Forum OpenACS Q&A: OACS CMS - Stillbirth?

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Posted by Dis Continued on
Am I alone in thinking that the current absence of a generic, easily-customizable, user-friendly CMS system (with Documentation) is a serious drawback to many who might be considering porting their sites to OACS.

It's of course great to have so many great modules to work with (forums,..etc).......but without a decent CMS!? For good reason, CMS is the jewel in the crown in Redhat's CCM platform. If/when they produce a  Postgres version that is freely available then guess what...?

Scanning the forums adds to the frustration because the impression, perhaps misleading, is that not much has happened/or is happening since the porting of the, apparently fatally flawed, original CMS module. Coordination, focus and a timeline for an OACS CMS solution seem to be absent. However, maybe I've missed the point, or something - I hope so .

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2: Re: OACS CMS - Stillbirth? (response to 1)
Posted by Simon at TCB on
Nice title! Charming :o)

Anyway, yup its a reasonable shortcoming. As you're aware there is a CMS, and structurally (i.e. the Content Repository) it is pretty good, its the *interface* that lets it down.

The original CMS interface was so unpopular that I think its put people off developing a new one, not unreasonably.

That and the fact its a big undertaking and I doubt any of the current volunteers have that much more time available.

So no, you are not alone. Therefore instead of point out the obvious ;o) are you volunteering to develop one? That'd be the easiest way to solve the problem.

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3: Re: OACS CMS - Stillbirth? (response to 1)
Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
I think one of the drawbacks is the complexity involved in developing a decent one size fits all CMS. There are specialized versions out there, but so far I could not detect a coherent way to approach this. And last but not least, what should a CMS accomplish. What is the basic functionality that is common to all. And what could be added to it at a later stage. Beside the technical backend it is the user interface that matters most. And as Simon put it rightly, we have a good backend, but an aweful frontend.

Now, I think, if all the people out in the community who need a CMS within the next 6 months could agree to work on specs together and come up with a coherent spec something can be accomplished, that will come at a fairly low price for each of the parties and is generic enough to be used in multiple ways.

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5: Re: OACS CMS - Stillbirth? (response to 1)
Posted by David Kuczek on
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4: Re: OACS CMS - Stillbirth? (response to 1)
Posted by Dis Continued on
It's not just a case of pointing out the obvious, but more exploring the reasons why a CMS solution is lacking and to what extent this is detrimental in (i) holding back the wider acceptance of OACS as a solution for web publishers looking to convert to an opensource, database driven backend (ii) the long-term competiveness of OACS (and those who market it).

No individual can solve the problem, but a coordinated effort by the community might.

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7: Re: OACS CMS - Stillbirth? (response to 1)
Posted by Dis Continued on
I'm reopening it.
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6: Re: OACS CMS - Stillbirth? (response to 4)
Posted by Simon at TCB on
The reasons are thats its a lot of work and difficult to define.

Yes a coordinated effort might solve it (if thats not stating the obvious I don't know what is ;o)

What I meant was, what are you contributing? Whats your suggestions? Are you prepared to do some of the work,if so how much? Can you resolve the design/definition issues?

I think everyone's agreed we'd like/need a new one. So lets not waste time just debating this again.

If your not putting a new offer of effort/resources on the table, then there's nothing to discuss.

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8: Re: OACS CMS - Stillbirth? (response to 1)
Posted by Lars Pind on
I think Michael is absolutely right that the lack of a well-functioning CMS is hurting us. Right now, demand for CMS systems is about ten to 100 times as big as demand for groupware-related stuff, and even for intranets, CMS is a major component.

I'm not so afraid of the problem of designing the beast. It's my impression, without really knowing a whole lot about it, that the CMS space is fairly standardized, and instead of trying to come up with a grand and innovative design, I think we should just look at one of the more successful systems out there, and simply copy that. Or at least let ourselves be heavily inspired by them.

How to get it done is another problem altogether. We need to find someone to fund it. My suggestion is that we come up with a reasonable specification that will let us get to a baseline implementation with not too much work, and that has obvious potentials for future extension. The point is that when someone needs CMS features, instead of rolling their own, they'd implement the parts of the specification that fit their needs, and eventually we'd get something together ther works.

We should also take a look at the CMS that Lanifex did for UNIDO, and other parts of a CMS system that people have done on client projects.

/Lars

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9: Re: OACS CMS - Stillbirth? (response to 1)
Posted by Dis Continued on
It's a problem..and problems need solutions (usually) so of course there is something to discuss. The amount of blood, sweat and tears that I can personally contribute is not the issue.
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Posted by Simon at TCB on
Michael,

You're missing the point. This has been discussed, at length, numerous times. The problem (as Lars points out) is that the amount of effort required is high.

I am merely asking that if you having nothing to contribute (i.e. you're not going to build any of it) then please don't spark off yet another debate about software that ain't going to get built. Its like fitting wheels to a tomatoe, time consuming and completely pointless. ;o)

As for funding, Lars I think you make an excellent point but, as I've mentioned before this community has neither the structure, direction nor the will to conform that would make significant investment possible.

The money is there. It could be pushed into the OpenACS, we could attract funding, but not while the community remains this informal and fluid.

I don't see how any commercial organisation (and significant cash will come from there) can be expected to push its money into the product when there is virtually no structure or control whatsoever. I would just be too risky. The only way it will happen is when one of the companies here needs a CMS so badly that it will fund it.

If that happens that of course the CMS developed is most likely to be the one that company wanted, not whats best in the medium/long term.

I'm not saying its impossible Lars, but I think it wold be more likely if some formalisation takes place.

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Posted by Kevin Murphy on
A CMS is so important that I am willing to work on it, but I can't do a lot of work.  There are probably many people in that category: do we feel that this is true, and that it is possible to harness this collective potential?  If so ... if there is even one person who is willing to be an aggressive CMS
project manager and champion -- even if that person does no coding or design at all -- it might help a lot.

Speaking as a newbie, I worry whether CCM has thrown OpenACS into confusion and made people unwilling to work on new functionality for fear it will be a waste of time.  I hope not, but if the OpenACS gurus feel this way, I'd like to know.  Personally I think OpenACS should shed its blind port past and fork its own way into the future.

I find it hard to believe that the none of the OpenACS companies have produced a semi-generic CMS or improved the flawed existing one.  Is this because the toolkit makes it hard to add generic functionality, or because most of the
competent people here have a vested short-term commercial interest in not sharing new functionality with the "community"?

On a more positive note, has anybody evaluated the UNIDO CMS?  I can't find any discussion of it.

-Kevin Murphy

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Posted by Simon at TCB on
I don't think you need to worry too much about CCM. I don't think its caused any confusion.

I'm aware of one individual who may be ideally placed to be a CMS project manager, but in fairness I'll leave it to him to respond, as I'm sure he will in due course.

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Posted by Lars Pind on
Kevin,

Speaking for myself and Collaboraid, we haven't built any CMS at all. We haven't had any clients yet who wanted CMS functionality (badly enough to pay us to do it), and for our own web site, we just use SSH and Emacs.

I think most of the other companies are either the same way, or the CMS's they've built are too client-specific to be of any use, or they just haven't really bothered to make it publicly available.

I don't think there are short-term commercial interests at play here. But I could be wrong, of course.