CMS open source - Guide Open Source

Open source CMS

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“Content management

best open source solutions”

March 2012 © Copyright Smile – Open Source Solutions – Unauthorised reproduction prohibited

“ The best of open source CMS ”

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May, 2013 edition © Copyright Smile – Open Source Solutions – All unauthorised reproduction is strictly forbidden

PREAMBLE

SMILE

Smile is a company of engineers specialising in the implementation of open source solutions and the integration of open source based systems. Smile is a member of APRIL, the association for the promotion and defence of open source software, PLOSS, a network of open source software companies in the Ile-de-France region, and CNLL, the French open source software council.

Smile has a staff of more than 700 throughout the world, more than 500 of whom are in France (as at May 2013), making it the largest integrator of open source solutions in France and Europe.

Since approximately 2000, Smile has been actively monitoring technological developments, which has enabled it to discover the most promising open source products, to qualify and assess them so as to offer its clients the most successful, robust and sustainable products.

This approach has led to a range of white papers covering various fields of application: content management (2004), portals (2005), business intelligence (2006), PHP frameworks (2007), virtualisation (2007), electronic document management (2008), ERPs (2008), open source VPNs (2009), firewalls and flow controls (2009), message oriented middleware (2009), e-commerce and corporate social networks (2010), the Guide to Open Source and NoSQL (2011) and, more recently, mobile and open source census and compliance tools (2012). Each of these works presents a selection of the best open source solutions for the domain in question, their respective qualities as well as operational feedback.

As open source solutions continue to acquire new domains, Smile will be there to help its clients benefit from these in a risk-free way. Smile is present in the French IT landscape as the integration architect of choice to support the largest companies in their adoption of the best open source solutions.

Over recent years, Smile has also extended the range of services it offers. Since 2005, a consulting department has been supporting our clients both in the pre-project phases, in coming up with solutions and in project guidance. Smile has had a graphics studio since 2000, which in 2007 became an interactive agency (Smile Digital) that, in addition to graphics creation also offers expertise in e-marketing, publishing and rich interfaces. Smile also has an agency that specialises in third party maintenance (supporting and operating software applications) and a complete training centre, Smile Training. Finally, Smile is based in Paris, Lille, Lyon, Grenoble, Nantes, Bordeaux, Marseille and Montpellier. It is also present in Spain, Switzerland, Benelux, Ukraine, Morocco and the Ivory Coast.

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CLIENT REFERENCES

Smile is proud to have contributed, over the years, to some of the largest web fulfilment projects in France and Europe. Below are some examples of clients that have placed their trust in us.

Websites

EMI Music, Salon de l’Agriculture, Mazars, Areva, Société Générale, Gîtes de France, Patrice Pichet, Groupama, Eco-Emballage, CFnews, CEA, Prisma Pub, Véolia, NRJ, JCDecaux, 01 Informatique, Spie, PSA, Boiron, Larousse, Dassault Systèmes, Action Contre la Faim, BNP Paribas, Air Pays de Loire, Forum des Images, IFP, BHV, ZeMedical, Gallimard, Cheval Mag, Afssaps, Beneteau, Carrefour, AG2R La Mondiale, Groupe Bayard, Association de la Prévention Routière, Secours Catholique, Canson, Veolia, Bouygues Telecom, CNIL and more…

Portals, intranets and information systems

HEC, Bouygues Telecom, Prisma, Veolia, Arjowiggins, INA, Primagaz, Croix Rouge, Eurosport, Invivo, Faceo, Château de Versailles, Eurosport, Ipsos, VSC Technologies, Sanef, Explorimmo, Bureau Veritas, Région Centre, Dassault Systèmes, Fondation d’Auteuil, INRA, Gaz Electricité de Grenoble, Ville de Niort, French Ministry of Culture, PagesJaunes Annonces and so on…

E-commerce

Krys, La Halle, Gibert Joseph, De Dietrich, Adenclassifieds, Macif, Furet du Nord, Gîtes de France, Camif Collectivité, GPdis, Projectif, ETS, Bain & Spa, Yves Rocher, Bouygues Immobilier, Nestlé, Stanhome, AVF Périmédical, CCI, Pompiers de France, French Atomic Energy Commission, Snowleader, Darjeeling, etc.

ERPs and business intelligence

Veolia, La Poste, Christian Louboutin, Eveha, Sun’R, Home Ciné Solutions, Pub Audit, Effia, France 24, Publicis, iCasque, Nomadvantage, Gets, Nouvelles Frontières, Anevia, Jus de Fruits de Mooréa, Espace Loggia, Bureau Veritas, Skyrock, Lafarge, Cadremploi, Meilleurmobile.com, Groupe Vinci, IEDOM (Banque de France), Carrefour, Jardiland, Trésorerie Générale du Maroc, Ville de Genève, ESCP, Sofia, Faiveley Transport, INRA, Deloitte, Yves Rocher, ETS, DGAC, Generalitat de Catalunya, Gilbert Joseph, Perouse Médical, Société Générale, Solucom, Corsairfly, Virgin, Nexway, Sagem and more…

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Document management

Generali, HEC, JCDecaux, Serimax, Pierre Audoin Consultant, Alstom Power Services, NetasQ, CS Informatique, SNCF - Equipment Department, Mazars, EDF R&D, EDF Nucléaire, Conseil Régional du Centre, Leroy Merlin, Primagaz, Renault F1, INRIA, Belgian Ministry of the French Community, APAVE, CNIL, Services du Premier Ministre and others...

Infrastructure and hosting

Agence Nationale pour les Chèques Vacances, Pierre Audoin Consultants, Rexel, Motor Presse, OSEO, Sport24, Eco-Emballage, Institut Mutualiste Montsouris, ETS, Ionis, Osmoz, SIDEL, Atel Hotels, Cadremploi, SETRAG, Institut Français du Pétrole, Mutualité Française…

View our client references online at: http://www.smile-oss.com/en/Clients.

http://www.smile.fr/clients

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THIS WHITE PAPER

The basic uses of content management are easy to access on the web:

• From a developer’s point of view, it is easy to create a simple version of this type of tool, thus a staggering number of CMSs (Content Management Systems) have been developed, both by open source communities and in the world of proprietary software. The website, http://www.cmsmatrix.org/, lists more than 1,200 CMSs, ranging from Abo.CMS to Zwook!

• From a user’s point of view, it is often the first category of product implemented because these provide a degree of presence on the web, for a limited investment, and most organisations start with this step before embarking on more ambitious projects (e-commerce, community websites, customer service, etc.).

These two factors mean that open source solutions have historically been very present in the field of content management. In this mature market, open source solutions are in a position of strength. Despite the difficulty of obtaining reliable statistics, most sources agree that Drupal, Joomla! and WordPress are the three most popular content management solutions in the world (see, for example, http://trends.builtwith.com/cms, http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management/all and http://wappalyzer.com/categories/cms).

The time is now right for a new edition of our white paper because, despite the maturity of the market and its solutions, at present we are seeing a number of major developments in content management:

• The appearance of smartphones: The widespread use of high performance mobile terminals has opened up Internet access to a vast population. Indeed, for many people their smartphone is the first computer that they ever own and their first access to the connected world.

• The massive adoption of social networks: A growing proportion of time spent on the web is devoted to discussions on social media (27% according to a recent study by Experian - http://press.experian.com/United-States/Press-Release/experian-marketing-services-reveals-27-percent-of-time-spent-online-is-on-social-networking.aspx ).

• The public’s migration from traditional media to online content: Regardless of the medium (printed press, television, radio or film), media consumption is evolving toward more customised modes, in which spatial and temporal frontiers have been abolished (digital versions of printed press, pure player online news, catch-up services, podcasts, VOD, etc.).

These new developments have had such an impact that it is no longer possible to survive without a digital communication strategy. Moreover, the content management sites now coming online are faced with new challenges, in a highly competitive environment.

http://www.cmsmatrix.org/

http://trends.builtwith.com/cms

http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management/all

http://wappalyzer.com/categories/cms

http://press.experian.com/United-States/Press-Release/experian-marketing-services-reveals-27-percent-of-time-spent-online-is-on-social-networking.aspx

http://press.experian.com/United-States/Press-Release/experian-marketing-services-reveals-27-percent-of-time-spent-online-is-on-social-networking.aspx

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In this context, open source solutions are preferred options, thanks to their predisposition for innovation. In this white paper, we will present the major actors in this ecosystem, based on two interpretations: an analysis of the core concepts, grouped together by category, and an analysis by tool uses.

Please feel free to share your opinions and assessments of this white paper with us. One address for both: [email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

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OPEN SOURCE SOLUTIONS

Each year, open source is stretching into new domains, in an extraordinarily dynamic movement. Open source vendors are now firmly established and their products are mature. They have shifted from being simple alternatives to historical proprietary solutions, to being vital tools in today’s context.

Naturally, the economic benefits are one of the top reasons for choosing open source solutions. Even if implementing an open source solution does not mean a zero project cost, these solutions are always markedly less expensive than their proprietary equivalents. We have found that the integration of an open source solution can be five to ten times less costly than a proprietary solution.

This is all the more true in that the costs of related services also tend to be lower, because the products’ openness facilitates the dissemination of knowledge.

But as and when these solutions reach maturity, a lower price tag ceases to be the main selection criterion.

The main arguments then hinge on:

• Independence from, or lesser dependence on, a vendor. We know that changing tools can be very expensive, and vendors may be tempted to take advantage of the cash cow of their now captive clients, often referred to as vendor lock-in. The solutions described here all have very broad support matrices and can run in many different environments.

• Openness is also an important argument. Open source solutions are generally more standards compliant and more open to the addition of extension modules. For a component as central as a portal, an open solution is crucial.

• Longevity is another key selection criterion. Of course, open source solutions cannot make a promise of eternal youth. But the circulation of their source code (uncompiled) to a community of clients and partners ensures a broad distribution of the know-how associated with their implementation and therefore of their upgradability.

When it comes to longevity, the worst that can happen to an open source solution is the gradual disaffection of the communities, typically in favour of a more promising solution. In other words, it is possible that a change in product might be necessary one day. But at least this always occurs slowly, and the client has time to organise a migration.

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It should also be stressed that, even if the original vendor were to default one day, the possibility would remain that a community might take over the product and its development, which is the very principle of open source licenses.

