LebGeeks

Joe

Member

Yet another CMS comparison

Hello people,

Before you start trolling about your favorite CMS around, let me explain what the project is. I do not care about peripheral features that quite frankly would be useless to my project. Here goes:

I am helping a friend of mine set up a web portfolio for her film school. Instead of building the website from scratch, (unless there would be considerable gain from doing it, in which case tell me) I am thinking of using a CMS.

Here are my main requirements:

* It has to be an open source one, mainly so I could hack it for customization if necessary, but also for the freedom (as in speech) and the freedom (as in beer). You heard the story before. To be honest I am hesitating between Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress, but if you know any others could be good too :)

* Videos (movies) will be hosted locally, so a video player should be available.

* I suck at CSS and design. A wide (and good looking) collection of visual themes is a big plus.

* Flash is not completely banned and could be used. I have no idea how to do that, so if a certain CMS offers higher Flash integration capacities, it would be worth mentioning.

As for databases, since it's going to be low volumes (mainly some comments and that's it) I was wondering about the possibility of using SQLite instead of MySQL. Anyone has an opinion?

As always, thanks for your help guys :)

rolf

Member

Re: Yet another CMS comparison

About point #1: I find it tedious to "hack" big CMSes, that is why I build from scratch, trying to develop my own reusable codebase in the process. I can share if you're interested.

Ayman

Member

Re: Yet another CMS comparison

About point #1: I find it tedious to "hack" big CMSes, that is why I build from scratch, trying to develop my own reusable codebase in the process.

+1 I always consider using a CMS before a project but then I change my mind to build everything from scratch as I don't like to scroll and hack between hundreds of lines of codes.

Kassem

Member

Re: Yet another CMS comparison

I used to use Joomla before I actually learned web development. Now I prefer building stuff from scratch, much more efficient and enjoyable.

rolf

Member

Re: Yet another CMS comparison

About point #1: I find it tedious to "hack" big CMSes, that is why I build from scratch, trying to develop my own reusable codebase in the process.

+1 I always consider using a CMS before a project but then I change my mind to build everything from scratch as I don't like to scroll and hack between hundreds of lines of codes.

Would be nice if we guys could get together and contribute to a lite CMS / framework with the main goal of being easy to hack.

arithma

Member

Re: Yet another CMS comparison

+1 Rolf, I agree. Shall we tell rolf?

xterm

Moderator

Re: Yet another CMS comparison

CMS is not meant to be "Lite".

The alternative to doing what you propose is creating some sort of scaffolding where your entire "Content Management" is generated by a template, keeping the flexibility of altering the generated views/actions.

Simple case scenario/approach:

1- You have a Foo model with a bunch of attributes
2- You create the CRUD functionality for example: foo_create.php, foo_details.php, foo_list.php, foo_edit.php
3- You incorporate any functionality you deem necessary into those files.
4- You refactor your code and use a certain templating engine that allows you to generate those files
5- You create a small script (ruby, python, perl, bash...) where you can pass your domain model and get the files generated for you based on the template you've created.
6- For every domain model you have, you can now generate the necessary views/actions.

Joe

Member

Re: Yet another CMS comparison

While there are some definite benefits to build your website from scratch, there are two weaknesses that make me chose to go the CMS way (in this case mainly).

* A CMS would buy me time. I don't have the time to build the thing from scratch. Wordpress + a couple of plugins should do the trick. (It looks like I'm going with Wordpress after all). It's fairly easily hackable and integrates really well with MySQL.

* From a security point of view, I always trust CMS over my own ability. There are simply too many exploits! XSS, injections, overflows, ... I simply cannot protect myself from them all. Trusting an open source component is usually the way to go, as vulnerabilities and exploits are usually fast corrected.

Now what could be interesting is to argue over CMS vs web frameworks (Cake, Symfony, Django, Rails, ...)

Ayman

Member

Re: Yet another CMS comparison

About point #1: I find it tedious to "hack" big CMSes, that is why I build from scratch, trying to develop my own reusable codebase in the process.

+1 I always consider using a CMS before a project but then I change my mind to build everything from scratch as I don't like to scroll and hack between hundreds of lines of codes.

Would be nice if we guys could get together and contribute to a lite CMS / framework with the main goal of being easy to hack.

That would be a nice idea :)

Kassem

Member

Re: Yet another CMS comparison

Ok so let's kick it off... what framework(s) are you guys using?