I dunno, I just want to be first

Well, their web page looks nice ...

/don't laugh, it can sway execs. in some companies!
:-)

Let's Mambo ;-)

JG

I'm sure it will good Charles - I'm looking forward to it.

Wish I was more of a computer geek too...

Ah, registration in exchange for a hot tip on CMS. Good idea, Charles. Does the winner get a free lgf t-shirt.

Interwoven is superb, but the Microsoft affiliation may not be to your liking.

Looks just a little pricey...

#3 Broomer

I agree, Mambo

Speaking not as a techie but as an end user who doesn't know what a "high-end professional content management system" is, my first thought is that there should be more contrast between the text and the background. Beyond that, Charles, if it's yours I'm there! 8^)

Hey everybody! I'm a new lizardoid! Yeah!

Praise be to Charles! Registration is open again.

Mambo's demo pages are currently disabled, unfortunately. What do you guys like about it?

Slashcode!

Welcome, JPS and rabidsquirrel!

Farsighted LGF to be on the leading edge facilitating Blogs who have difficulty taking a brake from their desktop addiction enabling washup-"Zope on a rope"

BTW Charles, it's good to see the occasional Web or other IT topic.

#11 rabidsquirrel
#10 JPS

Welcome

#14 and 17

Thanks for the hospitality. It's good to finally be able to post in the bastion of sanity and reason.

#18 rabidsquirrel

I remember when I first registered. It felt like had won a prize. I was taller and better looking all because I was a lizard.

Hah! Made it! I have read LGF since Charles was a Leftie, and I always seem to miss registration. I like to lurk, what can I say?

#18 jwbrown

I don't know about the taller and better looking part, but it does kind of feel as if I've won the lottery after lurking for so long without the ability to post. Wouldn't you know it, just when Charles opened up registration yesterday, my broadband cable connection was down.

#20 Stormy70

Welcome

Charles:

Check out [Link: sourceforge.net...] if it is a CMS and is Open Source, it is there along with reviews and instructions.

We have used Bricolage, and numerous others. Mambo is ok, really not that great. Drupal was interesting, and we have had some good luck with Metadot, though I suspect this is not along the lines of what you want. Zope/Plone was a nightmare (just try to turn it off ...). Xoops was ok, but again, looks like it requires simply too much work on our part.

Our customer facing site (not a media outlet) is done with Metadot. We build our applications on Mason (www.masonhq.com). Nothing against PHP, just we are more familar with Perl.

It is likely that something like Bricolage would be to your liking if you wanted a great deal of power and you wanted absolute control (e.g. you have to code it yourself) the template. It is done in Perl, so this may or may not be off-putting for you (as this is a PHP based site?)

Most of the PHP based systems imposed their own particular philosophies and were almost as configurable as we needed, but not quite ...

Metadot might not be what you want. It is based on Template Toolkit, and that makes it pretty easy to do things, but I think the user interface kinda sucks. It just is more configurable than the others, and sucks a little less than the others.

Plone is ... well ... you need to like Zope to like Plone, and you have to buy into what they are doing. It isn't really that great. Actually, it kinda sucks (from my perspective). Very hard to do basic things, complex things were for us, effectively impossible.

I haven't found the "perfect" CMS. Been looking for a while for something usable. We settled. Hopefully this will change for the better soon.

What do you guys like about it?

There's something quite glossy about Mambo.

/expert technical opinion

There are Mambo sites that you can take a look at though.

Porsche

Airline Pilot Central

MIO

to name a few.

#24 Yank in the EU

Simple answer "OPEN SOURCE"

Woot! I can comment again. =D Thanks Charles.

Someone told me the Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead was written about Ross Perot--does anyone know if that is true?

Charles,

Try it before you buy it.

#28 winry-chan

As I understand it, the song pre-dates is political adventures

Zope is expensive. Besides Mambo there is another decent open source choice, OpenCMS:

[Link: www.opencms.org...]

I'd test these two first (time permitting), before dropping that much coin!