And now, a quick word on openness. The possibility of modifying the source code is of fundamental importance in theory, but risky in practice. As a result, openness should not be assessed in these terms, but rather in the capacity to accept extensions and interface with other applications.

In substance, it is important to understand that a proprietary vendor’s interests do not always converge with those of its clients. Of course, it is evolving on a competitive market, so its product must be better than its competitors’. But once its position has been clearly established, a vendor might determine that:

• Its product needs to give a strong performance - but not too strong, because the more servers are needed, the more licenses will be sold.

• Its product must be robust - but not too robust, because it will need to continue to sell its support services.

• Its product must be open - but not too open, to keep control over its clients.

We are not saying that proprietary vendors are Machiavellian to the point of downgrading these qualities in their products; we are merely saying that their strategy priority is not necessarily placed on these qualities.

Overall, the choice of an open source solution is, from our perspective, one that places equal emphasis on the solution’s total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment (ROI) in the medium term.

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CONTENTS

PREAMBLE .................................................................................................. 2

SMILE ................................................................................................................................................................... 2 CLIENT REFERENCES ................................................................................................................................................. 3 THIS WHITE PAPER ................................................................................................................................................... 5 OPEN SOURCE SOLUTIONS ......................................................................................................................................... 7 CONTENTS ............................................................................................................................................................. 9

CORE CONCEPTS ....................................................................................... 12

STRUCTURING CONTENT ......................................................................................................................................... 13 CONTENT STRUCTURING ................................................................................................................................ 13 MULTILINGUALISM ....................................................................................................................................... 13 CONTENT ORGANISATION ............................................................................................................................... 13 MULTI-SITE CAPACITY .................................................................................................................................... 14 MULTIMEDIA LIBRARY ................................................................................................................................... 14 VERSION MANAGEMENT ................................................................................................................................ 14

MANIPULATING CONTENT ....................................................................................................................................... 14 MANAGEMENT INTERFACE ............................................................................................................................. 15 CONTENT SUBMISSION .................................................................................................................................. 15 LIFE CYCLE ................................................................................................................................................... 15 COLLABORATIVE CONTRIBUTIONS .................................................................................................................... 15

USING CONTENT ................................................................................................................................................... 16 TEMPLATES ................................................................................................................................................. 16 ACCESSIBILITY .............................................................................................................................................. 16 REFERENCING .............................................................................................................................................. 16 SYNDICATION, IMPORTS/EXPORTS, LINKS TO SOCIAL NETWORKS............................................................................. 16 COORDINATION OF RENDERING (CXM) ............................................................................................................ 17 INFORMATION GATHERING ............................................................................................................................. 17 PORTAL FUNCTIONS AND CUSTOMISATION ......................................................................................................... 17 SEARCH ENGINES .......................................................................................................................................... 17 MOBILITY ................................................................................................................................................... 18

PERMISSIONS AND ACCESS SECURITY ......................................................................................................................... 18 USERS, GROUPS AND ROLES ............................................................................................................................ 18 SOCIAL FUNCTIONS (INTERPERSONAL CONNECTIONS) ........................................................................................... 18 CONTACT DIRECTORY .................................................................................................................................... 19 SINGLE SIGN ON ........................................................................................................................................... 19

TECHNICAL PLATFORM ............................................................................................................................................ 19 FRAMEWORK / TECHNICAL BASE ...................................................................................................................... 19 REMOTE API ............................................................................................................................................... 20

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PLUG-INS AND EXPANDABILITY ........................................................................................................................ 20 PERFORMANCE ............................................................................................................................................ 20

USE CASES ................................................................................................. 21

INSTITUTIONAL WEBSITES ........................................................................................................................................ 21 MARKETING WEBSITES ........................................................................................................................................... 22 SOCIAL NETWORKS (CORPORATE) ............................................................................................................................. 23 MULTI-SITE PLATFORMS ......................................................................................................................................... 24 INTRANET PORTALS ................................................................................................................................................ 26 CUSTOM SITES ...................................................................................................................................................... 27

BEST SOLUTIONS ....................................................................................... 29

PREAMBLE ........................................................................................................................................................... 29 DRUPAL............................................................................................................................................................... 29

KEY POINTS ................................................................................................................................................. 29 CORE CONCEPT ASSESSMENT .......................................................................................................................... 38 SUITABLE USES ............................................................................................................................................. 38

EZ PUBLISH .......................................................................................................................................................... 39 KEY POINTS ................................................................................................................................................. 40 CORE CONCEPT ASSESSMENT .......................................................................................................................... 49 SUITABLE USES ............................................................................................................................................. 50

HIPPO CMS ......................................................................................................................................................... 51 KEY POINTS ................................................................................................................................................. 52 CORE CONCEPT ASSESSMENT .......................................................................................................................... 65 SUITABLE USES ............................................................................................................................................. 66

JAHIA .................................................................................................................................................................. 67 KEY POINTS ................................................................................................................................................. 68 CORE CONCEPT ASSESSMENT .......................................................................................................................... 84 SUITABLE USES ............................................................................................................................................. 84

JOOMLA! ............................................................................................................................................................. 85 KEY POINTS ................................................................................................................................................. 86 CORE CONCEPT ASSESSMENT .......................................................................................................................... 95 SUITABLE USES ............................................................................................................................................. 96

LIFERAY ............................................................................................................................................................... 97 KEY POINTS ................................................................................................................................................. 98 CORE CONCEPT ASSESSMENT ........................................................................................................................ 110 SUITABLE USES ........................................................................................................................................... 110

SPIP ................................................................................................................................................................. 111 KEY POINTS ............................................................................................................................................... 112 CORE CONCEPT ASSESSMENT ........................................................................................................................ 125 SUITABLE USES ........................................................................................................................................... 125

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TYPO3 ............................................................................................................................................................. 126 KEY POINTS ............................................................................................................................................... 127 CORE CONCEPT ASSESSMENT ........................................................................................................................ 137 SUITABLE USES ........................................................................................................................................... 138

WORDPRESS ...................................................................................................................................................... 139 KEY POINTS ............................................................................................................................................... 140 CORE CONCEPT ASSESSMENT ........................................................................................................................ 148 SUITABLE USES ........................................................................................................................................... 149

OTHER OPEN SOURCE CMSS ................................................................................................................................. 150 AMETYS ................................................................................................................................................... 150 CENTURION ............................................................................................................................................... 151 CMS MADE SIMPLE ................................................................................................................................... 151 CONCRETE5 ............................................................................................................................................... 152 DOTNETNUKE ........................................................................................................................................... 152 LUTECE..................................................................................................................................................... 153 MAGNOLIA ............................................................................................................................................... 153 MODX .................................................................................................................................................... 154 PLONE ..................................................................................................................................................... 154 SILVERSTRIPE ............................................................................................................................................ 155 UMBRACO ................................................................................................................................................ 155 BUT ALSO ................................................................................................................................................. 156

SUMMARY .............................................................................................. 157

CONCLUSION .......................................................................................... 159

TYPO3 ............................................................................................................................................................. 159 DRUPAL / WORDPRESS ........................................................................................................................................ 160 EZ PUBLISH / HIPPOCMS ..................................................................................................................................... 161 JAHIA / LIFERAY .................................................................................................................................................. 162 JOOMLA! / SPIP ................................................................................................................................................. 163

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................... 164

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CORE CONCEPTS

In the world of content management, it is difficult to identify one product as better than another. They often have different scopes and approaches that will be able to adapt more or less well to a project’s context.

As a result, selecting a solution is first and foremost a matter of correctly qualifying one’s expectations (short, medium and long term). This is why, on the basis of our project experience, we presented a methodology for analysing and selecting a CMS for a given project in our white paper, “200 Questions to Help You Choose a CMS”.

We remain convinced that this methodology, based on identifying a project’s key criteria (and their relative weights) is the best approach... but it is also the most time consuming one, particularly since it requires advanced knowledge of all the CMSs, which is not the case of everyone.

To help you to select the best CMS for your expectations, this white paper contains:

• First, a chart summarising this paper with all the scoring (over 27 criteria – our own work was based on more than 400!);

• Second, an overview of the results of those assessments, grouped into five core concepts described below;

• Last, another interpretation of our assessments based on the most common uses of sites created using a CMS.

In this chapter, we will present the 27 criteria that we selected, as well as the way that we grouped them into the following five core concepts:

• Structuring content

• Manipulating content

• Using content

• Permissions and access security

• Technical platform

http://www.smile.fr/Livres-blancs/Gestion-de-contenu-et-GED/Choisir-un-CMS

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STRUCTURING CONTENT

It can be tempting to want to address all the aspects of content structuring and manipulation in a single block. While the two points are undeniably linked, the notion of content structuring has come to have such an impact on the selection of a CMS solution that it seemed important to break down its core concepts.

Content structuring Content has a structure: a title, sub-title, hook, body of text, etc. that can also include images and documents.

Some CMS tools only have a single type of content, a “generic” or “all purpose” content type. This can be suited to a large number of uses, provided that there is a sufficient quantity of “generic” content types. Typically, a content rich site such as www.bbc.com might be able to work with a single content type for all its subject matter.

However, the ability to define specific structure content - by defining a list of the fields forming that content - is a key option in any content management tool. Structuring content is giving it meaning, and the benefits of proper content structuring are immense: complete publication and layout control, better content checks at input and increased content usability, via field searches for example.

Multilingualism To build a multilingual website, a CMS needs to manage different translations of each item of content. This can be complicated to manage: fields to be translated and fields without a translation, special translation validation paths, recognition of the visitor’s language, etc.

On the back office end, it needs to be possible to display all the messages and labels appearing in the user interface in the language of each contributor and each administrator.

Content organisation There may in some cases be a need to differentiate between multiple tree structures: storage, back office and system trees, and one or more publication trees corresponding to the site’s (or sites’) structure built on that system.

The simplest tools can only manage a single tree structure, likewise for the system (back office) and the website (front office). It should also be noted that some tools now offer an organisation that is similar to document management, with the use of a free and/or tree based taxonomy.

