This is part of The Pile, a partial archive of some open source mailing lists and newsgroups.
Subject: [OT] Content- & user management, publishing From: Christian Jaeger <christian.jaeger@sl.ethz.ch> Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 15:51:22 +0200 Hello! I don't know a better place to discuss this, please tell me if you know (mailing lists preferred). Here at ETH Zurich (swiss federal institute of technology) we want to build a daily online journal. One of the suggestions (mine) is to build it with perl. It should be based on XML, and the idea is to make also the authoring / workflow / content management / user management parts of the system web based. The content should be modular: pictures, text, audio etc. should all be independant content elements with their own history, preferably with possibility to spawn children from parent elements (i.e. original picture and derived lower resolution pictures). For publishing, several elements should be composed together. Another non-trivial part is a good user- and group or role based user management. Suggestion for Text markup is a (pod like) plain text markup which is converted to XML for storage, with the possible option to fully go with XML when editors are really ready. For publishing of the articles I'm planning to use in some way AxKit (source should be taken from database), and Mason for the administration parts. Now maybe that's a bit a big project - I don't even really know yet. (My estimation for the whole project is 280 days of work - I'm hoping to solve this with 5 programmers until the end of november.. never done something that big :-(). Now what I would like to know: - is anything like the mentioned things already existent? (mainly: database based content management system, and something of a sophisticated user management) (We would probably even pay for it if that matters) - are things like these in the interest of other people, too? (Some weeks ago, in the discussion about templating, someone mentioned Zope and that perl should have something like that...) Would it be possible to get together and build such parts as open source? Preferably in a good modular fashion so more people can profit from it.. Maybe someone of you knows Vignette Storyserver? We have the option to get the source code of a Storyserver based online journal - although it requires modifications, and it's not XML based yet. So an idea is also to port this (TCL code) to perl, and reimplement required Storyserver functionality in perl. Any comments on that? (I don't know Storyserver yet) The reason for not using Zope, OpenCMS or Enhydra, is a) I don't know them really :-(, b) some downsides are visible when looking at these solutions (i.e. Zope's user interface seems rather sub-optimal for use by journalists, especially as long as it's html based). (And we haven't succeeded to get OpenCMS to run until now) === Subject: Re: [OT] Content- & user management, publishing From: Matt Sergeant <matt@sergeant.org> Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 15:07:05 +0100 (BST) On Mon, 28 Aug 2000, Christian Jaeger wrote: > Hello! > > I don't know a better place to discuss this, please tell me if you know > (mailing lists preferred). > > Here at ETH Zurich (swiss federal institute of technology) we want to build > a daily online journal. One of the suggestions (mine) is to build it with > perl. It should be based on XML, and the idea is to make also the authoring > / workflow / content management / user management parts of the system web > based. The content should be modular: pictures, text, audio etc. should all > be independant content elements with their own history, preferably with > possibility to spawn children from parent elements (i.e. original picture > and derived lower resolution pictures). For publishing, several elements > should be composed together. Another non-trivial part is a good user- and > group or role based user management. Suggestion for Text markup is a (pod > like) plain text markup which is converted to XML for storage, with the > possible option to fully go with XML when editors are really ready. For > publishing of the articles I'm planning to use in some way AxKit (source > should be taken from database), and Mason for the administration parts. Well you've pretty much just described my plans for AxKit-CMS... > Now maybe that's a bit a big project - I don't even really know yet. (My > estimation for the whole project is 280 days of work - I'm hoping to solve > this with 5 programmers until the end of november.. never done something > that big :-(). Now what I would like to know: > > - is anything like the mentioned things already existent? (mainly: database > based content management system, and something of a sophisticated user > management) (We would probably even pay for it if that matters) Well there are lots of pre-existing content management systems. See http://www.camworld.com/cms/ for an overview of a few of them. The only perl ones I know of on that list are MediaSurface and Interwoven Teamsite. Both are horribly expensive (though maybe cheaper than your 280 programmer days). Mason has a CMS, which Linux Journal just did a write up all about. I haven't used it so I can't comment, but the article is at http://www2.linuxjournal.com/lj-issues/issue77/4168.html > - are things like these in the interest of other people, too? (Some weeks > ago, in the discussion about templating, someone mentioned Zope and that > perl should have something like that...) Would it be possible to get > together and build such parts as open source? Preferably in a good modular > fashion so more people can profit from it.. AxKit is building something like this right now. We have the skeleton framework in place, its just a matter of time now. We would _very_ _much_ appreciate funding or manpower for the project. We have strong long-term goals for the project, not just