Peter Pumpkinhead is not about Ross Perot, but about a fantasized leftist messiah of the socialist imagination, which habitually immamentizes the eschaton in just such a manner.

All your open registration are belong to us!

Hey, can any of you folks tell me why after about 400 comments I can't access the threads anymore?

Thanks

Check out opensourceCMS.com. It has myriad CMSes available for online demo (with user reviews). It also has them arranged in groupings of what might float your boat (ex. "Portals (CMS)," "e-Commerce," "Wiki," "blogs, " etc.). Definitely worth a look before committing to a commercial program.

Hey I googled PJ Media to look for the start up page and I get some euroweenies page. Whats up with that? And PJ Media Net is some fixit company.

Is it going to be Pajama Media? or PJ Media.

Either way, I know its going to really knock the MSM right out of the game.

Charles -

For something as big as you hope PJM might become the key factor is not the CMS per se, as you could roll your own, but the Database engine that you use as the back end. Oracle have a very good CMS, but it is pricey, but if you think that is the way you migt go in the future you should go for Postgresql over Mysql now, as the Postgres provides an easier upgrade path.

Vignette Story Server is used by most of the big sites like NYT, CNN etc. It has everything you want including configurable approval before publish and multiple publishing formats.

Very good, but very expensive.

1. Charles, thank you for what you do so well...

2. Sarah D., Thanks very much for the link to opensourcecms! I have never seen anything remotely like it before, and I think it is a superb idea. [I have phpBB2 on my home network, and know from experience that trying to administer a service like this is often the make-or-break issue.]

One more lurker checking in...

Duke

SW-Z4MP-220-BASE
Zope4Media [Print] Version 2.2.0 (One Processor, unlimited users/sites)
1CPU
$19,995

Ay Caramba! I presume this will be one of the major start-up costs of PM. That'd beter be some hella great software.

I do recommend that you request like a two-week tryout period to ensure that it meets your needs. Otherwise, You'll have committed to it, and if it doesn't work as advertised, then what?

#34 bangalore - there could be a number of reasons why you can't "go deep" - this happens to me once in a while, too.
Try this: if you have an anti-spyware program like Ad-Aware, run it; then delete your cookies and dump your cache and temporary files (and history) and re-boot and see if that works. Also check your anti-virus program and if you haven't scanned for a while, do so.
If that doesn't do it, you may need to disable whatever your firewall is.
realwest, technocrat (not!).

#34 bangalore (and realwest)

I seem to remember there was a browser related problem (Firefox) also. I never ran into it so I don't recall exactly what it was.

#42 ploome hineni

Oooo! Nice! Wish I could afford one - I could blog from bed. What a concept.

I'm not sure about the Dell site, but I'm sure Charles can find out now that you've pointed it out to him.

Stay away from Zope if you care about performance.

I had the misfortune to work on a zope based project one year ago. It was very slow, and the only way to get halfway decent performance out of it was to put a caching squid proxy in front of it. But that causes all kinds of problems with registered users and frankly is not very elegant.

The performance problems are not that grave if it is a relatively low traffic application. But the site I worked on will definitely go down the very moment some large site links to them.

I have nothing intelligent to offer except: this is my second post! Have been lurking for about a year and finally got up the nerve to register.

Maybe you can take anything Google throws out. It's cheap and should do the job.

I've never seen OpenSourceCMS either so I can't comment on it.

But I do have Zope experience. I used to use it in 2001 when it was first getting off the ground. The system is very powerful indeed, and very fast. I didn't look at this version of Zope, but Python is very easy to learn and extremely adaptable.

And another new lizardoid weighs in...

I haven't played too much with CMS, but I'm pretty sure nothing will be exactly what you want without a lot of customization -- so why not go full custom? A friend of mine who was helping develop a CMS package for a local conventional media outlet is now available to help as well, and he's positively itching to show up his old bosses; we both do custom work. Drop me a line if you want to talk about it.