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Multi-site capacity It is increasingly rare for a company to select a CMS with the idea of building a single site. Most companies are looking for a central tool that will serve as a real base for their web policy, allowing them to implement one, two or even ten sites or more. There are numerous possibilities for multi-site architectures (sharing content, functionalities, rights and more), and vigilance is necessary in this area because, while most modern CMSs provide for multi-site rollouts, there are different scales in terms of the scope of functionalities available, as well as ease of use.

Multimedia library A multimedia library makes it possible to manage multimedia objects, image files, sound files, office automation files, animation and videos, but also files made available by a third party supplier (YouTube, Twitter, Prezi, etc.), and to store them according to a filing plan in the interest of their future reuse. This raises the question of how to distinguish between these library objects and the content itself: are images mere accessories used to create “real content” or are they content in and of themselves?

Here, we have assessed the wealth of media types accepted by the solutions, as well as the functionalities offered for their management (metadata, categorisation, copyright management, image retouches, etc.).

Version management Version management can sometimes be summarised in a single question: “Does the tool manage versions?” We assessed this aspect in greater detail by looking at the structural depth of the versioning mechanism.

In particular, we considered the following points:

• Level of configuration detail

• Automation

• Version comparisons

• Searching and restoring prior versions

MANIPULATING CONTENT

This category looks at the manipulation of content, including life cycle management. After defining a content type, it can be brought to life, i.e. created, enriched, and the content

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modified and published. Of course, this is the central function of a CMS, and it requires special attention.

Management interface Over the years, the content management interface has become a key part of the use of CMSs. The use of technologies like Ajax (a set of technologies that enable data exchanges and manipulation without having to reload the page) makes it possible to implement interfaces that are nothing like mere web pages.

Beyond the ergonomic layer (which remains a fundamental point in any good management interface), ease of use - which is so important to taking ownership of the tool - was also considered in the tools’ assessment.

Content submission Contributions are the entry or modification of content. If a company wants to decentralise this, to offer the option to a broader population, the contribution method should be as simple as possible and separate from overall content management, which is naturally more complex.

We also focused in particular on the simplicity of contributions and the various available methods. Other aspects, such as rights management and forms that define structured content, are covered by other analytical points.

Life cycle This refers to dated publication and the validation workflow or, in other words, the process leading up to validation and publication of content. The more decentralised contributions are, the more flexible - and configurable - the validations processes need to be, according to each category, content type and population group.

Collaborative contributions Collaboration can take on a variety of forms: comments on articles, attached forums, shared calendars with task management, wikis, blogs, document revisions with tracking of changes, observations, annotations, and more.

There are few CMSs that focus on this dimension, although it is an expected option. Today, communications tend to be separated more and more by media (people do not communicate in the same way on paper as they do on the web). CMSs are therefore becoming a content production site and so must include collaboration tools.

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USING CONTENT

Content delivery entails producing pages for a given medium, by integrating the content into a specific model.

The publication process can be broken down into two steps: content selection and template based page layout.

Templates Every CMS has a template system used to define the page layout and format of the content published on the website. There is no real standard when it comes to templates; each CMS has created its own mechanism. In recent years, many CMSs have expanded their functional scope to allow templates to be edited and modified via web interfaces (namely via drag and drop functions), which greatly simplifies changes to websites.

Accessibility Producing an accessible site naturally means taking account of various disabilities (sight, motor skills, etc.), but also working to ensure that technical criteria like connection speed, browser type and the absence of plug-ins will not disrupt the view of the site or, at the very least, will not prevent it from being viewed. This chiefly pertains to the templates created at the time of integration of the CMS, although there are some functional points that need to be verified when selecting a tool.

Referencing The importance of referencing has been clearly established at present. The first point is that it has become very difficult to handle, i.e. to aim for an artificially enhanced ranking. Nonetheless, there are some minimum practices that should be followed in the interest of good referencing.

On this subject, we assessed each tool’s capacity to allow the implementation of all the good practices that foster search engine referencing.

Syndication, imports/exports, links to social networks Syndication means sharing content with partner sites. There is one main standard for this, RSS, but other techniques are also available.

In this chapter, we cover the capacity to import and export content, whether for an exchange or for sharing, particularly on social networks.

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Coordination of rendering (CXM) The majority of websites display the same content to all their visitors. However, there are cases where it could be beneficial to adjust the delivered content by visitor, displaying to each what he/she wants to see, what he/she is authorised to see or what is recommended for him/her, from a unique content base administered at the global level. In other cases, the content could be animated to make the site appear more dynamic.

Information gathering Online forms have already fallen outside the domain of content management. They are more a question of activities’ functionalities, like quizzes and forums.

We have still used this as a point in our analysis however, because forms themselves can be similar to content, which can be developed in the back office, much like a contribution.

Portal functions and customisation A portal is a tool used to create composite pages formed of content on the one hand and application modules on the other. These application modules can come from groupware (webmail, calendars, tasks, etc.) or from custom business applications.

There are some “pure” portal tools that only handle the assembly of pages by offering interfaces with the included modules. This is the case, for example, of Websphere Portal Server and Jetspeed.

But other tools combine CMS and portal functions in a single application, which considerably simplifies implementation.

Search engines Searches are a basic functionality, regardless of a site’s scale, simply because they allow visitors not to have to think about the site’s organisation. It also makes it possible to “Google”, i.e. to apply processes learned elsewhere within the site.

Users from the “Google generation” cannot live without this.

The majority of CMS tools offer an embedded search function. Where this function is of good quality, it is preferable to use it rather than installing a dedicated engine that is external to the CMS. In some cases, an external engine can offer better language management (conjugations, synonyms, semantic proximity or inclusion, etc.), but can also exhibit shortcomings like deferred indexing, no management of visitor rights, and so on.

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Mobility In a world where web access from mobile devices has become commonplace, the question of your content management tool’s behaviour under these conditions is an inescapable one.

A number of strategies are possible:

• Offering use that has been adapted to smartphone and tablet browsers (responsive design or alternate versions)

• Serving content via a mobile application

For this criterion, we assessed the tools’ capacity to implement either or both of these strategies. We also considered the availability of native mobile applications.

PERMISSIONS AND ACCESS SECURITY

A good CMS should provide for flexible management of authorisations and access rights. For this to be successful, this security should be transparent in the eyes of the contributors.

Users, groups and roles The back office comprises all the admin, management and contribution interfaces. Of course all users need to sign in on these interfaces and it must be possible to clearly define the options available to each of them. This is what is referred to as rights management. It is chiefly structured around the users themselves, but can also - and is often - based on groups and roles.

Social functions (interpersonal connections) When you want to create social network type dynamics via a CMS, a certain number of functionalities linked to the concept of a user will need to be available. These include, in particular:

• Rich, configurable user profiles

• Activity walls

• Means of connecting to others

• Instant messaging

• Etc.

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In rating this analytical point, we assessed the presence and user-friendliness of these aspects.

Contact directory The majority of companies now have a central directory. This is a repository that contains all the company’s staff members (along with their information sheets).

Most CMSs currently offer interfacing with these directories (OpenLDAP, AD, etc.). This makes it possible to centralise user information in a single repository shared by all the IS applications. In this case, the CMS connects to the LDAP directory and retrieves the necessary information.

For this criterion, we assessed the CMS’s integration with the company’s information system.

Single sign on Single sign on (SSO) allows users to access a set of web applications without having to re-enter their user IDs and passwords.

CMSs that do not natively support SSO can be modified, although this entails a tricky intervention by technical experts.

For many CMSs, SSO is implemented via plug-ins. However, attention must be paid to the quality of such plug-ins.

TECHNICAL PLATFORM

There are more and more of us surfing the web these days. Site hit numbers have exploded. The smallest blog can receive thousands of visits each month, or even each day.

This is an aspect that can no longer be ignored. Beyond a tool’s functional scope, ease of handling and community dynamics, it is absolutely vital that its ramp-up capacity be taken into consideration. How disappointing it would be if the fruit of many weeks of design work could not be universally viewed due to a faulty architecture!

In this section, we propose an approach to technical platforms. If you would like to examine this subject in greater depth, please see our white paper on high performance architectures.

Framework / technical base It is common - even normal - for the choice of a CMS to begin with technical considerations, because businesses often have standards or preferences that will directly eliminate certain tools.

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Beyond the selected technical environment, other key technical considerations involve performance levels on the one hand and the ability to accept distributed or clustered architectures on the other.

Remote API CMSs are generally controlled and managed from an administrative (back office) interface. However, it can be useful to interact with the CMS remotely or via a third party programme.

For large scale projects, interfacing with third party tools is unavoidable; in these cases, the use of a well-documented, functional API is extremely important.

Plug-ins and expandability The concept of expandability is now offered by the majority of CMSs, albeit with varying levels of quality (which is a crucial point to the continued buy-in of a community’s thousands of developers). For CMSs turned toward this model (kernel + extensions), the difference lies mainly in the base’s capacity to offer a coherent, functioning whole (access to functionalities, dependency, etc.).

We have also included an assessment of the number and quality of the available extensions for this criterion.

Performance It is impossible to build an ambitious site without considering the “Performance” dimension. Yet this is the most complicated point to evaluate, because performance is dependent on the fulfilment context (which modules? which options? which customisations?) and the operating context.

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USE CASES

These use cases correspond to the main uses made of CMSs. They are based on our careful reading of the hundreds of client files that we handle each year and, we hope, offer an accurate representation of how CMSs are used.

For each of the six most common uses that we identified (institutional websites, marketing websites, social networks, multi-site platforms, intranet portals and custom sites), we selected the most important functionalities and determined a weighting for each. Of course this breakdown is somewhat arbitrary and a number of you may wish to modify the criteria, but it does offer a quick overview of the CMSs best suited to the main use cases.

We hope that this new tool will help you to identify more quickly the CMSs best suited to your context and that you will be able to pursue your projects by asking us for more advanced demonstrations of them.

INSTITUTIONAL WEBSITES

An institutional or corporate website is the most common use of common management tools (other than blogs). The vast majority of active websites fall into this category of site, created to present the company or organisation, its services, its staff, and even its range of products and service. They rarely have a very large scope, typically limited to a few dozen (or hundred) pages.

In our experience, CMSs with a high quality of content management basics are in the best position to help build a quality institutional website. These CMSs need to offer advanced management of structured content (articles, news items, events, special offers, etc.), multilingual management, good content organisation, a multimedia library (to be able to display product images and documentation), versioning management, an easy to access management interface, a life cycle (for content validation), etc.

