CMSFactor.com - Content Management System Information

Flashblog - Flash Blog Software

marcus — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 16:54:38 -0700

Flashblog is an open source php/Flash Content Management System geared towards blogging, though it could be used for any simple Flash website. The admin interface is done in PHP while the entire front-end is Flash.

The web interface is very simple to modify. There is a single Flash file that contains all the assets needed. Customizing the site is fairly simple as well--as long as you're familar with Flash, it's just a matter of drawing and moving things around where you'd like to place them. No HTML coding needed.

There are a couple downsides--for one, it's all in Spanish--unless you speak some Spanish it might be a little difficult to get installed the first time around. The second is that it's been quite some time since the site was updated, indiciating that development has, in all likelyhood, stopped--at least for now.

One of the most compelling things about Flashblog is that it could be used as a template for any Flash/PHP website. You have the .fla, the ActionScript and PHP all there for you--once you're able to understand that code, you're well on your way to creating your own customized content management system.

While it's definitely a shame that it's not under active development, it's a great open source project that is being used on several live websites.

Ozimodo - The Tumblelogging CMS

marcus — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 18:14:00 -0700

First of all, a definition of Tumblelogging from Ozimodo's website

Tumblelogs are quick-and-dirty. They are loosely structured and used to share various iotas of interest. Throw a link log, a moblog, a quote blog, and a code blog (colog? quoblog?) into a blender and out pops a delicious, fat free tumblelog.

My personal favorite example of a tumblelog is Projectionist and there's the site of the creator of Ozimodo (Chris Wanstrath). There are many others out there.

On to the CMS. Without waxing too wordy about what CMS for tumblelogging should do, I'll provide a quick list and say that Ozimodo does what it should do well.

Post types - this is the key difference between blogging and tumblelogging. With a blog all posts are, well, posts. With a tumblelog, a post could be a photo, a quote, some code, IRC or IM snippets or anything else you can imagine. This is handled nicely in Ozimodo.
Tags - it has tags.
Flexible templates - If you're going to do much customization of your Tumblelog, you'll definitely need to know some HTML and it would be nice to understand a teeny bit of Ruby to use the rhtml templates. None of the configuration for Ozimodo is done in the admin interface, it's all handled with .rhtml template files.

Ozimodo is written in Ruby on Rails and, like pretty much every Ruby on Rails app it is simple to install. The process is download, create empty database, edit 2 lines in config/database.yml, type 'rake migrate' and you're done.

Attached to this article are several screenshots of Ozimdo in action, including the admin interface. It comes highly recommended as a good (and the only) niche CMS created for Tumblelogging.

Attachment	Size
ozimodo_default_template.png	109.02 KB
ozimodo_admin_screen.png	33.5 KB
ozimodo_new_post.png	34.52 KB

Eribium Review - A New Rails CMS

marcus — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 17:05:11 -0700

Eribium has been out for a very short time--as of this writing there have been under 250 downloads, but already looks like a promising option as a CMS for fairly simple websites. In general, Eribium can create pages based on a global template and handles uploads and file attachements nicely.

Where Eribium really shines are in the design--it's very polished, the admin looks great and the default themes (ported from Typo) are also very nice. It also does a really good job with the details. Check out the screenshots attached to this article for some visuals, but to list them, some of the coolest parts of Eribium are:

Spell check - a la Gmail. Inline, preconfigured and very nice.
Good control over feeds
Have I mentioned it looks good yet? Well, it does.
Tagging
Nice use of Ajax in a few key areas.

The installation was painless. On a server that was already running Rails 1.1 it took me less than five minutes from start to finish to get it running. The steps are (like most Ruby on Rails applications) download, extract, create empty database, run rake migrate and you're done.

If you're looking for a powerful CMS, this probably isn't the best choice yet, but for a simple site Eribium is worth a look.

Attachment	Size
eribium1presentation.jpg	161.92 KB
eribium2spellcheck.jpg	123.41 KB
eribium3export.jpg	101.69 KB
eribium4feeds.jpg	119.48 KB
eribium5overlay.jpg	117.13 KB
eribium6dashboard.jpg	215.27 KB

Showcase

marcus — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 18:30:25 -0700

Something I've debated is whether to use an all-in-one CMS and customize it to do everything or to find (or write) a CMS that was created specifically for the task at hand. Showcase, written by Kyle Maxwell in Ruby on Rails, is one of the latter--it does an excellent job at what it was intended to be, a CMS to manage a portfolio.

