Forum OpenACS Q&A: OpenACS vs Vignette vs Mason

Posted by Andrew Koh on 06/21/00 03:24 AM

Hi,

A friend of mind is evaluating content management systems to use for
an online magazine. Basically all he wants is simplicity in updating
the site with new articles(i.e. webforms for uploading
text/graphics/etc)

So far, he's looking at Vignette(expensive thing) and Mason(Perl
based opensource). However both have limitations - one is expensive
and the other is not quite as featured as ACS.

I've been trying to sell him the 'bigger picture' :) but he is
reluctant to commit unless he knows its easy to do want he wants. So
my question is - how hard is it to use the content-module of OpenACS
to come up with a set of webforms for doing this admin stuff?

Is the templating system functional yet? He'd like the ability to
segment the webpage into different parts - navbar, titlemast, related
links, main body.

Also, are there anysites which can be used as examples to show how
easy it is to update the site?

Thanks!

2: Response to OpenACS vs Vignette vs Mason (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 06/21/00 05:33 AM

The document structure your friend is interested in is something aD's working towards, which means we'll port it to OpenACS (it's up in its beginning form in ACS Classic 3.3 but we're going to wait until 4.0 to port it).

In today's OpenACS you need to hack the scripts by hand, and there's not a content management module ala Vignette (because ACS Classic doesn't include one). The folks at Ybos wrote one that works OK for ACS Classic (you can see it at http://naturewell.com though the newsfeed for stories isn't up and running yet, or at least wasn't about 36 hours ago), you could kindly request ybos get off their butts and port it to OpenACS (or not so kindly, I don't care :)

Now, in reality, the simple thing your friend wants to do could probably be solved by an few evening's hacking on the News module, which does exist in OpenACS, if your description accurately describes what he wants...

3: Response to OpenACS vs Vignette vs Mason (response to 1)

Posted by Andrew Koh on 06/22/00 06:18 AM

Thanks, I'm looking into it. :)