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April 14, 2005

Content Management

One of my consulting projects right now involves taking a sprawling, content-heavy Web site and bringing it out of 1998 and in to 2005. The site needs to be refreshed, reorganized, given a new look and feel, and a modern codebase. Part of this process involves replacing their current, static publishing approach with a content management system, or CMS. A CMS will allow them to do all their edits in the browser, make immediate changes to one file (which then propagates to all the relevant pages), and so on.

This blog uses Movable Type (a great, lightweight CMS that's perfect for ... weblogs). However, MT is too dinky for what we need to do here. So I spent my morning shopping for CMS applications, evaluating them against a list of criteria I'd developed to meet the client's needs.

Hoo, boy. It's a crazy market!

After poking around with about 20 different systems (everything from PhpWebSite to Midgard Project, Simian Satellite, WebEdition, Land Down Under, netEDITOR, TYPO3 and Nuke), I finally found a product that really curls my toes - eZ Publish.

Available under the GPL, this app is totally open - written in PHP, relies on a MySQL backend, Apache Web server, and UNIX underpinning (the current infrastructure is Solaris). It comes with source, so it can be modified from here to New Jersey. It makes extensive use of an object model for content, so we can use it to manage all kinds of different pieces of information. Its browser tools are cross-platform, so they will work on Macs and PCs, in both IE and Firefox.

So far, it's exceeding my expectations. (And it's by these folks in Norway! I have family in Norway! Connection? Hm ...)

Anyway, I'm so having an "I Love The Internet!" moment. Think about this. A small company in a foreign country is able to leverage a global network to distribute its product, add-on products, and even documentation (they have a book on Amazon, for cripes' sake).

Unbelievable. And so, so, so cool.

UPDATE, December 2, 2007: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer at April 14, 2005 6:37 PM. Posted to Geek.

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