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Five open source content management systems you should know about

Open source has a lot of advantages. For starters, the license is free, which means you take a huge part of the expense out of the equation, but just because the license is free doesn't mean the entire implementation is. You still have to learn about it, set it up, possibly customize it, roll it out, train your users and so forth, just as with any enterprise software. But with open source, you have a lot greater freedom to get under the hood than you do with its proprietary counterparts and to connect to other systems or even completely rework it if you wish. That's the beauty of open source. The code is open and accessible, so you aren't locked into a proprietary vendor's view of what your software should look like.

For these reasons and more, you should at least include open source options when you evaluate content management vendors. Many vendors like eZ Publish and Alfresco are working with large organizations, which shows how well they can scale to even the largest content repository requirements. 

We decided to make a list of five open source content management systems you should know about across the spectrum of content management platforms from ECM, to WCM, to blogging, and Digital Asset Management. As you would expect, these are just some examples of good open source products. We are aware there are many others we have left out.

If you have others you're fond of, please feel free to leave a comment and share them with us. Here's the five we think you should know about in no particular order:

Alfresco
eZ Publish
WordPress
Joomla!
Razuna

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Comments (13) | Post a comment

Comments

you missed drupal. I tried Alfresco, WordPress, drupal, and Joomla and chose drupal.

wordpress, talk about Blah blah blog

You also missed Plone, (www.plone.org). It is based on the Zope application server. It have a rich flora of plugins, The userinterace is very rich due to frequent use of AJAX.

There is also Radiant. (radiantcms.org)

Plone is a POS. What happened to programming the traditional way without CMS where organizations created their own framework. We did write code before CMS came around didn't we. CMS software just add another layer of complexity between the language used to write the CMS framework and the language used to write code withing the framework. Thats more learning than required.
For example to do some serious work in Zope you should at least know DTML (not DHTML). That means one has to learn another layer thats barely useful as a language.
It should just be necessary to know a few core languages and run with it, like Python or Java aren't enough by themselves without having to know something vague like DTML. The worst part is having to write code in a web-based management interface which in itself is inherently insecure.

You can try Alfresco, Joomla! and Wordpress (and others like Drupal that a commenter mentions) at BitNami (bitnami.org) It is free and takes 5 mins to install on Windows, Linux and Mac

Please take a look at open source digital asset management solution OpenEdit DAM. OpenEdit is a JAVA web app, includes CMS and other features such as ecommerce and social networking tools. OpenEdit DAM acts as a file repository for all digital files and allows you to collaborate, share, manage and re-purpose your digital assets. With OpenEdit, you can build, share and email collections, track usage, allow reporting and more.

I considered Drupal and Plone, but with only five spaces, there wasn't room for everyone. I don't consider WordPress blah. It's an excellent platform for bloggers and for web content management.

Thanks for all the comments.
Ron

Always funny that people only try CMS's that make use of past generation technology like php/perl/python, as a serious developer you don't want to use those languages anymore, also from a security perspective its not smart.

Something is wrong with this picture. Drupal is a major open source CMS but it didn't make your list because you didn't have enough slots? But kiddy packages like Joomla and Wordpress make the list? Does Fierce have something against the Drupal community?

Nothing against the Drupal community I assure you. There are lots of good candidates that didn't make the list.

If you are developing Plone DTML does not play a role. It is NOT TRUE that you have to write code in a web-based management interface. You can, but you are are highly recommended to develop in the file system. If you are talking about plone's security you should have a look at the CVE Vulnerability Database. You will find out that about 100 cves where reported for the Plone/Zope/Python stack in the last three years but a PHP based stack about 10,000.

A helpful resource for researching CMS systems is http://www.cmsmatrix.org The site has 1000's of CMS systems reviewed and the site allows side-by-side feature comparisons. Open Source and Closed Source, Free and For Sale. Read feed back from users and developers of each system.

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