Of these points, we consider referencing to be key to any institutional website. The fact is that there is no point in creating a superb site if it is not referenced and so does not attract any visitors. The same is true of accessibility: it is important to ensure that your website is accessible to as many users as possible.

Lastly, template management (at the heart of the CMS) is another important point. Although all CMSs can serve content via templates, not all of them can serve to multiple channels (to a

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mobile specific version, for example) and not all offer the option of modifying template layouts on the fly (in the back office).

The following graph shows the criteria we used to determine the suitability of the selected CMSs for institutional website use (plus the weighting assigned to each criterion).

Expected scope of an institutional website

MARKETING WEBSITES

Unlike institutional websites, marketing sites are designed to start a dialogue between a prospective customer and the company, with a view to selling its products, packages or services. In this way, one might say that it lies somewhere between a corporate website and an online shop.

First, a “marketing” CMS is expected to offer advanced template and media library functions, a pre-requisite for successfully promoting what the company has to offer.

But over and above a presentation of the company, a marketing website aims to serve user-specific content, customised based on the pages visited by each individual on the website, his/her centres of interest and his/her behaviour. This is what is called CXM (Customer eXperience Management), the latest trend in CMSs and which offers very attractive ROIs.

However, a simple presentation of the offers that might be of interest to the user is not enough; his/her personal data also need to be collected (in order to be able to contact him/her

4 REFERENCING 3 CONTENT STRUCTURING 3 MULTILINGUALISM 3 CONTENT ORGANISATION 3 TEMPLATES 1 MULTIMEDIA LIBRARY 1 VERSION MANAGEMENT 1 MANAGEMENT INTERFACE 1 CONTENT SUBMISSION 1 LIFE CYCLE 1 ACCESSIBILITY 1 SYNDICATION, IMPORTS/EXPORTS, LINKS TO SOCIAL NETWORKS 1 MOBILITY 1 USERS, GROUPS AND ROLES

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in person, for example) via forms, contests and so on. This enrichment of the CRM database is an important issue for marketing websites, which is why information gathering is the crux of the scope of this type of website.

Finally, marketing websites also require many other functionalities, such as good referencing, content structuring, and a search engine, to name but a few.

Additional functionalities might supplement the scope of a typical marketing website, like a newsletter or statistics tool, but for the purpose of this paper, these are considered to be external tools.

The following graph shows the criteria we used to determine the suitability of the selected CMSs for marketing website use (plus the weighting assigned to each criterion).

Expected scope of a marketing website

SOCIAL NETWORKS (CORPORATE)

There are some excellent open source tools dedicated to managing social networks, whether public or corporate. However, many CMSs have also developed social functions which, when combined with the fundamentals of content management, offer alternatives - that are more than credible - to the pure players in this segment.

To set up a social network (or a highly social website) based on a CMS, it is first expected that the content management tool will have advanced functionalities in terms of social animation. By this, we are referring to profile presentation, interpersonal connection, activities feed,

11 COORDINATION OF RENDERING (CXM) 3 TEMPLATES 2 MULTIMEDIA LIBRARY 2 REFERENCING 2 INFORMATION GATHERING 1 CONTENT STRUCTURING 1 MANAGEMENT INTERFACE 1 CONTENT SUBMISSION 1 SYNDICATION, IMPORTS/EXPORTS, LINKS TO SOCIAL NETWORKS 1 SEARCH ENGINE 1 MOBILITY 1 SOCIAL FUNCTIONS

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alert/notification, microblogging, bookmarking, rating and other tools. This is the most important point in any social network type project.

These functionalities alone however will not suffice. It is also important to have collaborative contribution functions (the line between social and collaborative is very thin), such as wikis, blogs, group management, task management, polls, calendars, a file sharing space, etc., as well as portal type functions providing for customisation (display of information based on the user’s group and/or centres of interest) and offering customised views of the social network’s content (e.g. a personal page).

Lastly, a social network type site must also be based on strong content management foundations like structured content, a multimedia library, a search engine, a directory, and so on.

The following graph shows the criteria we used to determine the suitability of the selected CMSs for social network use (plus the weighting assigned to each criterion).

Expected scope of a social networking website

MULTI-SITE PLATFORMS

A multi-site platform is not truly a use case, as defined above for institutional and marketing websites. It usually needs to be examined in correlation with the type(s) of sites being rolled

11 SOCIAL FUNCTIONS 3 COLLABORATIVE CONTRIBUTIONS 3 PORTAL FUNCTIONS AND CUSTOMISATION 1 CONTENT STRUCTURING 1 CONTENT ORGANISATION 1 MULTIMEDIA LIBRARY 1 VERSION MANAGEMENT 1 LIFE CYCLE 1 SYNDICATION, IMPORTS/EXPORTS, LINKS TO SOCIAL NETWORKS 1 INFORMATION GATHERING 1 SEARCH ENGINE 1 USERS, GROUPS AND ROLES 1 CONTACT DIRECTORY 1 SINGLE SIGN ON 1 PERFORMANCE

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out (e.g. institutional multi-site platform, etc.). However, this need is being expressed with increasing frequency and is often described in the specifications that we receive.

It is true that web related needs (new institutional website, intranet, brand website, blog, etc.) are growing exponentially and can be very costly to companies. As a result, these latter often feel the need to streamline their costs, which is achieved by setting up a common platform. This is the use case that we will be presenting here.

Naturally, to implement a multi-site platform, a CMS that offers those features, i.e. that is capable of hosting 1 to X sites on the same instance, is needed. Today this need is more or less covered by all the CMSs that we selected here. However, the functionalities for industrialising the platform are not equal from one CMS to the next. These functionalities include the creation/modification/deletion of a site on the fly (via a graphic interface), creation of a site from a set of data or set of templates, content sharing (omnipresent content, multiple positioning, etc.), resource sharing, and shared and/or independent configuration, amongst others.

Other functionalities also seem to us to be important in building a true multi-site platform, such as content organisation (which can be a real headache in certain CMSs in multi-site mode), life cycles and multilingualism (for international platforms). We would also like to note that some points, like the quality of the technical platform and the CMS’s performance can also be sensitive subjects, depending on the project’s ambitions.

The following graph shows the criteria we used to determine the suitability of the selected CMSs for multi-site platform use (plus the weighting assigned to each criterion).

Expected scope of a multi-site platform

11 MULTI-SITE CAPACITY 3 CONTENT ORGANISATION 3 LIFE CYCLE 2 MULTILINGUALISM 1 VERSION MANAGEMENT 1 MANAGEMENT INTERFACE 1 CONTENT SUBMISSION 1 USERS, GROUPS AND ROLES 1 FRAMEWORK / TECHNICAL BASE 1 PERFORMANCE

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INTRANET PORTALS

The creation of an intranet is one of the most common use cases for content management tools. Of course a variety of portal types (communication portals, application portals, document portals, collaborative portals, etc.) is available, but their one commonality is their need for at least basic content management.

Thus, whether a portal is intended for application or communication purposes, it must satisfy the three core concepts that define a portal: a single point of entry, data aggregation and customisation. CMSs generally satisfy the first two points fairly well, but there are real differences when it comes to customisation, which we have entitled “Portal functions and customisation”. This entails giving users the possibility of configuring their own pages with different portal content. This is the very basis of a portal.

Yet a portal with this functionality alone would be of dubious assistance. A portal also needs a broad functional scope, ranging from collaborative contributions and information searches. In this typical use case, we have selected 18 useful - if not indispensable - criteria for the success of an intranet portal, including but not limited to a multimedia library, version management, information gathering, user management, single sign on and social functions.

The following graph shows the criteria we used to determine the suitability of the selected CMSs for intranet portal use (plus the weighting assigned to each criterion).

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Expected scope of an intranet portal

CUSTOM SITES

In theory, a content management tool is not designed to create custom sites or even custom applications. To some, this may seem illogical, give that CMSs have typically been created to circumvent the need for the custom developments used to produce websites until the early 2000s.

At the same time, it is true that it can be tempting to use a favourite CMS to develop a small custom application, for example to manage the members of an association or to create an order placement extranet for an SME. Of course, this will not yield the same results as might be expected from custom developments based on a specialised framework. But with the content management foundations offered by certain CMSs, quite comprehensive results can already be obtained.

After all, if you only want to develop a small application, why not make use of the CMS’s security policy, relational data model (structured content), search engine (multi-faceted), etc.? When taking this approach, it is important to privilege CMSs with a quality technical platform, including a large API and recognised expandability.

11 PORTAL FUNCTIONS AND CUSTOMISATION 3 COLLABORATIVE CONTRIBUTIONS 1 CONTENT STRUCTURING 1 CONTENT ORGANISATION 1 MULTIMEDIA LIBRARY 1 VERSION MANAGEMENT 1 MANAGEMENT INTERFACE 1 CONTENT SUBMISSION 1 LIFE CYCLE 1 TEMPLATES 1 INFORMATION GATHERING 1 SEARCH ENGINE 1 USERS, GROUPS AND ROLES 1 SOCIAL FUNCTIONS 1 CONTACT DIRECTORY 1 SINGLE SIGN ON 1 REMOTE API 1 PERFORMANCE

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Other criteria like content structuring and template management also have a key role to play. This is similar to performance management, to our eyes the main limitation on this type of use (CMSs are built on a principle of caches which, if not activated, engenders a strong risk of a drastic drop-off in performance).

We would like to specify here that the creation of an independent application is already a very advanced case and that, without going even that far, you may find yourself needing to develop a custom functionality on your site. The criteria presented below are valid for all these different cases.

The following graph shows the criteria we used to determine the suitability of the selected CMSs for custom site use (plus the weighting assigned to each criterion).

Expected scope of a custom site

9 REMOTE API 5 FRAMEWORK / TECHNICAL BASE 5 PLUG-INS AND EXPANDABILITY 1 CONTENT STRUCTURING 1 TEMPLATES 1 USERS, GROUPS AND ROLES 1 PERFORMANCE

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BEST SOLUTIONS

PREAMBLE

We will now present an objective overview of the open source content management solutions that seem to us to be the most relevant for the French market.

For the nine most emblematic solutions, we provide a detailed explanation of how they handle the five core concepts that we defined above.