Having spent three very long years reseaching, testing and procuring a CMS for a really big corporation (really big, like so big they use a smiley face in their logo), I went through about everything. My personal favorite was Documentum, ugly but very versatile and intuitive. Broadvision 1 to 1 isn't bad, but very expensive and more difficult to adapt. C.A. sucks.

As for open source, I don't like Mambo all that much but have had pretty good luck using PHPWebsite on different small projects.

#43 NTropy - Haven't seen bangalore since I taught him all I know about computers!
There WAS some sort of browser issue (though I don't think it involved Firefox) but it happens to me, still, even after following all the advice I gave to bangalore. And it happens to me whether or not I use IE or Maxthon browsers.
'course, being on dial-up doesn't help, either!

I see a number of people have mentioned OpenSource CMS. Another very useful site is CMS Matrix which has feature comparisons of a huge number of CMSs.

I'm also looking for a new CMS, and it's driving me crazy, because there doesn't seem to be anything that works the way I want.

PHP PostNuke.

PHP Nuke has a much too canned appearance, but PostNuke is easily customizable to look very professional, even corporate.

Most importantly, PostNuke is written in PHP, which is a language you are obviously familiar with in great detail. Knowledge you currently have can be leveraged during migration.

Zope may be a decent CMS, but I see no advantage it has over PostNuke that would merit your switching to an unfamiliar technology.

Cheers,

Glob

Thanks for the brief open registration. After lurking here several times a day for several years, i finally hit the big time!

#39 docduke

You are very welcome!

#13 ajackson

Ughhh, slashcode? Maybe if you're a perl wizard. I've examined that code on several occasions and it gives me headaches.

Not really much of a full fledged CMS anyways :P

I was going to suggest a look at Bricolage :

bricolage

The problem with Postnuke is that it's a bucket of Lego bricks... Except that they're not made by Lego, but by dozens of different companies, and they don't always quite fit together.

You can get lots of features, but making all those features work together just the way you want - not so easy.

#34 Bangalore

Two possibilities: Upgrade to latest virus sw.
or more memory

Temporary fix. Refresh LGF with virus software disabled
then enable immediately.

Worked for me but now have new P-IV, 512SDRAM, Norton IS 2005, and XP and problem no longer occurs.

Coupla other comments...

A while back I worked for one of those now-defunct web design cum e-commerce companies that had a client who specified Interwoven as the CMS. We went to Interwoven training and i was so disgusted with the product -- ugly as sin, confusing, poorly documented, that I had myself transferred from the project. Things may have changed since then, so I can't speak for it now.

At 20,000 bux, Zope seems to me an absolute friggin' ripoff, especially for software written in a "hobbyist" programming language (aka Python). Maybe they don't have the economies of scale, or maybe the have some customers who want to spend the money, associating "expensive" with "best". Who knows.

Using FireFox and Netscape. 7.1 Netscape not my favorite. It screws with memory allocation and hangs up. Any help with that? I like the Netscape email handler...supports both POP anf IMAP. TBird doesn't like IMAP.

Thanks

Nothing wrong with Python. In fact, Zope (the company) pays the salaries of a number of the developers of Python.

Most CMSs are written in a "scripting" language - PHP, Perl or Python being the most common. Java probably comes fourth.

Oh, and $20k is towards the lower end of the scale for enterprise-level CMSs. Some cost over $100k.

#63 Lizardoid Minion #32603

Nothing wrong with Python.

Agreed. It's just not nerdy enough for the twinkie-in-the-pocket crowd.

+1 PostNuke

Charles,

SmoothWeb by Green Penguin.

I have it on good authority that one of the founders is a really big fan of LGF.

SmoothWeb can publish simltaneously to many device types (most cell-phones over here can browse the web, but have different specs, like some can view jpgs but not gifs, they require different character encodings, they have different screen sizes).

SmoothWeb is used to power blogs for JMail, and allows simple posting of photos from cellphones, on-the-fly cached conversion of images for format and size, one-post-to-many-topics, one-owner-to-many-blogs, auto-notification (opt-outable) to friends, post-by-post commentability control, posting and commenting via email (with validation), blocking of comments from specified email addresses, and more as time goes by.

