Opensource software suite recommendations...

the aloha

kosmo, mod x is definitely gearing to make waste of etomite and metacube. hahaha. typo3 is way more powerful, complex than mod x et. al. our you can think of mod x being a very lightweight solution for one person to make a website. typo3 demands an enterprise, mod x i've been playing around with mod x for a little bit and although i still like to hand code, mod x does make things easier in some circumstances. i like it and typo3 because they are not so set in one function. like how drupal and every nuke out there are portals, movable type and wordpress are blogs. sure, you can twist and distort them into doing other things (well, maybe not the nukes) but they clearly don't shine there. mod x can make a "site" easier than mambo. right now, i'm actually giving textpattern a try as i've been made to understand you can easily make it into something better than a blog.

Kosmo

Thanks aloha, another CMS I have to get around. Typo3 IS powerful, but you have to be a statistics mathematican and a rocket techinician to use it. And I'm already learning so much more that I don't have the time to learn a complex software. Textpattern can be molded to anything, but I'm not so sure if it is so easy.

the aloha

the thing with typo3 seems to be that you have to develop a whole new set of skills that only apply to typo3. if i were starting over again, maybe i could blow enough time to learn it and then be lost when it came to doing without typo3. however, i'm not going to do that now. i have a life to live! i should note that mod x is a fork of etomite and the guy who made etomite is trying to make money on metacube. so they are pretty much all the same program except mod x is the one that is actually under any appreciable development. i, too, am still skeptical about a blog prog being able to be flexible enough to do something other than a blog, but i'll see. at least your concern seems to be unbiased.

Kosmo

I couldn't find anything about the mod x else than a few forum notes about Etomite that mentioned mod x, so I'm wondering how it actually is under anykind of development? And Etomite seems to be pushing forward mighty nicely. The thing about textpattern is that, you can "cheat" the blog to be like a news feed and make everything else out of static pages. Pretty much what every other CMS out there is, a site build around a news engine. But now that I have dwiddled around with Drupal, I can agree that it is way too much of a community machine than a real CMS of any sort, so it's not that good for my needs and I have to find something that is more of a corporate site CMS. I'd just hope that people would call their engine more accurately, like portal engine, blogging machine and a real CMS and so on.

Krak

Why dont you code your own? You appear to have the knowledge/skill.

jesusphreak

I hate to be the repeat offender here, but if anyone is seriously looking it something custom-tailored to fit their needs, learn Ruby on Rails. You can get a good blog engine up in a few days once you learn how RoR works. I've been considering making a CMS in RoR (which I still might), but truth of the mater is, Rails makes it easy to just tailor make anything you want. You end up with a better product that does exactly what you need instead of hacking around a product that was never intended to do x.

Krak

Ive just started with RoR, and its nice, it is pretty easy... I mean read through a tutorial (cookbook, todo list) and youll see just how easy. After reading the cookbook tut is when I setup RoR. Only thing is.... I dont think most servers support RoR, am I wrong? And, getting Rails rolling can be a bitch. I hear its super easy on Linux, but if your tossin it on a Windows box, it can be a pain.

Kosmo

What Krak said, not all server admins think Ruby on Rails is the second coming of christ, and neither do I. I have bought few books on Ruby and RoR, but I have yet to read them and actually make a move on them, but I'm more considered on the support for it than the "ease" all RoR zealoths vouch for. I'm very capable of doing some things, but unless you can code a CMS for web applications in LUA or UnrealScript, I'm out of luck, I might know how to whip up a game modification or stumble my way across a PHP programs, but I'm no Mark. :edit: And my main concenr is, how secure the company website is, if the swiss cheese programmed it?

jesusphreak

Well, more and more places are now supporting it. Site5, Textdrive, and Dreamhost all do. But its a lot like the first year of PHP. You have to remember that Rails has only been around for a year. Its thus not suprising that there's not a ton of support. I should say that it is suprising that it has SO MUCH support. Its catching on fast. As far as it being hard to use on WIndows...that's all I use it on, and I'm not having any problems. That being said, its currently much more of an "app" solution than it is a "software" solution. Its easy to get your own custom stuff up in it, especially if you know exactly what you want, but due to those same support issues your brought up, and simply due to have fast it is to develop in it, its not really something you go around and make CMS, forum systems, etc in that lots of different people will be using. Generally you are building an app that will run on a single site, which has its positives and negatives. To me it seems to be something more along the lines of del.icio.us, where you create an app that is always evolving and has open APIs that programmers can harness in that way.

