After months of constantly berating my lead, we are to start development of our first ColdBox app in the next month or so
.
He wants me to put together a demo of ColdBox features we’d be using with the new site given the requirements. One of the requirements is a CMS. We need a CMS across the enterprise, so there’s been a lot of thought and debate into this. He told me we are down to either Sava or Contribute, but we are still wide open to anything that is not too expensive, takes a minimal amount of time to implement and scale, and that is hosted on site. Given the upcoming project, I wanted to find out from you guys which CMS you are using with ColdBox, and what are everyone’s thoughts on the systems you’ve used in the past.
I've started doing some work integrating ColdBox with Sava CMS and
it's gone very smoothly (although I'm just a one-man shop). I put a
blog post together a little while ago about integrating ColdBox with
Sava: http://www.objectivebias.com/blog/entry/integrating-coldbox-applications-with-sava-cms
The one drawback to Sava is that the documentation is scarce, but the
forums are very helpful and active and I'm finding Sava to be a very
flexible and powerful CMS.
I found your post soon after I sent this email, and sent it along to my lead. He is supposed to be checking it out this weekend, so we’ll see what he says. I might be seeing you in the Sava forums.
With all due respect Ernst, back in my PHP days I did a lot of Joomla
and I wouldn't recommend it. The advantages are that Joomla sites are
very easy to set up and there are thousands of 3rd party extensions.
However, I found the system to be hard to work with when I wanted to
bend it more to my will. I can usually spot a Joomla site a mile away
because it's difficult to break out of their "mold." It might be
easier nowadays with version 1.5, but I don't know. If I were to
choose a PHP-based CMS I'd go with Silverstripe or ModX (I've also
heard good stuff about Drupal, but I have no experience with it).
In any case, Jonathan is clearly interested in a CMS that he can make
to work with a ColdBox app, so to choose any PHP CMS would be a
questionable decision. I am with Oğuz, though. I find Sava to be a
nice piece of software and super flexible with regards to integrating
custom code and other frameworks.
Alight, I'm going to pose this as an option - but it's not something I've
really thought through entirely as of yet.
We have a CMS that we developed internally, it's ColdFusion based with our
own event model framework in place (everything is broken out into Managers,
Views and Data Access Modules - MVC) - it's highly scalalbe, with a very
strong foundation including a robust security system, document management,
templating, the ability to create portals within portals (in other words you
can create an area with a site that is itself a container with it's own
security permission - think community group with it's own members, within a
large site). This CMS is a third generation tool we developed using more
than $100,000 in capital to complete. The CMS is solid but needs a round of
revisions since it was first released about a year ago and no work was done
on it after it's initial sale to one of our clients. Converting it to
ColdBox would be entirely possible since it's pretty well broken out -
although some of the code might need to be refactored. Our original
business model was centered around selling this CMS to clients that required
very granular and powerful security models - healthcare and banking clients.
Unfortunately, we never really pursued this model - hence the CMS tool has
been collecting dust for almost a year.
I'm interested in potentially open-sourcing this tool. It's a little hard
to part with it after so much capital was invested in brining it into it's
third generation, but I think the time has come to consider this option. I
know Cfer's would be stoked to have a CMS tool of this power available to
them - as we created it purely out of your dissatisfaction with things like
FarCry, Joomla, Ektron, Drupal, Plone and other tools we evaluated before
going down this road. This would be a perfect project for ColdBox and with
a little help I'm sure we could get it revved up pretty quickly for a stable
open-source ColdBox / ColdSpring / Transfer release.
On this note, I guess I'm curious if anyone is interested in being involved
in such a project - I'm not entirely familiar with the guidelines and
obligations of creating such an open-source release, so I'm definitely open
to input here. Let me know your thoughts and if you're interested in being
part of this team should we decide to move forward on this.
I think this would truly be a beneficial project. However, you might still get something from it by maybe limiting features and creating two versions, 1 open source, and then a clear path on upgrading to a full scale CMS solution. Also, maybe providing professional services around it.
Anyways, those are my 2 cents for that.
I would be glad to help out as much as I can on this.
Another important facet would be what type of license to have this open cms as. Maybe something not as constrictive as GPL, but maybe LPGL where core changes can be contributed back. But flexible enought to use it commercially or embedded.
Sounds good - I might have some questions about this process, but I believe
this could be good opportunity for us to collaborate on this project and
have an open-source CMS based on ColdBox. The CF community would gain from
this as well as the ability for others to see the power within ColdBox. I
assume this will be quite a bit of work to complete, but again the code base
we have should lend itself fairly well to a better ColdBox oriented model.
why not open a new google-group to discuss this project?
my idea would be something like an xml-controlled orm-framework based on mysql with
cms-basecode (or should we wait for CFHibernate&Railo/CF9?). i would enjoy to contribute
to any projects of this kind ...
