[thelist] Content Management System on IIS 5

[Martin Burns]

On Thursday, June 27, 2002, at 03:11  pm, Michael J. D'Amico wrote:

> --
> [ Picked text/plain from multipart/alternative ]
> Hi everyone-

Hi Michael

> Up until now, I have been running my organization's intranet manually,
> without the help of a content management system. We have grown to
> become a
> very large site, and it gets more and more difficult to keep up with the
> workload. I think that we are finally prepared to at least start
> investigating the different Content Management Systems.

Yep, I think you're probably right.

> I have read good things about Movable Type. It seems that a lot of the
> different web industry
> sites that i refer to use Movable Type.

<caveat - I don't use MT so am talking from documentation, not
experience>
MT is a pretty powerful blog tool, but I'm not sure it'll run a full CMS
for an arbitrary site type without some *major* league rebuilding.
</caveat>

Quite a few CMSs are built in a similar way - designed for one type of
site. If your site is that kind of site, you're in luck - most of what
you need is there. But if not, then it's going to be a lot of work.

I guess the difference is being a developer (one who can put a lot of
work into redesigning the internals of a system) and an integrator (one
who wants to do customisations, but not much else). For most CMS needs,
you'll be better off being an integrator.

> The web server I am on is running
> win2k and IIS 5. I believe Movable Type is only available on servers
> running
> Perl and custom CGI scripts, so I'm not sure that Movable Type would be
> possible with my server.

You can run Perl on NT/IIS via ActiveState, but I wouldn't like to swear
that MT will easily drop into that setup. It also requires a few other
keen Perl modules.

> Which CMS does evolt use?

Evolt uses a CMS built by evolt members. It runs on ColdFusion with an
Oracle db backend. You can grab a (slightly out of date) copy from
http://thecode.sourceforge.net/

Again, if your site is evolt-like, this will be reasonably easy to
integrate (although be careful if you want a SQLServer backend - some of
the code is Oracle specific).

> Does anyone have any answers?

As I've tried to stress, it depends on what your site is doing.

You basically have 3 options, though, in roughly decreasing order of
effort:
1) Develop a CMS from scratch
2) Take a general purpose CMS which has all the basic stuff (eg
security & authentication, knowledge of basic content types) and use it
as a toolkit to develop your site
3) Take a specific purpose CMS which you can just drop in and customise
the look of - all the main functionality is there for you

If you have a site which maps straight onto a vertical CMS like
http://slashcode.com/ or http://geeklog.sourceforge.net/, then I'd look
at option 3.

If you really, really, really, want to do all the work in developing the
base level tools, then develop your own.

Otherwise, I'd pick option 2 - let someone else do the hard work and
find the bugs.

What's the likely budget for this?

> What other Content Management Systems is everyone else using?

For my own site:
http://www.zope.org/

For clients with big budgets:
http://www.vignette.com/

For clients with smaller budgets
http://www.divine.com

For clients with smaller budgets and a heavy MS investment:
http://www.microsoft.com/cmserver/

All 4 of these are general purpose CMS, but that's by no means an
exhaustive list.

Cheers
Martin
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