Thanks to the guys (there are no gals) at Civic Actions for linking to this fascinating article by a team of software engineers at IBM comparing content management systems. This is the first in a series called “Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site.”
Mambo was very appealing from the ease of install and the UI, but the development track at the time was fractured and didn’t give us any confidence of support.
Typo3 seemed to have a huge community and the maturity we were looking for. However, the learning curve for using Typo3 is daunting in comparison to Drupal.
We did have to invest some time to learn the Drupal way, and the framework just seemed to make sense. We also felt that Drupal provided the right combination of framework and flexibility to break out of the framework when needed to get the job done. With all things considered, we decided to use Drupal. The landscape of open source CMS is continuously changing, and in the future we’ll revisit these and any new entries in the field.
– Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site, Part 1: Introduction and overview
Hey Ruby,
Thanks for that link.
I have no real experience with Drupal, having only installed it and played with it for a few hours.
But I think that these guys missed the mark a little about Mambo…
Over a year ago there was a schizm between the developers of Mambo, and the comercial company that wanted to exploit their ownership of the copyright.
The developers forked the project (although they object to that term), and left in mass to make Joomla. Joomla has an incredibly vibrant community of developers and users, with a huge number of live sites. It is by far the most sucessful open source content management system in terms of user-base. And I would urge anyone reading that article to understand that they should not fear for the future of the project.
I understand what they are saying about flexibility, though. Joomla is restrictive compared to Drupal (which I could tell in a short time) and phpWebSite (my dark horse favorite).
Typo3 is a career.
Cheers,
Luke
I actually wrote an article about the schism shortly after it happened. I think it turned out to be on the mark.
http://alloraconsulting.com/index.php?module=article&view=14