SPUG:Content Management software: opinions?

[Aaron Salo]

I have yet to exploit the full potential of Bricolage

http://www.bricolage.cc

but it is a robust package based running mod_perl on PostgreSQL and pushing
through HTML::Mason or HTML::Template as you prefer. 

Mature UIs, a nice setup, more than you'd expect. Feature set is overkill
for small tasks or tiny-team CMS needs, but it's worth a look for moderate
to large sites with a lot of content updating. It was developed to run
salon.com (a magazine site, think lots of articles published daily,
workflow and approval, publishing metaphors in the UI, etc).

A weakness is sparse (IMHO) documentation, it took quite a while of trial
and error and perldoc'ing the source code to get up and running, novice
users participating in a CMS flow would require significant training to
join the fun. 

On the other end of the spectrum (think a couple of people at your client
that know nothing about web stuff and just know MS Office that want to
manage the static content areas of a site), Macromedia just released a
product called Contribute. Contribute lets novices manage their own site
content and includes multi-version rollback, granular privileges, and etc,
and doesn't butcher page source code or require freakish MS security holes
euphemistically called "extensions" to run on your server. I am impressed
with how well it serves this niche, it's not quite a piece of heinous crap
like MS Fu*$edPage and for less than a hundred bucks a seat it's a good
solution for the low end of the market.

I am intrigued by some of the blogging products too. They handle the gist
of many CMS needs, that being easy web-based interfaces to add content to a
web site. Most customers that OMG I HAVE TO HAVE A CMS really mean hey,
every once in a while I want to add a news article, a press release, a job
vacancy, or an upcoming event to my calendar. 

Enjoy~
aaron

At 12:31 AM 1/22/2003 -0800, Kirby Krueger wrote:
>Any of you have any experience with these things?  Recommendations,
>cautionary tales, and the like?