Can you recommend an easy to use easy to develop CMS?

Question

We need some easy way to manage web sites at our company, and we are evaluating some CMS tools for this purpose.

We do not yet know what features the sites will need to have (but it will definitely be something with lots of functionalities), so we are looking for something with lots of features and more importantly to be easily extensible (if it does not have some feature, we at least want to be able to build-it by ourselves).

We have no experience with Content Management Systems but we do with Java, so it has to be something written in Java. We evaluated some tools and from our perspective the following seem the promising of them (in no particular order):

• OpenCMS
• dotCMS (Community Edition vs Enterprise Edition)
• InfoGlue
• Alfresco (EE vs CE)
• Magnolia (EE vs EE Pro vs CE)
• Jahia (CE vs EE)

Since we have no experience with either one of them, we were wondering if someone of you who have can share some information about how good they are or how easily they can be used and extended.

I know similar questions have been asked on SO and I also know this is highly subjective and people will vote for closing it as soon as it is posted, but for us it is important to know what difficulties other people have been facing in using the above tools (we don’t want to walk a path that takes nowhere if other people already know it leads nowhere).

Others could then vote on the posted answers if they agree or not.

From your experience, which from the above mentioned CMSs is the more easily extensible, the easier to use, the easiest to learn etc?

Thank you and Happy Holidays to all.

Answer 1

Well i have used Alfresco and Magnolia so i can speak for these CMS's . You can say that Magnolia is more easily extensible than Alfresco , but this depends on what you really need. Alfesco is very good CMS but it is more like document manager, or like online file menager and Maglnolia is more like website kind of CMS.

If i had to pick one it would be Magnolia.

Answer 2

Maybe you try another solution named Liferay

Answer 3

Liferay is not a CMS, it is a portal. You should be absolutely clear about what you want. A portal means complexity in every aspect you can think of. If you need a CMS, get a CMS, not a portal (and not a DMS like Alfresco either).

BTW, Magnolia has video-taped their conference last summer, and many of the talks feature interesting integration projects - maybe something you want to take a look at.

Answer 4

ALfresco and the other Java options are pretty full featured. I'd say it'd be worthwhile to lock down the essential featureset and then go alooking. Most of these CMSs are like taking tanks to a water fight.

We've rolled most of our CMSs on our own in Java. However, when I did do some research, Alfresco seemed like the "easiest" to deal with solution.

Just stay away from Documentum.

Finally, it seems like you guys want to stick with Java, which limits the open source cms solutions, but if you are open to php, they have a lot of available and decent solutions.

Answer 5

Oshyn, a web agency located in California, made the comparison between Opencms, Magnolia and Jahia here: http://www.oshyn.com/%5Fblog/Web%5FContent%5FManagement/post/Jahia%5FOpen%5FSource%5FCMS/ from a developper point of view.

Answer 6

+1 on Alfresco. I used it for a project that required very robust search capabilities. The fact that it is built on Lucene, a very capable open-source search engine, means that you can index almost anything and then build arbitrarily complex (or simple) search UIs customized to a particular business workflow.

Another thing I liked about Alfresco was that it has a pretty active community behind it. There are lots of third party add-ons for it.

I don't know anything about Magnolia...maybe it's even better.

Answer 7

I'd suggest trying Weceem http://www.weceem.org/weceem/

It's light-weight and built on Grails ( http://www.grails.org ) which is really great to develop with so if you do need to add features it will be a lot more pleasant than other frameworks.

If Weceem doesn't provide a certain feature, it's likely one of the 300+ plugins for Grails will.

cheers

Lee

Answer 8

Go to cmsmatrix.org and there you can pick up to 10 cms's and the site creates a side by side comparison of features. OK so you are not getting peoples subjective and often practical comments but it does mean you can be more confident that all the technical requirements boxes are ticked.

Answer 9

I recommend Drupal

Answer 10

Drupal is the best

Answer 11

I use Expression Engine and love it.

Answer 12

We are very happy with Drupal -- we use it in house as well with quite a few clients. If you want to discuss Drupal in more detail, feel free to contact me offline.

We have found a large community around Drupal with a large number of active developers for modules. We have also written several custom modules. There is a learning curve, as there will be with any new technology, but if I can get it, I am sure you can!

Answer 13

hmmmm. The java requirement is a bit limiting. I would say regardless of language, Zotonic is worth looking at, but I haven't used it myself, so I can't speak from experience.

Answer 14

If you're considering Alfresco, you should also consider Nuxeo (http://www.nuxeo.com/) as both are Document Management System.

They also have a specific "Website" feature now. Check it out.

Patrick

Answer 15

Alfresco offers both DMS and WCM.

The thing I like about alfresco is that it is very intuitive. As a developer, I feel right at home when building a webapp. webapp/project is not coupled with the wcm (i.e. to create webapp managed wcm you don't have to change the wcm configuration or add jar files so you don't have to worry about jar file conflict with the wcm system)

And you can also define user content in xsl, create template in freemaker or jsp so most people don't need to learn new stuff just to work on templates.

You can use visualization server, smart folder, etc. You can also use it to build php website.

If you are building very simple websites, php solutions is better. But if you are building average website then I would take a look at alfresco.

Answer 16

Walrus CMS is extremely easy to use CMS that supports multiple sites on one installation - you can run many web sites in one Tomcat web context. It is built using Spring framework and Tiles, so adding new functionality is simple and easy.