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  • From: Deborah Ellington <deborah AT invincigirl.com>
  • To: internetworkers AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [internetworkers] CMS recommendations?
  • Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 12:25:32 -0500

The college I work at (A-B Tech) is in the process of evaluating various open-source content management systems to replace our current software, FrontPage 2003 (I know, I know, you're preaching to the choir, believe me). One strong contender is the CMS Silva, which runs on Zope. I know next to nothing about Zope, but have some experience setting up PHP/mySQL based CMS'es (Mambo/Joomla for example) so how hard can it be, right?

Problem is, despite plenty of websites alluding to Silva's "extensive documentation," I can find hardly hide nor hair of that alleged documentation. No books. No training available in the US, apparently. I can't even find user forums on Silva. I went to install a supposedly free-standing package of Silva/Zope/etc specifically for developing locally on Mac OSX, but got hit right away with instructions I couldn't follow, such as "Open the Terminal application and change directory to..." I know I am exposing my ignorance here when I say that I opened my Applications folder and found nothing called "Terminal." I gather the authors are referring to some kind of command-line application but I have no knowledge or experience in this area.

So why go with Silva? Primarily because one of the college's urgent needs is to streamline the production of catalogs and course schedules which are both printed on paper and published online. Currently we publish the (400-page) catalog to the web as a pdf, and you can just imagine how popular that is. Silva allegedly can import and export content wrapped in XML tags, and as our print designer already uses XML tags in all his production work, it seems like we could pretty easily produce the catalog content in a single application and then export it for both print and web.

My dilemma is -- if I can't even figure out how to install the software just to try it out, and there are no books/forums/training opportunities, how realistic is this product as a solution for the school? How the heck does anyone else manage to use it? Are there other products that would accomplish the same goal (importing/exporting XML content) but with less of a learning curve--given that I'm already comfortable with php/mySQL based products.

Oh, and our budget is like, nothing, fwiw, which is why we've been stuck with FrontPage for this long. I can buy a book, or take a class within a few hours' driving distance, but that's about it.

Thanks for any advice!

Deborah Ellington




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