Click here to view a screenshot of the Showcase admin interface

The Showcase admin allows you to manage several things, the name, subtitle, stylesheet, JavaScript behavior of your websites, as well as the users, pages and projects (both of of these sections can be renamed) and files attached to the site. Within a specific project, you can edit the name, description, version, thumbnails and attachments associated with the project. The admin interface makes use of Ajax in all the right places--editing and adding to the site is simple and fun.

Once you've got your data in there, Showcase produces an entirely unstyled site--it's up to you to create the CSS and there's no default template. While I think a default template or style would be nice, it's really not a bad idea not to have one--this guarantees that every Showcase site will look different.

Installation is very straightforward if you have Rails set up on your server. Basically you check it out of svn, create a database, tell showcase what it's called, type rake migrate and you're done. One caveat is that at the time of this writing Showcase requires Rails 1.0 (not 1.1) so make sure you freeze Rails 1.0 in vendor/rails.

If you're looking for a good, free CMS to manage your portfolio and don't mind writing a little CSS, check out Showcase.

Run Your Own Digg with Meneame, Pligg or DiggClone

marcus — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 04:04:18 -0700

Digg is cool. There is no denying it. It's so cool that you might have thought at one point of running your own Digg-like website. Think about it no more! There are at least three ways for you to run a Digg like site without writing a line of code:

1. First there's Meneame, the source code is commented in Spanish so it may help to speak a little, but you can clearly see that it works by the heavily trafficked production version of the site.

2. Only speak English? There's Pligg which is a branch of Meneame translated and has an active community behind it.

3. DiggClone I haven't tried or seen this one in action and I doubt it's under active development, but if the above two don't work for you, it might be worth checking out.

Drupal 4.7 Looks REALLY Good

marcus — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 17:12:53 -0700

Drupal 4.7 RC1 is released and you're looking at it! The upgrade from 4.6 couldn't have been easier--delete the old files, insert the new files, run an upgrade script, update modules and done. It took me about 15 minutes on this site. I have a few other Drupal sites that use modules that haven't been released for 4.7 yet so I'll probably wait on those.

What's new in Drupal 4.7? Here are the changes from the changelog that I thought were most interesting (my comments in red)

added free tagging support. woohoo!
added a site-wide contact form.
added the PHPTemplate theme engine
reworked the 'request new password' functionality.
reworked the node and comment edit forms These are much nicer now!
made it easy to add nodes to the navigation menu.
added site 'offline for maintenance' feature.
added support for auto-complete forms (AJAX).
added support for collapsible page sections (JS).
added support for resizable text fields (JS).
improved file upload functionality (AJAX).
made it possible to alter, extend or theme forms.
added support for "mass comment operations" to ease repetitive tasks.
reworked the revision functionality.
added a block to display author information along with posts.
added support for private profile fields.
added the ability to track page generation times.
made it possible to block certain IPs/hostnames.
added support for theme-specific block regions.
made the aggregator module parse Atom feeds.
made the aggregator generate RSS feeds.
added RSS feed settings.
added 'loose caching' option for high-traffic sites.
improved performance of path aliasing.
made indexer smarter and more robust. Nice. This needed major work.
added advanced search operators (e.g. phrase, node type, ...).
added customizable result ranking.

Over all a huge release with alot of features that have been much anticipated. I'd say that this release probably should have been Drupal 5.

Blogtorrent Initial Impressions

marcus — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 03:45:42 -0700

Yesterday I was given the opportunity to host a full length longboarding movie on Silverfish Longboarding. The site has a pretty huge bandwidth allotment, but it became clear after a few hours that it wasn't going to be enough. Before long, 250gb had been sucked down and the server was crawling.

In an effort to provide a better download experience, I decided that bittorrent¹ was going to be necessary to do the job. I've never seeded a torrent, but I remembered having seen Blogtorrent. I checked out their site, downloaded the software and began to install it. Literally (I can tell by timestamps on my forum posts) 10 minutes later the Blogtorrent site was up and running and the torrent was being seeded. You can see the results here.

I recommend the free, open source Blogtorrent to anyone looking for a simple way to host a bittorrent. It even comes with a Mac and PC Bittorent client for users to download. It couldn't be easier.

¹ Bittorrent is a way of distributing a file across several computers so each is constantly uploading and downloading--effectively sharing the bandwidth load.

PHPList Mini-Review

marcus — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 02:53:00 -0700

PHPList is a free mailing list/newsletter software written (not surprisingly) in PHP. I set it up for a company that has not yet launched--I wanted people to be able to sign up for a notification of the launch.

