Content Management System for web/intranet

Mon Oct 15 10:35:14 EDT 2012

I love hearing great stuff and good results that you and others get with
ExpressionEngine and other systems. What I find tiresome are blanket
statements about the difficulty and cost of maintaining a WordPress or
Drupal site. These are, for the most part, nonsense coming from folks who
know little, if anything about the systems they are berating. I installed
and played with ExpressionEngine two years ago, and that qualifies me to
say that I don't know enough about it to offer any criticism, comparison or
advice.

Working from the command line with Linux or Windows, I can perform all
updates on a Drupal system with two words: "drush up". This command makes a
backup of everything it replaces, loads the new code and runs the update
scripts. It takes two commands to load and install a new module or theme.

Drupal, in particular, is frequently tarred with a lable of being difficult
that goes back over seven years ago, when the Drupal community had a very
strict and largely whacky interpretation of its GPLv2 license, and required
folks to setup and configure the database in a separate, and poorly
documented operation. At that time there were about 300 modules and themes
available for Drupal. Now, there is a streamlined install process and there
are over 10,000 contributed modules, themes, profiles and translation sets
available, all of them free. There are another 13,000 modules and themes
available as sandbox projects. Few of the public libraries using Drupal (or
Wordpress) have programmers on staff, nor do they need them.

Drupal requires no special maintenance or monitoring in library usage, and
has relatively modest hosting requirements. We recommend that libraries do
not use commodity shared hosting — the $6/month variety — but that leaves
many inexpensive options like LISHost starting at about $140/year. We
provide fully managed hosting starting at $900/year including unlimited
support.

As I said in an earlier post, community is important. You should check out
the software and the community as part of your evaluation.

Thanks,

Cary

On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 6:51 AM, Alnisa Allgood
<alnisa at nonprofit-tech.org>wrote:

