Is there a good Google Sites competitor?

Question

A client of ours is a membership organization and they are looking for functionality that seems closely aligned with Google Sites capabilities.

They want a system where their members can have a content managed site of their own that one or more admins can create by submitting a simple form.

The member organization could then add/remove pages, add/edit/remove content, add their own users, modify their color scheme and layout.

They would like the ability to have a url structure like, "member_org_url_to_be_named/member_name" - but it could also be subdomains (i.e. "member_name.member_org_url_to_be_named").

So they need a security hierarchy to be able to have different levels of users:

Admin - can add/edit/remove sites, users, etc.

Member Admin - can add/edit content within their site, add users that are also able to add/edit content within their site.

Member user - can add/edit content within their site.

From what I've seen and read, Google Sites seems to be able to handle this functionality. It's a little difficult to get in touch with someone there who would be able to tell me this definitively, however. So I'm wondering if there are any other platforms that might be able to handle this workflow.

Obviously, I'd love to hear from anyone who has implemented a system like this before. I'd also love to hear from anyone who has actually used Google Sites.

Answer 1

(Disclaimer: I work for Google. I don't know much about Sites though.)

Have you actually tried to use Google Sites for this? It strikes me that it shouldn't take very long to give it a whirl. If you have any Sites-specific questions, the Google Sites help centre and user forum are probably good starting places.

Answer 2

I've used Google Sites (the free "standard edition") a very little bit, it was easy to setup + easy to reconfigure my DNS records via nearlyfreespeech.net to setup CNAME and MX records to a domain I own.

The mailing list stuff works nicely. The site editing is very easy for anyone to use but a bit slllllooooowwww and somewhat clumsy, and doesn't appear to "play nicely" with the concept of uploading/downloading via FTP/SFTP/etc. I don't like the idea of my group's users spending all this time developing a website, that I can't backup or transfer to someone other than Google if I run into an issue.

I don't know if these issues are addressed in the pay version of Google Sites. For the moment I'm definitely keeping the email-mailing-list features going, but looking around elsewhere for something similar that works better.

(If you find something please post!)

Answer 3

Thanks for the responses. Unfortunately, I was not able to find a good product with the capabilities I needed for the price that would compare to Google Sites.

I think we're going to end up custom building something that will fit the client's needs - or they will end up using Google Sites. It comes down to whether they want something that will exactly match the workflow they need and whether they want it to be freely extendable for future expansion.

Answer 4

This sounds like content management with roles. Drupal fits this purpose pretty much perfectly.

http://drupal.org/