Each presentation concludes with an assessment of the solution’s quality in terms of the five core concepts included in our study and its alignment with the six types of uses presented here.

DRUPAL

Version studied: 7.22 Website: www.drupal.org Community driven solution

Drupal is a multi-faceted CMS. Originally designed as a collective blog, it has a wide variety of possible applications today: from the corporate website to the community portal, Drupal does it all! It was designed in the 2000s by Dries Buytaert and has enjoyed worldwide success ever since. An enormous community - with more than 960,000 people listed on drupal.org - has formed around the product.

The main strength of this CMS lies in its expandability. It can easily host numerous complementary modules (forums, photo galleries, polls, forms, newsletters, messaging, chats, surveys, online payments, shared calendars and more). In particular, it has well designed, highly appreciated modules developed by the community, that make it particularly well suited to corporate social networks. Version 7 has won over a multitude of large companies and the product is now considered to be one of the most complete and best balanced.

Drupal is published under the GNU GPL and is 100% open source. Support is available from Acquia (www.acquia.com).

Technically speaking, Drupal is built around LAMP technologies (PHP and MySQL in particular).

Key points

Structuring content One of Drupal’s main strengths is the ability to create different types of content easily, depending on the type of article (“news” content, “data sheet” content, etc.).

http://www.drupal.org/

http://www.acquia.com/

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For this, Drupal has a native module called Field UI (formerly CCK) that makes it possible to create content types containing fields that are customised in a user-friendly data entry interface.

Managing a content type

When creating new content type forms, the administrator is asked to choose from amongst a long list, such as date, email address, group of fields, files, table, hidden fields, text, page break, drop-down menu and rich text zones (managed using a WYSIWYG editor), enabling the customisation of the content type to meet very specific needs.

A behaviour can be defined for each field, such as a default value (blank or a specific value to be entered at the time of creation of the content type), data entry checks (field format, checks on use of the @ sign or on the number of characters, required or optional field, etc.).

Drupal also differentiates between “managing fields” and “managing display” which, in concrete terms, means that you can define fields in your content structure that will be entered but not displayed by the front office (e.g. metadata fields).

Content types can be modified at any time. Fields can be added and even deleted if there is already content of that type. The fields’ order can also be arranged with a simple drag and drop action.

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Rearranging fields

Navigation is built using the taxonomy.

It entails creating a category based tree structure used to classify the content. A contributor’s degree of freedom in selecting a category is indicated when the terminology is created (free by keyword or specific choice from a list). There are no limits on the depth of the tree or the number of categories used.

Manipulating content Drupal can natively “promote content on the home page” and/or “pin content to the top of lists”.

This operation can of course be expanded: Drupal can be used to create linear workflows with X levels. The main principle is to define an order of statuses for a publication and for users or user groups responsible for validation.

A complementary module for this workflow principle is the “action” module, included by default in the Drupal kernel. This makes it possible to trigger an event when there is a change from one status to another, such as sending a notification to the person in charge when certain actions are performed (media obsolescence or need to change a password, for example).

To take this a step further, one often used solution is to install the Workbench module.

By default, this module can generate a unified and simplified view for users with specific rights to use the workflow.

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Workbench module

Workbench has related modules like Workbench Access (a workflow based on hierarchical rules like menus, taxonomy or any other structure that is easy to create), Workbench Moderation (used in particular to present all the content awaiting an action) and Workbench Media (a media workflow).

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History of revisions

Using content Drupal’s pages are created in blocks that can be (re)positioned easily using the admin interface in different regions of the web page, such as the header and footer, the left and right columns, the upper and lower content, etc.

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Selecting the locations of a template’s regions

Each item of content is managed in the form of a block that can be moved (by drag and drop) from one area of the website to another:

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Managing blocks

These “blocks” may contain links or information streams of your choice. Technically, you can place any type of content in them: videos, images, information streams, the latest articles or comments, links and polls, while defining the rules for their display (e.g. feed the last 20 articles tagged as “thematic dossiers” and display the content in lists of five).

Permissions and access security In Drupal, you can create users and user groups with cross-cutting roles. The granularity of these roles and rights is very fine.

The security rules associated with contributions, administration and views are determined in the same way. This provides for real flexibility in differentiating between normal users and administrators. Users are not just divided between the back office and the front office.

Access rights allow you to control and limit what users can do on your site. Each user role (defined on the user roles page) has its own allotted access rights. You can use access rights to unveil new functions to special users. Access rights also allow trusted users to share in the administrative burden of very active sites. Rights are assigned intuitively, based on a table presenting the users and the various modules. The administrator simply ticks the box to activate the right he/she wants to assign.

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Below is an example of how users and their roles are managed:

Managing roles

Below is a detailed example of rights and roles management in Drupal:

Managing rights

Drupal also stands out for its native capacity to enrich user profiles, as if they were a type of content. Many modules are available to take social functions a step further. These include Homebox (for customised pages), Invite Friends (friend management), Content Profile (profile data management), FriendList (list of friends), Organic Group (groups management), Privatemsg (private messaging), and more.

The Drupal Commons distribution has a broad native scope capable of rapidly implementing a real social network.

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Drupal Commons 3

Technical platform

Drupal’s current version is not based on a framework but does have a very complete API.

One of the solution’s greatest strengths is its modularity, i.e. the possibility of adding functionalities by expanding the system’s kernel. A large community of developers publishes extensions online.

These modules can be added at any point in the life of the application. This implementation provides for great freedom to act, makes the solution easily upgradable and promises its longevity. To achieve this, the interface offers a module management interface (for activation and dependencies).

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Generally speaking, a special link is added to the configuration menu displaying the installed modules.

Adding a module

Core concept assessment Drupal has a balanced profile that is generally solid across all the core concepts.

It scores especially well for the technical platform, thanks in particular to the modularity of its architecture which is thoroughly exploited given the large number of modules provided free of charge by the community.

Conversely, content structuring is a little weak, primarily due to the tool’s relatively limited multi-site capacity and the absence of an undeniably authoritative module to manage media libraries (despite good existing candidates such as Assets, Media and Scald).

Suitable uses Unsurprisingly, Drupal’s modular architecture, combined with the strength of its community, yields strong scores for this CMS for many of the use cases considered here, particularly when it comes to creating a custom site.

Drupal is however slightly weaker for setting up a multi-site architecture. Although Drupal is natively multi-site, there are few tools to simplify this type of use, and these have room for improvement.

Finally, for intranet portals, although Drupal rates an honourable score, its portal functions do not entitle it to a place on the winners’ podium. It should be noted, though, that Drupal can

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shine when implementing certain types of intranet sites, particularly in response to corporate social networking issues.

EZ PUBLISH

Version studied: 5.0 Website: www.ez.no Vendor driven solution (eZ Systems)

eZ Publish was created in 1999 by eZ Systems. eZ Publish stands out from other open source CMSs for its possibilities in terms of configurations and extensions: it is presented as a ready to use tool, but also as a development framework for the creation of business applications.

http://www.ez.no/

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In terms of the fundamentals of content management, eZ Publish is one of the most powerful open source tools available today. It pushes the object oriented approach to its full potential, making each content item an object and applying all available methods to each one: multiple positioning, versioning, multilingualism, links between content, access rights, workflows, etc. This makes it a highly configurable CMS. The latest versions offer recommendations functionalities and a wide array of possibilities for multi-channel management.

eZ Publish is an open source software solution published under the GPL. Two editions are distributed: a free Community edition and a commercial Enterprise edition that provides stability, support and a warranty.

Technically, eZ Publish is written in PHP, runs on Apache and MySQL (the latest versions of PostgreSQL and Oracle are also supported via plug-in modules), manages three different file caches and separates content very distinctly from presentation.

In November 2012, eZ Systems published the first version of eZ Publish 5.0, which incorporated few functional changes and was instead chiefly a technical overhaul based on the very well reputed framework, Symfony2.

The version assessed in this white paper is version 5.0 in Legacy mode, i.e. based on the old technical architecture but enjoying the newest functionalities. This is the mode that we recommend while awaiting the release of version 5.1.

Key points

Structuring content At present, eZ Publish is one of the CMSs that makes it possible to define very easily any content type you might desire, with the utmost ease via a web interface.

A new content type is characterised by a list of typical fields that could be short texts, enriched texts, numerical, dates, tick boxes, files, etc. Validation rules (text only, telephone number, email address, etc.) can be applied to these fields.

Once an article type is created, contributors can enter that type of article using a form that is automatically served by eZ Publish. Page templates can refer to the different fields in the article and, in this way, can control its presentation in a very detailed, very flexible manner.

A considerable quantity of standard content is offered with eZ Publish: articles, sections, galleries, calendars, events, forums, and more. Each item of content can be freely modified through the back-end interface, for the addition or deletion of attributes.

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Another great strength of eZ Publish is that typical content can be defined as an attribute of another type of standard content, without requiring any development. The very concept of relationships between objects (“Relational database”) can therefore be implemented very easily.

For example, if you want to create Trade Fair type contents, you would define a “class” (container) with two attributes, such as: a Text field and a Date field. If you want to create Conference type content, you would define a class with three attributes: a Title field, a Relationship to Trade Fair objects field and a Date field.

The site’s tree structure is completely dynamic and is easy for any person with the necessary rights to modify on their own.

Content can be positioned in several folders on the tree and be presented differently depending on its location, and this without having to be duplicated. It should also be noted that the tree structure has contextual menus that provide fast access to key functions like editing, copy-and-paste and version management.

eZ Publish also offers native categorisation solutions, often enhanced by the use of the eZ Tags extension, which offers the possibility of truly setting up a classification plan or taxonomy that will be applied to the content at the time of its creation and which can cover all content types or be specific to each individual content type.

Categorisation offers your web users “cross-cutting” navigation and allows you to create and display different pages and content, according to one or more keywords entered. In this way, their display on these portals can be made conditional on one or more keywords. For example, a portal page might simultaneously display all content tagged as “profiles” as well as all content tagged as “news” for a profile type, etc.

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Publishing content in multiple locations

All eZ Publish content can be published in multiple locations on the site(s) managed by the platform. Naturally, this is a single content that will simply be assigned to multiple spots on the tree structure.

Version management is another strength of eZ Publish. All the content available in eZ Publish is subject to the principle of versioning whenever it is modified. It is very easy to revert to an earlier version. All this is true of other CMS solutions: two versions of the same content can be compared, with additions appearing in green and deletions in red.

