[thelist] Free CMS for magazine-style publishing

Burhan Khalid thelist at meidomus.com
Sat Oct 25 22:44:29 CDT 2003


evolt at miaridge.com wrote:

> I'm putting together a site for a zine with multiple authors and one or
> two editors.  Articles should be grouped by category or by edition.  I
> know most CMS products do categories, but does anyone know of any that
> allow publication by edition?  That is, each article will be associated
> with a particular edition as well as a category.

My recommendation is for CoFAX[1] (Component Object Factory). Its a CMS 
system written specifically for newspapers (it it used by many 
newspapers world wide). Has a plethora of options and is very 
customizable. The only nitpick I had about it was that is a JSP product, 
so it requires the proper servers (works fine with Tomcat) in place for 
it to be effective. Oh, and its free :)

I found it to be one of the (if not the) best free (and opensource) CMS 
application designed *specifically* for newspapers and publications. I 
am hoping you give it a try.

(Even though I'm raving about it like a teenager talking about the 
latest boy band, I am not affiliated with the project, etc. etc.)


> 
> The required features are:
> * magazine-style publication by edition
> * ability to create categories
> * customisable layout - different layouts for different kinds of article.  
> In most categories it would be a basic three column plus header and footer 
> page.
> * security - should be securable, with no known exploits in current 
> versions

For PHP-Nuke -- there are exploits reported weekly.

> * free (the zine is a labour of love)
> * basic workflow or at least basic staging (e.g. draft/published status)
> * valid and accessible HTML/XHTML if possible
> * MySQL, PHP, Perl or Python.

Not exactly. Has MySQL support, but no PHP, PERL or Python.

> If people would rather reply off-list I'd be happy to summarise the
> responses and post it back.

Good tip, btw :)

-- 
Burhan Khalid
thelist[at]meidomus[dot]com
http://www.meidomus.com

[1] http://www.cofax.org/index.jsp



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