CMS: OSCOM conference, day 2
The second day of the OSCOM conference continued with presentations by different open source projects, with a discussion panel on commercial issues at the end of the day.
Open Source Java Systems
Three different Java-based systems were presented. DBPrism is an Argentinian
project that has developed a very full java based platform for CMS development.
It is built on a lot of pre-built Apache modules and is designed with close integration with Oracle and provides a good platform for writing XML based web applications on Oracle. RedHat's offering is another open source Java
based CMS, brought into the RedHat fold when they bought ArsDigita, and the final submission is Wyona, the
CMS of Michael Wechner, founder and President of OSCOM.
Each of the Java CMSs provides a thorough set of functionality for content
management, and share a number of common components.
At the end of his talk Michael Wechner opened up a discussion on different projects working together to produce fewer open source CMSs of higher quality.
This was generally received as a "good thing", but something that was unlikely to happen in the short term.
The consensus was that co-operation between open source projects was more likely to success at a vertical level (i.e. using the same XML editor and XSLT pipeline processor) rather than in
merging separate CMS projects.
www.dbprism.com.ar
www.redhat.com/software/ccm/cms
www.wyona.org
Out-of-the-box
The afternoon moved on to presentations from projects that produced CMSs that
could be used out of the box to create sites. OpenCMS is a German initiative that runs on the Java platform. The user interface copies the style of
MS-Windows but within a web browser. This works well and the administration interface is significantly easier to use than the majority of commercially available systems. Plone runs on the Zope platform and has
a similar user interface. In addition, both Plone includes more portal based functionality and could be used fairly quickly to produce an intranet or extranet site. Xoops is PHP based and provides out-of-the-box community based websites with Forums and interactive functionality.
It runs an impressive array of website, and includes localisation into twelve
different languages.
www.opencms.org
www.plone.org
www.xoops.org
Open Source and the Commercial Sector
The final session of the day was a panel session discussing the differences between open source and commercial software. The consensus on the panel was that open source systems were technically comparable to their commercial counterparts, but lacked the organisation in terms of support and marketing facilities to compete head-to-head in most sales situations. The future for open source CMS seemed bright, with most of the companies involved in open source projects already profitable. With the expanding availability of charitable grants for open source software and projects to take open source software into the developing world, the expectation was that the next ten years would produce interesting interplay between the open source and commercial communities.
www.clarkweiss.com
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