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Revising content

Manipulating content eZ Publish’s management interface can be used to define validation and publication workflows.

Workflows enable the publishing - or “unpublishing” - of content based on start and end dates, successive validations (X levels tracked), workflow assignments to content types, workflow assignments to a section of the website, and so on.

Sample workflow rule

Workflow tracking is a native function of the dashboard’s admin area. The administrator has access to a global view, and each contributor can track the actions assigned to him/her.

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Previewing in the back office

Page results can be previewed at any point along the publication path. The input data are then displayed in the management space, as shown in the example to the left. The page is displayed in-context (template, section, blocks, etc.).

Using content Content organisation in eZ Publish is page-oriented. The native functionality manages pages, not blocks.

To meet this need, eZ Publish can integrate the eZ Flow module, used to select the page’s format (two columns, three columns, etc.), then each zone can be filled with one to X elements (components).

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Within these different columns, the different blocks can be assigned an order by dragging and dropping them in place.

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eZ Publish natively includes some 40-odd blocks, some of which have a specific behaviour or fields (Location field for the Google Maps block, photo selection for the Carousel block, etc.).

When supplemented with eZ Flow, the eZ Publish solution offers the following model: Layout > Template > Page – Component > Object (content). This is a very advantageous model, which namely makes it possible to pool content, thus simplifying the site’s maintenance and upgrades.

eZ Publish’s pages are based on templates. These templates are associated with content via management rules configured during the development or TPM phase. They are usually difficult to modify without the intervention of technical staff.

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Permissions and access security Decentralised contributions, like reserved access to private zones in each site, is covered by user rights management. And eZ Publish offers exceptionally detailed rights management functions.

Groups tree

Users are divided into groups. These groups are also “container” type content, similar to categories. Here again, the CMS’s native functions optimise their management: creation of tree structures, reassignments, copy-and-paste, notifications, etc.

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User details

In eZ Publish, whether they are contributors or approvers, users are all handled like content objects. This presents a multitude of advantages, namely the possibility of defining attributes to characterise them.

Technical platform

eZ Publish is a content management system, but also a framework that can be used as a base for custom developments.

Thanks to its modularity, eZ Publish is a highly upgradable system. Its extension mechanism makes it possible to add upgraded functionalities without denaturing the application’s kernel.

Rolling out an extension requires technical intervention on the server, and the extensions can then be activated from the back office.

eZ Publish uses a template mechanism offering the truly free creation of graphics and ergonomics. In this way, isolated from any technical constraints, the substance determines the form.

Based on a technical architecture model organised into software layers, eZ Publish rolls out its solution with strong scalability, beginning with very simple architectures in which all the

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components can be installed on a single server, and ending with far more sophisticated architectures for high traffic systems.

To reach optimal performance levels, eZ Publish integrates different levels of caches, starting with the database, by way of cache systems internal to eZ Publish, all the way to front-end HTTP cache solutions.

The eZ Publish solution is built on existing technologies with a strong presence in the open source environment:

• PHP 5.3.3 and up as its development language

• SQL database: MySQL, version 5.1.61 strongly recommended

• Apache 2.2.15 and up

Core concept assessment eZ Publish provides excellent cover of the core concepts that we examined.

In terms of content manipulation and use, it was only penalised for domains on the fringe of content management: collaborative contributions and portal functions.

This solution also just missed out on a perfect score in the field of permissions and access security due to its underdeveloped social functions.

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Suitable uses In respect of its suitability for our use cases, eZ Publish scored remarkably well for custom sites, institutional websites and marketing sites, particularly the latter thanks to its strong CXM positioning.

It also achieved a more than respectable score for use as a multi-site platform.

However, its marks fall outside the traditional uses of content management, particularly where social functions are involved.

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HIPPO CMS

Version studied: 7.7 Website: www.onehippo.com Vendor driven solution (OneHippo)

Hippo CMS is an open source CMS written in Java. It was created in 1999 by Dutch vendor OneHippo. It is heavily used in the Nordic countries and especially in the Netherlands.

http://www.onehippo.com/

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It includes most of the functionalities that one might expect for a CMS: document model publishing, content creation, multilingualism, templating, publication workflows, multiple sites, content import/export, direct content publishing, etc. The user interface is less extensive than in some of the other products, but it remains ergonomic and functional and includes most of the common functionalities expected of a good CMS. The product’s roadmap is, moreover, particularly dynamic and promises a comprehensive, quality suite.

Hippo CMS is distributed under the Apache License 2.0. Two editions are distributed: a Community edition and an Enterprise edition that provides stability, support and a warranty.

Based on a solid, cutting edge technological base, Hippo CMS offers real benefits for the integration of functional needs by developers. The designers of Hippo CMS endeavoured to comply with standards (JEE), to use proven tools like Spring, Jackrabbit and Maven, and to define a clear, scalable architecture. These efforts make it easy for developers to take charge of the tool.

Key points

Structuring content Definition of structures

Initially centring its functionalities on the independence of the content and its publication, Hippo CMS needs to provide strong structures. The associated admin functionalities are, not surprisingly, very advanced.

Default content types

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Hippo CMS can define new content types and configure them in great detail, using the solution’s back office. For example, the data capture mask for the structure’s various attributes can be defined.

Choice of input form

Creating a structure for content

There is also a large number of attribute types, several of which can be assembled to create “composite attributes”, like geographic coordinates or an address.

The level of configuration detail goes as far as the option to define the character of each attribute: required, multi-value, ordinate, etc.

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Special attributes can also be added. For example, the community edition offers a list of links to other documents with type ahead suggestions.

Finally, some legacy options are available, making it possible to create multiple database types quickly without having to redefine each property.

While these functions reflect the depth of the underlying JCR storage engine, certain aspects of the interface can by overly technical.

Content tree

The system is organised in a tree structure that lists the structured content, images, resources (files, videos, etc.) and the various taxonomies.

Classic handling functions are available, and the types of content allowed in a sub-tree can be specified.

Content tree

Internationalisation is provided natively, with each folder at the tree’s root being attached to a language. The tree structure’s elements are then linked to their translations in the

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corresponding trees. If the hierarchy is missing in one language, it can very easily be filled in using a dedicated interface when translating content.

Tree translation wizard

Manipulating content Dashboard

When contributors sign on, Hippo CMS takes them to a dashboard. This dashboard supplies shortcuts to the most common actions (accessing content, creating event type content, and so on), a news feed that lists the latest operations on the site, and a to-do list with details of all the workflow validation tasks in progress.

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While it is not as visually appealing as other solutions’ dashboards, the Hippo CMS contributions interface is extremely effective and functional.

Once in use, the interface provides all scheduled publication functions, version management with restores, content reference management, previews on content channels and the creation of translations.

One interesting option is the possibility of publishing and tracking several contents at the same time, thanks to a tab based set-up.

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Content pending publication, with tracked changes

Contributions are made using the input form that was configured when the content type was created.

All the management functions are available: rich text editor, image selection, selection of links to other content, etc.

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Publishing

The content can follow a publication process, with an indicator showing the publication status of each content item.

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Managing images

Finally, image management is both simple and well-conceived, with automatic resizing during uploading and an integrated cropping function.

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Using content The heart of the solution lies in the use of the content administered in the central system, i.e. its use on different channels. This is the domain in which Hippo CMS offers the most interesting functionalities.

Its multi-site capacity is very advanced, thanks to its Channel Manager. The Channel Manager makes it possible to administrate the various delivery channels.

Channel Manager

The pages on the different channels can be administrated by dragging and dropping the various components.

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Creating a web channel with drag and drop components

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Creating a mobile channel

Once its multi-channel functionalities had been implemented, Hippo CMS sought to reinforce the relevance of the content served to users.

This first involved the ability to customise the behaviour of the different components based on roles and therefore only concerned signed on users.

The chief new development in version 7.8 is an extremely advanced customisation module that tracks each user’s behaviour on the site (whether or not they are logged in) and determines their profile, or persona.

This is based on a list of observations like the categories of pages visited, the user’s geographic location and, if signed on, all the information linked to his/her profile. The collected information can also be enriched through an interface with the CRM.

A correspondence with preconfigured personas is then established and the associated content is displayed.

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It is important to note that, like the rest of Hippo CMS, this module was designed to be directly usable by the functional teams, which find it to be an extremely powerful tool for testing and improving the relevance and the interest of served content.

Real time monitoring dashboard

Finally, this module comes with a dashboard that allows you to monitor user behaviour on your sites - live - which makes it possible to iterate very quickly and validate how your customisation is configured. It should be noted that these highly advanced CXM (Customer eXperience Management) functionalities are only available as an option in the Enterprise edition.

Permissions and access security For rights management, Hippo CMS offers an access control model based on classic roles. The platform’s functions are attached to application resources or “domains”, and users or user groups have roles in each domain that define their permissions.

This user management mainly pertains to contributors and is independent of the CXM module’s personas.

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Details of a group and its permissions

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Technical platform The solution’s architecture is highly modular and aims to facilitate its integration while also offering excellent scalability. It hinges on its central repository, admin interface and delivery layer.

The repository is the heart of Hippo CMS, where all content, metadata and other configurations are stored. More than just a storage engine, it also provides process and search management functionalities.

It is based on Apache Jackrabbit, an open source implementation of the JCR standard (JSR 170 and 283). The content is then displayed via a series of standardised interfaces, which allows for the integration of third party tools to automate creation, imports, publication and so on.

The admin interface is completely customisable and is based on the Apache Wicket framework.

The delivery layer, called HST (Hippo Site Toolkit), provides the tools needed to develop sites and delivery channels quickly with a REST API or RSS feeds.

It includes a template engine, which is easy to configure using the admin interface, a tag library and an expression language, to simplify the development of views in JSP or FreeMarker.

Lastly, it also contains cache, performance audit and migration wizard tools.

Core concept assessment The Hippo CMS solution has good scores across the board.

There is however a slight negative in the collaborative contributions and social functions aspects which, it is true, are on the fringe of pure content management. This can be seen on the diagram below as a slightly weaker result for the “Permissions and access security” concept.

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Suitable uses With its strong content management foundations and a CXM orientation similar to that of eZ Publish, the two products’ use profiles are very similar, with, in the case of Hippo CMS, a Java architecture.

