memories of OSCOM3
It has been almost two and a half years since my visit to OSCOM3, the open source content management conference held at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. OSCOM3 introduced me to some great open source CMS solutions. Since then I’ve used the OSS CMS Plone as a platform for my (now out of date) OSS repository and run Xoops, a decendent of the popular PHPnuke, under VMware on my home PC for fun and amusement.
Now that I’ve got some cycles to go a bit further I want explore some open source CMS solutions for a pet project of mine.
some prerequisites
This project involves setting up a closed (not public) community for a private event. I am looking for the following features:
o Open source – for cost reasons, but also because of the large number of solutions available driven by active and dedicated developers working with current technologies and able to provide online support.
o LAMP platform – because Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP are so popular and widespread that good shared hosting services are available and inexpensive. The entry level costs are low and the quality high.
o Focus on collaboration & community features – there are lots of open source CMSs out there. One list has 95 of them. Each OS CMS development team has their own take on features and priorities. I’m specifically interested in those that stress collaborative features and have good calendars.
o Easy – to deploy, administer, install additional feature modules, backup, and explain & train.
The last requirement, easy to explain & train, is important because I will need to promote the service in general and I expect these communities will not have experience of whichever open source CMS I select and will need an intuitive interface for basic users and group administrators.
As of today, I have a hosting provider with the preferred LAMP platform (they host this blog, if you hadn’t guessed) and I’ve used the handy-dandy Fantastico installation wizard to install three test sites.
a roadmap
I plan to use this project to discuss open source, content management, and some related best practices in the area of collaboration and perhaps document management. Although this is a small project, I expect it will touch on many points that might be of interest to those who may be selecting and deploying similar sorts of solutions, especially open source.
Oh, which CMSs have I installed? At this point I’m working with Drupal, Joomla, and Xoops. (You’ll notice that open source has a tendency to creative names!). If none of these are on your own CMS of choice, that’s ok. The selection considerations and issues will be of interest to almost anyone working with similar collaboration solutions, whether open source or not.
a point or two
One point: this will not be a How-To of OSS CMS deployment. I’m more interested in the Why. There are lots of technical resources that discuss the plumbing – as a consultant and architect I prefer to stand back from the details in order to look at the bigger picture. I’ll be working on these sites, hands-on… but I’ll only go into the messy details in order to make a point.
A second point: I would have liked to consider Plone, the extremely popular open source portal that runs on top of the Zope Framework. In my case that wasn’t an option because Zope/Plone hosting is significantly more expensive than the hosting services that cater to PHP-based applications. This is because of the higher system requirements necessary to host an application server based on the Python language. In the case of Zope, the database is also likely more demanding than MySQL or PostgreSQL (an OSS alternative to MySQL). I would love to hear from anyone who has done capacity planning for Plone versus PHP-based solutions.
Cheers,
-pmh
I really think that you should look again at Plone– over the long term, the fact that Plone hosting might cost a bit more than commodity LAMP hosting is more than made up for by the quality, power and extensibility of the Plone/Zope platform. Especially for document management and online publishing. And especially for non-technical end-users, where Plone’s UI really shines.
My organization, ONE/Northwest, has developed, launched and hosted about 45 Plone-powered sites for small grassroots nonprofit environmental organizations in the past year. We have found it feasible to put about 60 such sites on a moderately-powered server (2 GB RAM) and that’s without much effort at Squid caching.
We charge our clients $15/month for hosting a typical small site, which easily covers the cost of the server (hosted right now at Zettai), and leaves a bit left over for maintenance. We’re expanding onto our second server this week, which will give us some room to grow even more and have more failover options.
Bottom line: we don’t see Plone as “too expensive” to deploy even for small sites.
Jon, I couln’t agree more! Plone is all that you say and more. It ranks very highly when analysed with Navica’s Open Source Maturity Model – a benchmark for assessing the quality and stability of open source projects.
In fact, I used a version of Plone for my open source repository at Objectis.org (see link on sidebar).
But my current project is still in the proof-of-concept stage and a Zettai server, even at $15, is twice what I pay for a service that lets me install and compare any number of different PHP-based projects.
You make a good point, though. Perhaps I will consider using the Objectis site and add Plone to the other projects I’m looking at.
Thanks for your comment.
-pmh