I need to build a website that keeps the content & appearance themes separate. I figured that a content management system is the best way to achieve this goal. I expect the user base to be hundreds of hits a day.
What is the best content management system for:
Speed (given the low visits)
Development & maintenance (cost of hiring developers & maintaining the system, ability to upgrade to new versions of the system while keeping my customized code separate)
Availability of free themes
Check some of these babies out.
Wordpress or Joomla! (if you're on PHP)
DotNetNuke (if you're on .NET)
Pinax (if you're using Python)
Radiant (if you're on Ruby)
Personally I have had good success with Joomla. Wordpress is also good but I have seen some people have a harder learning curve with it than with Joomla.
I've good experience working with these CMS tools:
Adobe AEM CQ5
Interwoven HP TeamSite
Interwoven HP LiveSite
SharePoint
These tools are really good and have almost all the features related to Ease of use, less coding or one time design, compatibility, faster development, Good End User Experience, Targetting, Segmentation, Additional API's for integration and much more...
Related
Just wondering what pro web developers use to publish their sites. Also I would like to know what big sites have used, such as Amazon, Walmart, etc.
Thank you for your time.
It's a difficult question to answer, I guess. The tools used by a developer depends on the customer requirements. It may be one of the following:
Static site with graphics and/or flash (simple business site)
Dynamic site with front-end html/CSS and database driven backend using php, perl, .net, Java, etc.
A large site that may use ecom along with content management system (CMS). There you may need CMS (such as Joomla) along with compatible plug-ins and customization.
For very popular sites such as Amazon, speed and bandwidth are very critical. Usually, though they start small (say, using PHP/MySQL, or ready-made CMS), they change according to their own requirements sooner or later using custom coding (Java is very popular). This is only my guess!
For co-ordination and publishing, GIT is very popular.
hope this helps.
How can i test my local RIA?
I need to do a stress test, graph response time and memory usage when user increases.
Do you know any software?
RIA tool support is often dictated by the development platform. For instance if you have GWT and need Javascript support in the tool then you will be pushed to one subset of tools, Silverlight to another, etc...
Looks to your development team, System Requirements Document and Architecture documentation for information on the developmnent toolkits used by your rick internet application. Once you have good insight there, into both which toolkit and what version then take a look at the commercial and open source tools out there to see which ones support your interface. There are few things more frustrating than driving a nail with the butt end of a screwdriver, but if your tool and your interface are a poor match you could wind up doing just that.
All of the commercial vendors are offering short term licenses at this point that you should be able to tie directly back to the project budget. Something to keep in mind on the open source front is that the level of effort on the labor front tends to be higher overall because of the efficiencies built into the commercial tools on the development, monitoring integration and analysis fronts.
If you want an open source solution, I can think on Apache JMeter. There are others like Rational Performance Tester or Mercury LoadRunner but those are not free. You might want to verify if there's a trial version out there.
I'm developing an e-commerce community website, and i'm not sure which cms to use.
Here are more specific details:
It has to be themable, as i'm not a designer, with plenty of high quality templates online. (Wordpress, joomla and drupal are good examples of this).
It has to have a good e-commerce plugin. (I'm leaning towards virtuemart plugin for joomla)
It has to have a good forum plugin. (I'm leaning towards kunena plugin for joomla)
Very easy to use, with minimal coding, as my development partners are not not programmers (Its more of a hobby project). (Wordpress is the king here no doubt, only some css editing required to adjust a template).
My current choice is joomla with virtue mart and kunena. I think it has a very good combination of functionality, ease of use and plenty of high quality themes.
Is there a better choice ?
Please mention pros and cons of your choice and the amount of coding required.
I had to make this decision once - and I chose Drupal.
My decision was influenced by the need for Internationalization in addition to what you listed
; however, a couple years later, and having used Joomla in mean time, I still think Drupal is the way to go. Here's why:
Ubercart is a great open source e-commerce module and is widely used with solid group of forum goers. This is especially useful because there is more abstraction in E-Commerce plugins than plugins in general - so you may need help somewhere.
Drupal has a built in Forum system that is easy to use and fairly customizable. It isn't as full featured as some, but there are 3rd party modules for that.
Drupal's Administration: Maybe it's because I have more experience in Drupal, but Joomla's administration is just clunky. It lacks intuition and documentation.
Joomla is more Object Oriented - which makes some of the design harder to grasp if you're not a programmer. To extend/change a Drupal Module is much easier.
I would say they are about equal in terms of Themes.
If you're developing a new site on your own and you want to get it done quickly and done well, then the answer is: write it using the tools you already know. (if you know more than one already then you should already have a good feel for which one would suit this project the best)
If you have the luxury of having enough slack time on your project to learn a new system then the best answer is to use some of that time doing some evaluation on a few systems. Spend time putting together a simple prototype site in each of them. All the major CMSs are capable of doing what you want, but you may find one easier to work with than another, or that a particular one has a specific way of doing things that you like. A lot of it is very much person preference and can only really be found out by trying them out.
Finally, you say you want minimal coding. Fair enough. Don't expect to have zero coding though. So therefore you should probably pick one that is written in a language that you're comfortable with.