Installation - It wasn't too bad. PHPList assumes that you'll be installing it in the root directory of your site which I thought was a bit odd, but it wasn't too hard to get it to install elsewhere. The trick is to remember that the only folder that really matters is the "lists" folder, the rest don't necessarily have to be below your site root (although once you get it working, you should move them there, or remove them altogether).

Setup - Getting PHPList to recognize the Database and getting the first user entered was painless.

Configuration - Configuration wasn't as easy. Some of the config is done through the file inc/config.inc, some was done through a rather long configure page in the web interface. Most of the options were understandable, but I did find myself going back to that page to change things fairly often. I think the configuration could be greatly simplified by splitting up these screens into several pages with related options.

List creation - Creating and configuring mailing lists was fairly painless as well. The feeling I got was that the software lets you do the same thing in multiple places and that the workflow was difficult to follow. After doing it a couple times I began to get the feel for it.

Customization - Making HTML emails and text emails is no problem, nor is changing the look of the subscribe pages.

Looking over the above, I think that what isn't conveyed is that this software isn't something that you'll have set up and running in an hour. Expect to spend about 3-4 hours minimum the first time around. From there, creating lists, email and managing users is a breeze.

Downsides - I realize this is free, open source software released under the GPL. No one is making money off it. That having been said, my biggest problem with PHPList is that there are "Powered by" notices everywhere. They appear on subscribe/unsubscribe pages, in the meta tags and essentially every place the user could possibly view. I've got no problem with giving some credit, but this time I found it a little overwhelming. I spent quite a bit of time toning down the "Powered by" notices. I'd suggest making them a little less obvious and ubiquitous by default and if people choose to do so, let them remove them. Most people will probably choose to leave the credits.

Upsides - It's free. It's fully featured--I didn't find any feature that I saw in other mailing lists/newsletter software missing here. Kudos to the author - Michiel Dethmers for doing such a great job and releasing it as open source.

I'd recommend PHPList if you've got some time to spare to learn the interface and experience in setting up PHP scripts on the server. It's not simple, but it's the most powerful open source/free newsletter management software available (that I know of), matching (and often exceeding) many of the features of commercial mailing list solutions I investigated.

Tumblelogging

marcus — Sun, 11 Sep 2005 18:38:56 -0700

Tonight I discovered the name for what I like so much here: Projectionist. It's a Tumblelog. As I predicted on Best Tool For the Job (my personal blog), I bet this trend will go crazy soon. Very cool.

Is it Perl or is it Just Me?

marcus — Thu, 08 Sep 2005 06:07:23 -0700

A lesson that I've learned after installing many content management systems is that me and Perl (a programming language) don't get along well. I've found that web applications written in Perl have two characteristics

They're usually the most powerful and full-featured and
They're the hardest to install and keep running right.

Examples:

Twiki - If you're looking for a Wiki that does it all and does it extremely well, look no further than Twiki, billed as "an Enterprise Collaboration Platform" it lives up to its title. Installing it however took me 2-4 hours a day for a solid week. I kept thinking it was good to go, then I'd start using it and yet another problem would show up. It was a seemingly endless cycle of tinkering, asking questions and trying anything I could think of. Apparently there are people who can get it up and running solidly since Yahoo!, Cingular, Disney and Motorola have all found uses for it.

WebGUI - I mentioned WebGUI recently, so I won't go on too much about it, but it's powerful. Templating in WebGUI is phenomenal, asset management and user managment are as well. Installing and upgrading it are surprisingly difficult. WebGUI taught me to hate CPAN (an archive of Perl code libraries)--they rarely seemed to install correctly and I don't know enough about Perl to intuitively know why. I've spent dozens of hours reading documentation and compiling Perl libraries trying to get WebGUI going correctly. In the end, it was worth it but really... there has to be a better way.

MovableType - I actually can't complain too much about the popular blog software MovableType, but it is much more difficult to install than WordPress in my experience. Once it's up and running it's excellent.

Interchange - Interchange is "an open source alternative to commercial commerce servers and application server/component applications"--basically an ecommerce platform. I installed it once on RedHat 9 and it took all day one day and part of another. Once it's up, it's solid and powerful but good luck getting it running.

Maybe you're thinking--"you just don't know Perl or Linux." Maybe you're right, I have no idea, but I do know that I can get pretty much any PHP or Ruby application installed in under an hour. But even after a couple years of experience, Perl still seems to require at least a couple days of my time pecking away in the "black box" of the terminal before any magic happens.