experience, at least), they aren't 
focused on the needs of an entire editorial team. They are _portal_ 
apps, not _content management_ apps.

I hope that helps to clear up the general picture.

That said, there are a number of add-on modules available for OpenCms 
(including an HTML import module for uploading existing sites). You can 
take a look at the ones available on the official opencms.org website, 
and you can search this mailing list archive to see others. Many of them 
will require at least some familiarity with JSP technology -- in fact, 
to really make use of OpenCms, you should have some knowledge of JSP. 
But I wouldn't say you need to be a Java guru to use the application, 
and there are some good tutorial modules available at the OpenCms website.

Hope that helps,

Matt

Bob Cohen wrote:
> I'm sure you've heard these questions a thousand times before but . . .
> .  I'm a web designer who's tired of doing content updates for my
> clients.  OpenCMS seems like a good platform to help with this.  The
> problem is: I'm not a programmer and I can't seem to find a way in to
> OpenCMS that allows actually build a project.
> 
> E.g., I fooled with creating the standard "hello world" jsp page.  It
> worked.  I got an HTML form to display in another page.  But there's a
> huge gulf between "Hello World" and an input form that allows users to
> update and or add information on a particular web page.
> 
> By contrast, I've been looking at Xoops, which is a PHP/MySQL portal
> package.  It comes with a whole bunch of modules for setting up a
> ready-made portal, e.g., news, weblog, etc.  It allows me to design the
> look and feel of the site while delivering a database driven web site
> that's very rich in functionality, though somewhat clunky for my taste.
> Are there analogous OpenSource (aka free) modules available under
> OpenCMS?  Is OpenCMS really more of a platform that assumes a programmer
> is involved?  Can I import an existing static HTML site into OpenCMS and
> set it up so that content is editable through the OpenCMS interface?
> 
> I'm staring at a blank wall here!
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Bob
> 
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