What open source toolkit does fatwire compare to and are there some particular advantages to fatwire?
How hard is fatwire to export out of and move to a free alternative?
How stable is it as a platform to write java extensions on?
From a development persepective, FatWire can be unfriendly. Having worked on a number of sites using this application it can easy bloat, and become difficult to maintain.
From a user perspective there has been alot of effort in the UI and this has led to a highly functional tool.
From a client perspective all clients bar 1 (a large news agency) were happy with the end result. FatWire can slow when using complex logic to generate menus or breadcumbs for example or when you have a large amount of content. This is the main reason the one client was unhappy. The FatWire site regularily struggled under the load. It sometimes seen as a solution to all web needs.
As such FatWire succeeds in serving Static Content & Semi Dynamic content, but can flounder when forced to do fully dynamic sites (from my experience).
From the original press release:
FatWire Software announced the rollout
of FirstSite, which is a set of tools
and best practices that helps
companies using FatWire Content Server
get their first Web site or
application running quickly while
providing a foundation for future
expansion. FirstSite includes a
collection of standard templates and
site components that are common to
most sites, combined with
documentation, training, a rich
developer community, and best
practices methodology. FatWire and its
solution partners are using FirstSite
as the basis for developing
content-centric applications for
specific vertical markets. With only
minor, cosmetic alterations,
developers can use the code in
FirstSite to implement a first site,
while simultaneously learning how to
utilize Content Server's capabilities,
such as dynamic content delivery,
personalization, caching, and product
catalogs.
Firstsite is not a product, unless this has changed since 2004 (unfortunately I cannot look, since their developer site is down). Fatwire's Content Server does not compare to any Open Source CMS that I know. It's scope goes much further. I will answer your questions one by one:
Advantages - There are many (or nobody would buy it, and it is not cheap)
On the delivery side: scalability, fine-grained cache control, stateless servlet architecture, ....
On the back office side: virtually no limit to asset types, dynamic content attributes, find-grained security and access control, ...
On the development side: Intelligently architected API with good coding productivity, tag library, ...
Openness
You cannot easily expect to migrate content between any two CMS products, open source or not. While there are ways to extract contant from the database in XML and other forms, using product tools, or simply at the database level, I don't think that this can be an argument for or against using a particular CMS. Ever tried to migrate from Drupal to Joomla?
Stable
I worked on several Fatwire implementations from 2000 to 2004 (back then it was OpenMarket Content Server, then Divine Content Server). It was stable enough for the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the S&P sites, and I would expect stability not to be an issue today.
Fatwire is really unique concept from developer point of view. It builds everything on a very abstract, extremely flexible clever asset modeling framework which is stored in relational database.
Application logic is based on "templates" which actually are pieces of JSP code. This JSP code is not like conventional Java, but tags instead. It takes very long from a developer to learn these tags and Fatwire asset api. Expect even months before skilled develpers start to be productive.
Almost nothing useable samples ships along the product. There is advertized "FirstSite" but it is way too simple for the purpose this product is used normally (huge complex sites). So pretty much everything has to be built from scratch.
Cache control is advertized to be one powerful feature. Yes it is, but we had extremely long learning curve and it never worked exactly like one assumed.
Wysiwyg editing has been missed from this product even it is advertized. At least during 2009 it had serious conceptual problems which practically prevented using it in live environments. But it was cool feature for demos and marketing of course. Today it might be fixed.
As a summary and if I were a customer with limited budget, I'd select any open source alternative instead. Mostly because development costs with Fatwire are high due the uniqueness of the product, lack of good documentation and extremely long learing curve. Of course the product price tag is also thing to consider.
And to answer to questions: you have to start from scratch if you move from Fatwire 6.0 to any open source alternative. And it is stable to build Java extensions on.
Fatwire stores content in relation database and file system. Depending on what type of content (structured/unstructured), Fatwire can be evaluated.
I am currently working on a project which requires migration of content from different content management Systems to SharePoint. Are there any good, preferably open source, tools that would help me do this? Also, what are the best practices that I would have to keep in mind when it comes to such projects. One more thing that i would like to factor here is reusablity, because we might have to work on similar migration projects, from other Content Management systems in future.
You can check http://www.codeplex.com/SPMigration (open source, project started by a Microsoft consultant).
This framework gives you an importer tool, as well as some exporter example (FileSystem for example). You'll problably have to code your own exporter.
This MSDN blog also goes into some detail about the Migration API and may be useful as its generally very had to do this sort of thing without getting your hands dirty
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepointdeveloperdocs/archive/2007/11/30/content-migration-in-sharepoint.aspx
Also, IMHO you shouldn't dismiss proprietary products as although they can be expensive they may save you considerable time and therefore cost if you have a large conversion project.
http://www.tzunami.com/Pages/default.aspx
http://www.avepoint.com/products/sharepoint-migration
Tricks and tips -
http://www.parallelspace.net/portals/ALS305-mwherman-Content%20Migration-1-1-18-RC6_FINAL.ppt
We have had good mileage from going to the nearest university and grabbing some IT students to do a manual migration.
The students like the extra cash and it is sometimes easier when the Information Architectures of the site changes between systems.