Due to its limited number of extensions though, Hippo CMS falls short of excellence when it comes to creating custom sites and so must “make do” with a very solid score.

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JAHIA

Version studied: 6.6 Website: www.jahia.com Vendor driven solution (Jahia)

Jahia is a Franco-Swiss product created in the 2000s, which occupies a place apart in the world of JEE portals and CMSs. In fact, Jahia is one of only a few solutions to combine JEE portals with content management in a single, perfectly integrated product.

http://www.jahia.com/

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Jahia, which is free to download, has impressive finishing touches and packaging. It stands out from other CMSs thanks to its content administration interface, which is merged with the site itself. In functional terms, Jahia is one of the most compete CMS solutions, incorporating multi-site management, versioning, effective workflows, structured data, multilingualism, highly detailed rights management, etc. In particular, version 6.5 saw the arrival of a very user-friendly interface and a very complete template publisher.

Jahia makes for an excellent alternative to the portal solutions available from the major proprietary vendors, with the possibility of viewing and modifying its source code (under the GPL for the Community edition), thereby ensuring the tool’s longevity and alignment with real needs on the ground. Jahia also has an Enterprise version available under a commercial license that provides stability, support and a warranty.

Jahia is built on JEE technologies: persistence via Hibernate, support for JSR 170 standards, Apache Lucene search engine, support for JSR 168 portlet standards, etc.

Key points

Structuring content All the content is organised in a tree structure that is stored in the JCR, and a rich, scalable series of “engines” allows all their properties to be manipulated. This allows all the core content management functions - and more - to be accessed quickly.

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Creating an event content

In this example of event creation, the engines are represented by the tabs along the top.

They represent the wealth of information that can be entered in Jahia:

Content: management of the content’s properties Rendering: content delivery format (complete view, summary, link, etc.) Metadata: keywords SEO: management of “nice URLs” Tags and Categories Options: cache and site map management, and other content-specific settings Roles: management of the roles assigned to groups and/or users for that content

(including legacy) Use: list of pages where the content will appear History and Versions: with remote management of publication Visibility: rules engine to define the visibility of content Workflow: management of publication workflows, but also unpublication and

translation Channels: introduced in version 6.6.1, this allows for the detailed management of

publication channels

Naturally, access rights make it possible to limit the available functions.

Jahia’s version management is also of interest, with a version comparison tool that displays two versions of the same content, side by side, and allows you to navigate through time and restore an earlier version.

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Comparison of two versions

The translation interface also uses a side by side display.

To simplify administration, many views are available on this tree, along with dedicated functions by object type: managers.

List of managers

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Site Manager

For example, the Content Manager organises structured content and the Repository Explorer offers a more technical view and can browse the submission’s actual tree structure.

Document Manager

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Jahia provides strong management of multiple file formats (.ppt, .xls, .flv, .mov, etc.) and there are no restrictions on the types of files that can be managed within the document management system included in Jahia xCM.

The Document Manager presents a rich Ajax (Google Web Toolkit) interface, as can be seen in the above screenshot.

This manager also offers a multitude of other functionalities like an online image editor, resizing, simple processing functionalities and automatic labels.

Basic cropping, resizing and rotation functionalities can be used on image files. A rules engine (Drools from JBoss) can also automate certain processes, like the creation of labels and the extraction of metadata (EXIF and Office). Completely customised processing rules can easily be added, based on the project’s needs.

Repository Explorer

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Thanks to whole-site import/export functionalities, Jahia offers the possibility of managing a site-making factory directly in the back office, each site is created based on a set of pre-defined templates. Adding a site from a template or content repository takes just a few minutes.

Managing multiple sites

Manipulating content Several editing modes are available, devised for the different classes of users: an Edit Mode and a Contribution Mode with a simplified interface.

Edit Mode provides access to a rich interface with advanced drag-and-drop page layout, module use and content management functionalities.

On the left, a side panel is used to manage the site’s tree structure, with indicators showing publication statuses.

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Edit Mode: Managing page tree structures

In addition to page tree structures, this panel also provides access to:

Components that can be dragged and dropped on the page Content Documents Searches Categories Publication channels

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Contribution Mode

The preview function, for example, is very advanced, with the possibility of choosing a user, publication channel, date and more.

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Previews on multiple devices and orientations

From the perspective of collaborative contributions, a distribution named Jahia Wise is dedicated to the rollout of collaborative workspaces.

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Home page of a collaborative space

The home page for this type of space contains statistics and activities streams, an “Express yourself” field for users, upcoming tasks on the calendar, polls and more.

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Applications for collaborative spaces

This home page provides access to the space’s dedicated applications:

• Document management • Calendar and tasks • Discussions • Wiki • Blog • Poll management

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• Members directory

Personal page

The application also provides a personal page allowing each user to enrich their profile with their skills in different domains, see the tasks assigned to them, ask to join other collaborative spaces, and manage their collections of documents.

Using content First introduced in version 6.5, Jahia Studio makes it possible to model templates without any technical intervention, using formatting components that can define the different zones based on the 960 Grid CSS standard.

Different themes can also be attached to a set of templates, to implement different graphic charters by site, section or page. This functionality, combined with the option to offer different views (compact, complete, etc.) and different types of pre-defined skins for each element of

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content, by means of a simple selection on the contribution interfaces, offers extremely flexible presentation options.

Jahia Studio

Jahia Studio was primarily designed for integrators and the most advanced users, to modify or create new templates or variations on existing templates quickly. Its very simple interface and the ability to roll out all the templates to the sites very quickly make this a very powerful tool indeed.

Permissions and access security Rights management comes as standard and is performed via roles, whose configuration determines access to the content (read, write, publish) and to the product’s functionalities. There are no limitations on the number of roles, which are assigned to users and groups for a specific content or set of content, applying a concept of legacy to propagate rights to the underlying elements.

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Managing rights

When applied to an element of content (section, page, content, document, etc.), the combination of all the authorised actions that constitute the roles, with the users in groups, provides for detailed rights management, down to the level of a block of content on a page or a specific action, if necessary.

A first level of customisation can be effectively provided to the user, thanks to this rights and user management. To take it a step further, Jahia offers dedicated spaces to users through their own customisation actions.

Personal space

This space includes a “My portal” dashboard that each user can build as they see fit. It primarily comprises content streams, although the vast majority of the front office components can also be integrated. Jahia even offers a “Save as My portal component” function that allows users to choose the blocks that will form their personal dashboards:

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Saving as a My portal component

However, as these personal spaces are part of Jahia’s back office we do not recommend modifying them at the time of integration of the solution.

Technical platform Jahia has embedded a large number of different technologies and frameworks. This section will give you a glimpse of those included in Jahia and how they are used.

Jahia stores all its data in a Java Content Repository (JCR) (Apache Jackrabbit 2.x):

• two workspaces are used in the JCR, one for content under development (“Default”) and one for published content (“Live”)

• the JCR content is stored in a SQL database (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MSSQL, etc.) In the interest of performance, node data are stored in a serialised form.

Jahia integrates the following components:

• the kernel (services and frameworks), which itself contains:

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o Apache Lucene as the search and indexing engine

o Apache Camel as the enterprise integration engine

o the Spring framework as the technology for dependency injection and bean configuration (and so much more)

o Google Web Toolkit with Sencha GXT extensions for the interface in Edit and Studio Modes

o jQuery and extensions for Contribution and Online Modes

o JBoss Drools as the rules engine

o JBoss BPM as the workflow engine

• modules (extensions and templates) containing:

o XWiki as the wiki engine

o Apache Shindig (an OpenSocial implementation)

o LDAP connectors

o search engine optimisation (SEO) tools

o tags and tag clouds

Modules are a very important concept, first introduced in Jahia 6.5, that define Jahia’s extension infrastructure. They are used to add functionalities to Jahia. The term “functionalities” is generic and covers a very wide spectrum. It can refer to new content types, new ways to display content, interactive components, more complex functions, or even a set of templates.

A module can contain:

• Definitions of content types

• View scripts (JSP, etc.)

• Static resources

• Bundles and other files of properties

• Java or JAR classes

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• Etc.

Core concept assessment Jahia has solid assets across all the core concepts considered by our study.

Suitable uses Thinking outside the content management box with Jahia Wise, Jahia stands apart from the other solutions for its remarkable suitability for intranet portals.

Jahia’s balanced core concepts profile is reflected here, thanks to its rather strong versatility. That being said, Jahia is less suited to the creation of marketing websites than other tools that have decided to bank on CXM.

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JOOMLA!

Version studied: 3.1 Website: www.Joomla.org Community driven solution

Joomla! is a CMS developed from Mambo in 2005. It was created after a disagreement between the lead developers and the company coordinating the development. Today, the majority of developers in the community devote their work to Joomla!, which clearly tips the scales in its favour.

http://www.joomla.org/

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This tool chiefly stands out for the user-friendliness of its admin interface. The mantra is to “give full product control to non-technicians”. Page creation, categorisation, searches, access stats, meaningful URLs and a multitude of modules are integrated directly and do not require any special knowledge for their implementation. This CMS is ideally suited to personal websites but could also satisfy the needs of certain professional sites, particularly corporate-style sites (requiring simple publication).

Joomla! is a 100% community based solution published under the GNU GPL.

Joomla! is written in PHP and uses a MySQL database.

Key points

Structuring content Joomla! is well known for being very user-friendly, and its highly polished version 3.x will certainly not disprove that reputation... on the contrary! Most of the fundamentals of content management are there.

But among the numerous discussions of the product’s roadmap, one point drew everyone’s attention: should a CCK equivalent (Drupal) be included or not? In other words, a model used to define content types. Joomla! decided not to go down that road, once again privileging simplicity (the true strength of this historical CMS).

Example of an article modification interface

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Not to worry, though: if you need to define several content types for your site, the extensions are legion (the CMS’s newest major strength is its community). They include Cobalt7, ContentBuilder, Fabrik, FlexiContent, Form2Content, K2, Seblod and Zoo. These extensions take relatively different approaches and we recommend that you install and test them before choosing the one that best matches your expectations (for our part, we prefer Seblod and K2).

