[WEB4LIB] RE: CMS question

[D.H. Mattison]

That's an excellent summary of the many CMS you looked at Steve. For my
personal use, I started off with Zope, then decided the learning curve was
too steep and the kinds of applications I was looking for weren't there yet
(Plone was just getting off the ground), and I had no desire to write my
own. So I went through a similar process for my personal use, downloading
and trying just about every free, open source LAMP CMS and wiki application
I could find, before I settled on TikiWiki. The international development
team has since cranked out two more version releases from when I started
using it last year at version 1.6. They may have version 1.9 out by the end
of the year. I've noticed that the version releases since 1.8.1 have slowed
significantly, possibly because some of the team members have left. It's an
extremely powerful product, even has "live support," but like everything
that's free and open source, you get what you pay for, so some parts don't
work well and some parts are not fully implemented. TikiWiki has superb
documentation, the best I've seen for this class of open source software.
The 1.8.x version implemented ADOdb (see http://adodb.sourceforge.net/), so
you're supposed to be able to use TikiWiki with databases other than MySQL.
Installation is fairly simple if you're starting from scratch. Setting the
TikiWiki up for your particular situation can be time-consuming.

One caution which many of you likely already know, for security reasons you
can't use PHP 4.x or lower with Apache 2.x. I have no idea about PHP 5. Many
of these CMSs that run under Linux will also run right out of the zipped
file under FreeBSD. It would be helpful in future evaluations as Steve
posted to be a little more specific about the requirements in terms of
Apache/PHP versions and which of the *nix systems can be used.

I think two other important considerations these days for a choice of CMS is
whether and how well it supports Atom and/or RSS publishing and OAI-PMH.

Sincerely,

David Mattison
Victoria, BC, Canada
dmattison at shaw.ca
Tiki Wiki Hut: http://www.davidmattison.ca/tiki
Ten Thousand Year Blog: http://www.davidmattison.ca/wordpress