Sunday, March 15, 2009

CMS experiences

In the past year or so I have gotten a bit of experience with different CMS systems. I was given two clients(www.mross.com, www.auma.ca) that run on InfoGlue - a java/velocity based cms system. I am also messing around with Joomla, and I have one client (www.brooks.ca) that runs on it. I have yet to do anything with Droopal, but from what I've heard, it sounds more like InfoGlue than Joomla - that is, it's more geared towards an enterprise/portal centric CMS than what Joomla appears to be.

InfoGlue is very configurable and supports internationalization. This makes is somewhat cumbersome to configure to start out with. I've found that the important files to know about when doing a configuration on the fly are:
- WEB-INF/classes/cms.properties
- WEB-INF/classes/hibernate.properties
- conf/localhost/live.properties, etc

Some issues that I've noticed with the InfoGlue instances that I work on are:
- on logging into the CMS, I have to refresh the page 3 times before I acutally get the GUI. Only one of my instances does this, so I think it's a configuration thing.
- sometimes Tomcat seems to get it's knickers in a knot and needs to be rebooted in order for content changes to be saved. This happens periodically.
- deleting content (cleaning things up) can be a huge pain - especially if there are a lot of references to the content in other parts of the site. You end up having to delete the references first before you can delete the content.

So far I've been pretty impressed with Joomla. I was able to figure out how things were put together fairly quickly. I bought this book which helped some - it has some good chapters on SEO and working with Joomla templates. I was able to manage a complex upgrade to the site I maintain within a week of getting bootstrapped on the Joomla CMS. This impressed me.

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