Open Source CMS Shootout

The original plan was a shootout between three open sourced cocoon based content management systems. But michi from lenya booked a family holiday ( shows movie ) so he can't be here.

Coin toss: heads. Steven starts first. (smile)

Steven presents Daisy, Outerthought's own open source CMS system. theserverside.com has picked up the release already.

Daisy is a combination of a repository service, which connect to rdbms, filesystem and provides full text search. Repository is a big bag of documents with a search system on top of it. It is exposed by HTTP and a java API to ( for instance ) cocoon.

Unique Selling Propositions:

  1. Document must comply to a document type. This prescribes documents consist of fields

Document editor automatically adjusts to match the document type being edited.

2. Centralized ACL Rules. No hierarchy to attache ACLs upon. Rules are triplets of object, subject and permissions. Daisy query language is used to determine the object. Also has a UI.

3. Flat storage model, no hierarchy in the repository. Organized through types, collection and metadata. Three parts of storage: rdbms for metadata, file system for parts and full text indexes. Keep versions and make diffs

4. Site tree Withouth hierarchy how can you make a website other than a boring wiki? By using site trees: an XML site hierarchy description. You can use daisy queries inside the Site tree.

5. WYSIWYG HTML editing HTMLArea based, extended. HTML cleansing to clean XHTML image upload & insert. If you link to a document you can link by search.

Daisy info

  • http://cocoondev.org/daisy/
  • Open source license, mailing list, SVN
  • You can go a long way without touching any code
  • Thanks to Schaubroeck for funding

Arje Cahn is next, he presents the Hippo CMS

2 year old project which is about to be open-sourced. Document oriented, not page oriented, contrary to Lenya, but more like Daisy. Need a familiar (Windows) look. Uses Cocoon, Apache Slide, OpenSymphony Workflow, Apache Lucene.

CMS does versioning, workflow, authorisation, pulls in external data. This is combined to a preview of the website, edited by authors and reviewed by editors. Then it is published to the live site.

USP's

  1. We do Standards: XML editing, XML storage, XML output

XML vs XHTML for real querying, non-web publishing, related items. Editor pluggable: Xopus, BXE, HTMLArea

2. Hierarchy. Slide is hierarchical. Easier for ACL rules to assign users to certain parts of the repository. User is free to define the hierarchy.

3. User interface. Should look good for end users, MS Explorer-like view.

4. Workflow (OpenSymphony). Works with slide privileges, and extended those.

5. Queries and navigation. Queries across the repository, queries accros metadata database in MySQL

More features:

  • Versioning
  • User mgmt
  • Word import (file uploaded to server, xml'ed by OpenOffice)
  • ...

http://projects.hippo.nl/hippocms

Q: Ugo asks which cocoon tech both CMS are using. Daisy generates form definitions. The repository is independent, but usable from cocoon. Hippo CMS is basically a cocoon site.

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