Krak

My RoR install experience... http://blog.hatethis.org/?p=127 I do believe the RoR site says its for small to medium sites/apps. It may not be great for programming an entire CMS (I dont know, maybe it is?), but you sure as hell could use it to program certain parts of it... Indeed it is catching on, so is all this AJAX stuff, while RoR might not be the "second coming of christ" it is bad ass and it does save the coder a TON of time. Allowing him to focus more time on other things that need it. I would think that almost anyone can at least make the Cookbook, and Todo stuff in the tutorials... I mean, its so simple it almost hurts. Check them out, even if you dont plan on using it, they do give you a nice example of what it does and how easy/quick it does it. Todo : http://darkhost.mine.nu:81/~vince/rails/tutorial.html Cookbook: http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/01/20/rails.html?page=1

Kosmo

Yeah, but that is it, "rails saves you so much time" but is that all? If that is all, I can point you several thousand PHP coders and libraries that save you very much time, I have a friend who doesn't actually code anything useful in any language, but he codes definition libraries and such in almost every language imaginable, he was a DLL developer for some software company before the bubble bursted, and that is what he has been doing since, and using his addons I have coded several small PHP apps, even if I know PHP as well as I know latin, which is about both sides of a zero. And that is what I just get amazed at, people going nuts and cranberries over something so simple it almost lobotomizes me, even the guys at my work place who know nothing about web development are telling me about it, and I'm sure as hell, that they have not touched it with a long long stick. But after saying that, I AM going to read those books, I spent alot of money on them for christ sake, but AFTER I have finished with the LUA and Python books.

Krak

I dunno, Im not really authorized to speak on behalf of what RoR can and cant do...yet. I've just started, so I am as newbie as newbie gets. I can only speak of what I know of and have found out as of now. Which so far, is its ease and quickness. Making the same todo list/cookbook in php is easy (for me), but it would have taken more than the few minutes I did it with RoR in. And its nice, I dont have to type out (or copy/paste) all that code. I like it, dont think I will migrate to it 100%, but I will try to utilize it as much as possible. I need to learn some of that AJAX stuff too.

jesusphreak

Kosmo, you'll just have to use it before you can truly comment on it. Its not just about ease of use, there's just a ton of factors that go into it. Its just flat out a smart framework that does all of the low-level stuff for you and really gets your working on some serious apps. There's a very good reason why BIG NAMES in the web industry that formerly used PHP, Java, or even .NET are taking notice and using it, and its not just because it makes things easy for you. And PHP just looks ugly next to Ruby, honestly. I can go into the source of Vanilla and I appreciate how clean and how well it is done for a PHP app, but the syntax is just an abomination once you've been using Ruby for awhile.

jesusphreak

Here's just one of those "big names":

Link

Minisweeper

Call me an idiot, but which of the million 'source files' do i actually need? It seems to be shouting about rubygems but that doesnt seem to have much useful to it?

Kosmo

I'm actually questioning the same thing with mini here, I have studied scripting exclusively, I tried C and Java in school, but since I realized that scripting is the smart mans move, I moved to there, the RoR solution of one hundred files created on the fly for your "convinient" program doesn't just seem that "easy", compared to down dirty hand coded PHP or anything for that matter. And for the record, I have read some of thr RoR documentation, I'm just a sponge when it comes to knowledge :D

Minisweeper

what?

Kosmo

/me is puzzled

Minisweeper

When i was asking about source files i meant to install the server so i can run ruby stuff much like i use apache. Or doesnt it work like that. I dont get it?

Kosmo

Oh ... yes, ofcourse. I don't know if it's the fact that it's 3:25 on the morning here, or the fact that I'm hammered, but I just misunderstood what you were saying. But what I said still stoods, Rails tend to create way more files than what I need. Hehe