something we want to dump in the open source community. Mail me direct if this is something you're interested in doing, and we can talk business off the list. > Maybe someone of you knows Vignette Storyserver? We have the option to get > the source code of a Storyserver based online journal - although it > requires modifications, and it's not XML based yet. So an idea is also to > port this (TCL code) to perl, and reimplement required Storyserver > functionality in perl. Any comments on that? (I don't know Storyserver yet) Don't do it. StoryServer's architecture is not focused towards XML like AxKit's is. And thats a huge undertaking (trust me from someone who is working to port a product to perl from another language). > The reason for not using Zope, OpenCMS or Enhydra, is a) I don't know them > really :-(, b) some downsides are visible when looking at these solutions > (i.e. Zope's user interface seems rather sub-optimal for use by > journalists, especially as long as it's html based). (And we haven't > succeeded to get OpenCMS to run until now) UI's are always going to be a problem. See the discussion on the CMS list about editing interfaces: http://www.mail-archive.com/cms-list@camworld.com/ === Subject: Re: [OT] Content- & user management, publishing From: Perrin Harkins <perrin@primenet.com> Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 10:51:48 -0700 (PDT) On Mon, 28 Aug 2000, Christian Jaeger wrote: > - is anything like the mentioned things already existent? (mainly: database > based content management system, and something of a sophisticated user > management) (We would probably even pay for it if that matters) There are lots, but the only ones I know of that actually have the features most people mean when they say "content management system" (i.e. revision control, scheduling, ability to create new things without modifying a database schema) are MediaSurface and Allaire Spectra. Both are commercial and closed-source, although fairly flexible. The former uses a mix of java and perl, the latter uses Allaire ColdFusion markup. > - are things like these in the interest of other people, too? Yes. In addition to Matt's AxKit project, there are a few others, including the Iaido project on sourceforge.net. > (Some weeks ago, in the discussion about templating, someone mentioned > Zope and that perl should have something like that...) Zope is a pretty poor excuse for a CMS, at least straight out of the box. Maybe there's an add-on that makes it more useful. > We have the option to get the source code of a Storyserver based > online journal - although it requires modifications, and it's not XML > based yet. Don't bother. You'd end up needing to learn The StoryServer Way, just to convert this code from it. It'll be faster to start from scratch. - Perrin === Subject: Re: [OT] Content- & user management, publishing From: Matt Sergeant <matt@sergeant.org> Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 20:03:47 +0100 (BST) On Mon, 28 Aug 2000, Perrin Harkins wrote: > On Mon, 28 Aug 2000, Christian Jaeger wrote: > > - is anything like the mentioned things already existent? (mainly: database > > based content management system, and something of a sophisticated user > > management) (We would probably even pay for it if that matters) > > There are lots, but the only ones I know of that actually have the > features most people mean when they say "content management > system" (i.e. revision control, scheduling, ability to create new things > without modifying a database schema) are MediaSurface and Allaire > Spectra. Both are commercial and closed-source, although fairly > flexible. The former uses a mix of java and perl, the latter uses Allaire > ColdFusion markup. Just to correct things here, Mediasurface is only Java in the client editing front end bit, which should be good (better than a HTML UI, and cross platform too) but it turns out that it bites big time. One of the lead developers told me he thought he'd have been better doing it in Perl/Tk, as it has better run-time interactive performance. === Subject: Re: [OT] Content- & user management, publishing From: Stas Bekman <stas@stason.org> Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 21:37:48 +0200 (CEST) On Mon, 28 Aug 2000, Christian Jaeger wrote: > - are things like these in the interest of other people, too? (Some weeks > ago, in the discussion about templating, someone mentioned Zope and that > perl should have something like that...) Would it be possible to get > together and build such parts as open source? Preferably in a good modular > fashion so more people can profit from it.. http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=00/05/27/2137208&mode=thread ActiveState are going to put Perl support into Zope. http://www.zope.org/Wikis/zope-perl/FrontPage === Subject: Re: [OT] Content- & user management, publishing From: Perrin Harkins <perrin@primenet.com> Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 13:06:48 -0700 (PDT) On Mon, 28 Aug 2000, Matt Sergeant wrote: > Just to correct things here, Mediasurface is only Java in the client > editing front end bit They actually told me they were using Java servlets for various things, and seem to be downplaying the perl aspects of the server. Could be just marketing though. === Subject: Re: [OT] Content- & user management, publishing From: Matt Sergeant <matt@sergeant.org> Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 23:58:28 +0100 (BST) On Mon, 28 Aug 2000, Perrin Harkins wrote: > On Mon, 28 Aug 2000, Matt Sergeant wrote: > > Just to correct things here, Mediasurface is only Java in the client > > editing front end bit > > They actually told me they were using Java servlets for various things, > and seem to be downplaying the perl aspects of the server. Could be just > marketing though. Bizarre - maybe things have changed that much since 2.2x (they appear to be at version 3 now). ===