[thelist] Re: Perl, PHP, Zope and CMS - are they only for programmers?

[Martin Burns]

James wrote:

> I have been following the discussion on Content Management Software with
> interest. I also am just a graphic designer trying to cope with the ever
> widening skills required for web sites these days. Yes, I know, I
> should be
> bringing in others. But there's always the allure that software will do
> the
> trick.

And to an extent, it is an illusory allure - even with basic, static
sites, you really do need to know HTML and CSS to a much deeper than
Adobe and Macromedia sometimes claim.

> I notice that Perl, PHP and Zope are kindly open source (free)
> software and I have tried to install them on my Win platform, but I'm
> drowning. It's all so foreign to me.

PHP and Perl are different beasts to Zope. What PHP and Perl are are
low-ish level tools with which you can build a CMS. Example - Geeklog is
a CMS which is built with PHP. Once you have Geeklog basically running,
you're just needing to customise the template to look the way you want
it. Greymatter is a blog (and blogs are basic CMSs) written in Perl
which is a fairly simple install, and then you need to customise the
template again.

(Example Geeklog site: http://www.evolt.org.uk/)

But what both Geeklog and Greymatter are are very vertical CMS - you can
only do one kind of site with them. If what you want to do is that kind
of site (and Geeklog's site can be useful in *many* situations), then
you're fine. If not... you're into a *lot* of progamming work.

What Zope is is a general CMS. You can either build your own
functionality (which at the basic level of static pages to a common
template, is very easy), or you can implement some of the many vertical
products which sit on top to provide richer functionality:
http://www.zope.org/Products

Some examples, running on my home machine (so possibly a bit slow):
http://zope.homeunix.net:8080/evolt_tests/index_html
http://zope.homeunix.net:8080/squishdot/index_html
http://zope.homeunix.net:8080/polls/test
http://zope.homeunix.net:8080/tests/testwiki/test/FrontPage
(un and pw are both 'guest')

Oh, and it comes with a tutorial too:
http://zope.homeunix.net:8080/tests/tutorial/examples
which you'll see that simple stuff can be achieved with a superset of
HTML - all my site (http://www.easyweb.co.uk) is produced with basic
DHTML.

The other nice thing that a good CMS will do is handle all the hard
stuff like security - essential if you've got users editing via the
web - and version control. Believe me, if your site is regularly
updated, you *will* need version control. It may be tomorrow, it may be
next year, but some day, you'll overwrite your content by mistake.

Cheers
Martin
_______________________________________________
email: martin at easyweb.co.uk             PGP ID:	0xA835CCCB
	martin at members.evolt.org      snailmail:	30 Shandon Place
   tel:	+44 (0)774 063 9985				Edinburgh,
   url:	http://www.easyweb.co.uk			Scotland