SmoothWeb is also used by the print publication Tokyo Weekender to publish their website, including edition-based preparation, review, and publication (and archiving).

Data (and meta-data) can be given sets of language-equivalents (e.g. description in English, description in Japanese)

More...

Control of output through templates, custom tags, CSS, and

CSS templates.

Green Penguin may be interested in establishing a beachhead in the U.S.

34 bangalore

The problem you describe on LGF is caused by Norton Internet Security. I am betting you have this installed on your PC. Try disabling it temporarily and the problem will disappear.

I dumped it in favor of the superior Kaspersky Labs product.

ploome,

I think you're on to something there!

Think GREEN!

34 bangalore

Or use Linux.

JBoss Portal.

#68 Pro-Bush Canuck

I knew there was a reason I liked Canada besides the excellent pike fishing. Turning off the Norton worked great. Can you pass on any more info on Kaspersky Labs product.

Voted for Bush too- in Illinois it does'nt matter much tho

Thanks

Take a look at Stellent, they have a nice content management solution.

My boss wants me to take a look at DNN. The only drawback I've seen with it is that it require Win XP pro (b/c it needs to use the IIS server).

But aside from that it's damn pretty and I really think it's worth a look.

Oh yeah, and it's free, as in beer and speech.

-ron

er oops. Here's the link to dot net nuke (DNN)

-ron

Why do you need to purchase CMS software? You'd get something better and cheaper if you had it custom built. We hired an independent developer to create the custom software behind GOPINION, and it was much cheaper (and more customized)!

?I am a political scientist?

Try:

[Link: www.exsitewebware.com...]

it's open source, written in PERL, architected for plug-ins. Easy to extend if you're into PERL. User community keeps extending it via plug-ins, so it's a living thing.

Another open source CMS is Typo 3

[Link: typo3.org...]

I work at a company that is partnering with a terrific company that has their own CMS product. It is entirely Java based and will work with any database.

It is reliable and has been implemented at large and refutable companies.

Problem is, they would never give it away for free.

You can contact me however is you are interested. This product has everything that you need for CMS including bulk updates.

It is priced in South African Rands which means that it would be comparitively cheap in dollar terms. If you dont go for a free option then I really recommend this product.

I can't recommend a specific system, but for good information on the field and most of the major commercial suppliers, I heartily recommend KM World magazine at [Link: www.kmworld.com...]

A search for "CMS" turns up 30 articles, 24 news stories and 3 hits in Buyer's Guide. [Link: www.kmworld.com...]

Don't have any real technical info, but the chairman of zope, Hadar Pedhazur, was my boss from 1991-1998 and is an awesome top-notch technical guy. He is very committed to open source, and when he funded zope (he's a venture capitalist) he insisted that they make it open source.

Everyone who has ever worked for Hadar takes his advice very seriously. So if he vouches for zope that's good enough for me!

cathy :-)

First off, everyone spare the me the anti-microsoft whining.

MS Content Management Server is a very competent product already, and Microsoft will, as they always do, forge ahead in this very lucrative space until they have every feature of everyone else, and twice as easy, and you'll have easy upgrades every step of the way.

Wish I could help. I've been looking for a CMS for a group with what I'd say are needs that are pretty much as complex as PJ media's (and very similar in many respects, even though they are not associated with blogging). Haven't found one yet (including most of the above recommendations; I've got to look at a couple of those that I hadn't seen yet).

But I will recommend you stick with PHP... and open-source programs that you can reprogram (or hire someone to reprogram) to your liking. Because none of them are going to be exactly to your liking.

typo3. I use it to run my site, and a couple other low-volume sites. It's a PHP/MySQL app, open source, highly customizable. It's like hell to get it working correctly, but when it does, its a good feeling.

Also, there is a huge and growing developer community around it, which is obviously important for any long term success.