[opencms-dev] Getting Started

[Bob Cohen]

> 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.

The application for which contemplating OpenCMS fits this to a "T."  I
live in New England and our local municipalites are governed by "town
meeting."  My town is having, how can I say this delicately,
difficulties sharing the information necessary to make informed
decisions about items on the Town Meeting Warrant.  My thought was to
set up something in OpenCMS that permitted people from the various
committees as well as the professional government staff to make their
information available to the public--painlessly and in a rational and
timely manner.  In addition, I'd like to create an additional forum for
debating the issues.  

That said, as designer, the site needs to have a consistent look and
feel.  I'm reluctant to set people loose with an HTML editor, however
intuitive.  My thought was to make the content contributions via forms
that feed templates which can be changed to suit design needs at a later
date.

I also want to offer many of the portal tools: in particular a
searchable local business database, classifieds, weblogs, all things to
more fully engage my community in all things local.

So is OpenCMS a reasonable platform to accomplish my goals?


> 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.

Right.  Except I'm not all that impressed with either beyond the fact
that they put one in the portal business after a few keystrokes.  As I
said, Xoops, and PHPNuke, now you mention it, are very clunky.

> I hope that helps to clear up the general picture.

Sort of.  So what you're saying is that you just allow content authors
use the word like editor to get their info up on the web in any way that
seem suitable to them, within the context of what the editor can do?

> 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.

That was my sense.

> 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.

I'll poke around the OpenCMS web site some more and see if I can't
stumble my way through learning JSP.

Thanks,
Bob