> I vote for ExpressionEngine  http://expressionengine.com
>
> I've yet to use a more flexible CMS, and that includes Drupal and
> WordPress. You'll need a website developer/design to properly sketch out
> and get the project up and running for you. While ExpressionEngine (EE) is
> template driven (separated content from design), it was also designed more
> so for developers, which means unlike Drupal and WordPress, there aren't a
> lot of free standing templates for it. The reason is two-fold: (1) the
> community prides itself on its design and development skills, and (2)
> technically any design can be placed inside an EE CMS, so long as you have
> access to the HTML, CSS, and other related files.
>
> Content re-use, version control, relational data, distributed publishers,
> workflow management, etc are all available and can be configured (another
> reason to have a developer work with you is publishing permissions and
> workflow management), version control, relations, and permissions are all
> built-in, but the best combination of who has access to what, when, and who
> get's notified of what when, generally requires some plotting out if the
> structure is more complicated than group A can publish to section's A and
> B. This is probably true of all complicated permission and workflow
> structures, having someone help you plat out degrees and levels of access
> is good practice, especially if you want to increase the number of people
> who can directly publish content using the system (great for removing
> content road blocks, where only 1 or 2 people can official publish to the
> site).
>
> Polls, forums, feedback this would all be third-party add-ons. EE2 comes
> with a forums module, but I know a number of developers who work
> intensively with forums typically use a third party forum module. I believe
> there are more than a few of them, but none of our clients use forums, so I
> can't really discuss pros and cons of individual ones in-depth. But there
> are polling modules, survey, analytics (though Google Analytics is
> frequently used and then integrated into the system, other services and
> systems can be used).
>
> I'm not certain if you were primarily using ShadoCMS due to the
> translation services offered by Stalker, but EE can handle multi-lingual
> sites very well. The handling can simple or complicated depending on your
> needs. We set-up a system for a few clients that is what we call just a
> step above simple. They needed the ability to add translations of
> particular publications, say an English, Spanish, Chinese and Korean
> version of the same publication. Our goal was to just allow each version to
> be published, related back to each other, and then when ever someone pulls
> the document, it always links to the alternative languages.
>
> That's not super complicated, but isn't as simple as pure one to one
> translation, either. EE handled the situation very well, the complication
> is more in the planning it out first, and making sure language handling is
> added for end users in a very simple manner. Drupal and WordPress can also
> handle multi-language requirements, as I said it's more about the
> designer/developer than the system itself, though Drupal/WordPress do
> present some complications for full on translations versus just partial
> content translations.
>
> Drupal/WordPress start free. ExpressionEngine starts $150 (there's a
> freelancer's version that's cheaper, but I wouldn't recommend it for a
> library usage). The $150 non-commercial license is probably best starting
> point or the $300 commercial license. If you plan on a lot of e-commerce go
> for the commercial license, but basic commerce stuff, accepting donations,
> processing memberships, or selling things can be handled under either
> license. The software is the same for both licenses, its more about intent.
>
> Now that said third party add-ons can add more costs to basic
> ownership/license. I believe most of the Drupal modules, I've heard of are
> free; WordPress has free and paid module; as well as ExpressionEngine.
>
> I tend to use a number of paid ExpressionEngine modules, developer
> companies I like are Pixel & Tonic: https://pixelandtonic.com, Solspace:
> http://www.solspace.com, Exp-resso: https://exp-resso.com, Andrew Weaver:
> http://brandnewbox.co.uk. ExpressionEngine provides a great deal of
> flexibility for handling issues or needs internally. You can do custom
> queries, add php directly to the template, create a plug-in, extension, or
> module, etc. All these options are free. But sometime you want to think
> about, will you need more functionality for that feature in the future and
> do you want to be in-charged of doing it.
>
> There are also a number of free modules and add-ons for EE, as well.
>
> Cost wise, I'd probably say everything mentioned will be less expensive
> than ShadoCMS, my memory could be wrong, but it use to start around
> $3-$5,000. There are far more free to under $1,000 CMS solutions available
> these days and many are very good. If you plan on getting or have already
> have an in-house web developer, then going with Drupal or WordPress can be
> a good option, but the cost of maintenance and management exist and can
> require a full-time staff member for some organizations.
>
> An internal web developer can learn EE just as well as WordPress or
> Drupal, and EE generally require far less on-going maintenance and
> management issues. If you're constantly modifying the structure, you want
> someone around continuously, but for many of our clients, once the projects
> done, it's done. We come around once a year, and offer to do a version
> update for free. But security updates aren't nearly as much of an issue.
>
>
>
> .....................
> Alnisa Allgood
> Executive Director
> Nonprofit Tech
> t. 608.241.3616
> e. alnisa at nonprofit-tech.org
>
>
> ..................................................................................
>
>
>
> On Sun, Oct 14, 2012 at 6:24 PM, Anna Wheeler <awheeler at unitec.ac.nz>wrote:
>
>>  Hi
>>
>> Just a quick question. We are helping our institution  find a new Content
>> Management System CMS to manage both their website and intranet. Currently
>> they use Shado
>> What CMS do you think are worth considering?
>>
>> They would like to use system for intranet and website
>> and it will have ability to integrate discussion forums, polls, feedback
>> forums - with voting eg like uservoice
>> and it will have some kind of alerting or reporting system to remind us
>> to update information and manage distributed publishers
>> good analytics, reporting, content re-use, version control etc
>>
>> Any light shed would be appreciated
>>
>> many thanks
>> Anna
>>
>>
>>  Anna Wheeler, LLB, DipLibr
>> Manager, Electronic Library Services
>> Unitec Institute of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand
>>
>> email: awheeler at unitec.ac.nz
>> ph:    +64 9 8154321 ext 8601
>> web:  http://library.unitec.ac.nz
>>  twitter: http://twitter.com/elibraryUnitec
>>
>>
>>
>>  <http://www.unitec.ac.nz>
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-- 
Cary Gordon
The Cherry Hill Company
http://chillco.com

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2012-10-15
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