Adding a content type in Seblod

Concerning the organisation of content, Joomla! is relatively complete, with storage by menu (i.e. trees), by category and by tag. The underlying principle is powerful (namely the Drupal style menus) but it can be disconcerting for people accustomed to tree views in which content is stored in a category.

It should also be noted that there are dozens of options for activating a title, label, etc. Every effort is made to avoid having to code a particular management rule, as can happen in other, more “Enterprise” CMSs.

Example of an organisation of content

In respect of Joomla!’s capacity to become a real site-making factory, that time has not yet come. This is a point that, to the dismay of many a developer in the community, was not included on the roadmap for the latest version 3.x. Yet it would be inaccurate to say that

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Joomla! cannot handle multiple sites. Strong extensions like MightySites, JMS Multisites, Virtual Domains, and more are available to fill this gap. JMS Multisites seems to be the most promising module, with the possibility of sharing content between different sites, etc. Unfortunately, this extension is not open source and comes with a price tag of €50 to €175.

Finally, if the concept of versioning (managing versions of the same content) is important to you, Joomla! offers a native first level of abstraction with an article’s statuses: unpublished, published, archived or trashed. Of course, here again, you can take this further thanks to some terrific extensions created by the community, such as FlexiContent (not yet compatible with version 3.x) and Content Versions (RJ Versions).

To conclude this brief overview of Joomla!’s content structuring capacities, we would like to make note of the existence of a multimedia library that can be used to organise any type of medium and use it in your articles. Version 3 added multi-loading without Flash.

Example of a media library

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Manipulating content Proper content handling requires a quality interface. Joomla! provides an effective response to this need. Although this need was already met in its previous versions, version 3 goes even further with the use of the Twitter Bootstrap framework.

Joomla! dashboard

This same ergonomic quality can also be found in the CMS’s various screens, particularly the article input screen with its fixed action bar, WYSIWYG editor, clear codification of parameter activation or inactivation, and more.

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Examples of an action bar and configuration buttons

Although Joomla! is very pleasant to use to submit content (via a HTML editor, multiple uploads, etc.), it is very light on life cycles. A validated article is published by default, with no validation chain. If this is an important need for you, extensions (Article Factory Manager, User Article Manager, JE Story Submit, etc.) can offer an initial solution, while still remaining quite different from what can be found in other “Enterprise” CMSs.

Using content With Joomla!, you will find two types of templates: those for the back office (management space) and those for the front office (area visible to web users). The default theme for the management space, Isis, is a real success (full responsive design) and we do not recommend that you change it.

Joomla! provides a template manager, from which you can modify assignments, change parameters (colours, logo, etc.), create copies, and more.

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Template Manager

With this manager, you can view the different positions defined in the template. These positions are determined through programming and accommodate the elements of the site as defined in the template (e.g. menus and sign on forms).

Defining the different locations in a template

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In the Module Manager, for example, you can specify where the current module should be displayed/presented. The drop-down Position list supplies this information.

Defining a module’s position

It should be noted that the community provides access to hundreds, if not thousands, of templates by default. Joomla! 3 includes a good 10 or so templates with native responsive design behaviours.

Permissions and access security Joomla!’s security policy was long disparaged. Not that it presented any particular weak points in its security, but because it offered administrators few combinations for correctly managing their security policies.

Beginning with version 2.5, Joomla! revised its ACL (rights management) module and now offers a system that is relatively comprehensive, if somewhat complex natively. The appearance of the concept of groups was applauded, which simplifies rights management operations.

Unlike other CMSs (that use generic rules to define rights), access rights are defined directly in the articles. Thankfully, the concept of legacy simplifies this management.

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Defining access for an article

If you want to simplify your life in terms of rights management for your site, you can use (or rather acquire, for a fee) the excellent extension, ACL Manager which provides a global view of all rights on your site.

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Example of a view with the ACL Manager extension

Technical platform There are five types of extensions for Joomla!: Components, Modules, Plugins, Templates, and Languages. Visit the website, joomla.org, to see the thousands on offer. Each of these extensions handles a very specific functionality.

Joomla! offers relatively complete extension management, which can show you all available updates, their statuses, etc., at a glance.

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Extensions Manager

You will find more than 10,000 commercial and non-commercial extensions (with more than 2,000 that are compatible with Joomla! 3) in the online JED (Joomla Extensions Directory). Their quality can vary greatly, so do not hesitate to test them or seek advice on them.

The technical platform has been greatly improved over the years. It is supported by quality layers. Lastly, Joomla! has a very strong, very complete API.

Core concept assessment The Joomla! content management solution did not score quite as well as the rest of our selection but is still nicely balanced.

Further, the vast quantity of extensions made available by its community allowed it to come up trumps with its technical platform.

However, Joomla! scored lower on managing roles and user groups, which penalised it substantially in the “Permissions and access security” category.

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Suitable uses Joomla!’s moderate scores on the core concepts are reflected in our analysis by use case, all the same yielding a relatively balanced profile.

The tool is however better predisposed toward the set-up of institutional websites, a use case that can make do with the most classic content management functions, and, thanks to the wide array of available extensions, toward the creation of a custom site.

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LIFERAY

Version studied: 6.1 Website: www.liferay.com Vendor driven solution (Liferay Inc.)

Liferay is a good-level open source corporate portal solution that can be used, among other functionalities, to compile content and information, to share resources and for collaboration. Liferay was originally created for an American church in 2000.

http://www.liferay.com/

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One of its strengths is the simplicity of customisation by the end user. Liferay also offers more than 60 portlets including a full range of collaborative and social tools (blogs, forums, wikis, tasks centre, notifications, resource reservations, etc.), and intuitive management of communities of practice and of the hierarchical organisation of the entity using it. In addition, Liferay is highly flexible in terms of rights management and the adaptability of the graphical appearance of pages, and it also provides a powerful staging solution. Liferay is an excellent corporate portal solution, allowing for the standardised integration of any existing application while still offering a good starting level of content management functionalities.

Liferay is distributed under a double licensing model. Its open source edition (Liferay Portal Community Edition) is available under the LGPL.

Liferay is written in Java and complies with JSR 168, JSR 286 and JSR 170 standards.

Key points

Structuring content Portal content is modelled in the form or resources or assets. An asset is a type of content handled by the portal’s applications: web content, documents, blog articles, users, organisations, etc.

List of native assets

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To customise these different entities, Liferay has a customised attributes mechanism. For example, you can add properties to user accounts for enriched personal profiles, or add information to organisations, in just a few clicks.

To make spaces into self-contained silos, content is linked to a scope that can be global or limited to a particular site. This makes it possible to create sites with their own web content, events, blog posts, etc. So it is important to design the organisation of your different sites and portal groups correctly, based on the desired streams and aggregation.

List of contents in a site’s perimeter

Over and above the “simple” display of content, one of the most useful portlets is the content aggregation application, Asset Publisher. It can create fully configurable streams of content (originating website, content type, tag and category filter, definition of sorting, etc.) and is at the root of most of the portal lists.

The creation of different spaces is a very powerful tool: they can be created from page or site templates, and those templates are themselves easy to define in the application, again by means of drag and drop.

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This gives users a high level of control, both in rolling out new spaces (automatically embedding the desired applications: project space, community, working group, etc.) and in creating new site and page types, all of which without any development work.

List of site templates

Liferay also offers advanced content publication management. Sites can have multiple versions, whose publication can be scheduled.

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Content staging

The statuses of portal content can be made subject to publication or validation processes. Liferay has its own embedded workflow engine, Kaleo.

Workflows can be defined globally or by site and pertain to the different types of assets.

The Enterprise edition also includes a highly useful graphic workflow editor that can be used to set up new processes without having to play with configuration files, unlike most other solutions.

Kaleo Designer

Manipulating content The applications that manipulate web content are very comprehensive and cover a large number of functions:

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Structured content and separation of form from substance Drafts and versioning Tags and categories Scheduled publication and content staging (site previews and live sites) Etc.

Inputting rich content

The “assets” concept allows you to use systematically certain functions on all the portal’s content.

Rights management Tags and categories Linked content Process management Comments and observations

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In this way, a new type of asset can be created that will automatically have all these functions... but be mindful of compatibility with native portlets.

Web content assets can be categorised, to obtain structured content as understood in content management (such as an article, testimonial, product information sheet, etc.). This distinction between portal assets and content structure is important, because in can lead to certain limitations in terms of rights management and workflows.

Web content structures

Using content Each site has an admin interface, whose rights management allows for delegation to a functional administrator or a coordinator. For example, page structure can be configured from that interface. A page’s layout can easily be modified, if so set up in the integration.

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Managing layouts

Permissions and access security The system for managing the rights linked to the objects (sites, pages, portlets, content, etc.) is quite exhaustive. Because of the very broad configuration options, the rights configuration stage for the most advanced uses must not be neglected.

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Managing rights for a role

Rights can be used to delegate all or part of customisation to the users. It is also possible to define which zones on the page can be customised.

Zones that can be customised by the user

Very early on (in 2008), Liferay introduced a social aspect to its embedded applications and now offers a specialised distribution to address social intranet issues: Liferay Social Office.

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Social Office corresponds to a configuration of the Liferay portal that includes social collaboration portlets and specific themes. These portlets follow the solution’s omnipresent composition mechanisms and can therefore be used to build pages and spaces.

They include the following in particular:

A contact centre that can search and display personal profiles

Personal connections in the contact centre

Personal connection mechanisms, either bidirectional or a simple subscription to follow

An activities feed listing your connections’ and subscriptions’ events and actions on your sites

Enriched profiles Wall and Chat Microblogging

Personal wall

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Activities feed, microblog and chat

These social modules integrate with the architecture of Liferay’s pages the same way as any other application: by a simple drag and drop. This is another example of the systematic, homogeneous side of Liferay’s administration.

Technical platform Liferay is built on a solid JEE technical platform that is capable of excellent performance and can bear heavy loads. Its architecture is very open and can integrate with many other systems:

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Technical architecture

The only drawback with Liferay is that it can demand specific competencies. As a result, you should keep in mind the fact that the solution offers a very broad functional scope compared with “pure” CMSs, and that it was, moreover, built on heavily customised standard Java

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frameworks. The solution is also an old one and has a degree of technical debt reduced by continuous refactoring from one version to the next.

In addition, even though an Eclipse based development studio and an SDK are available, in respect of the standard technical project management tool, Maven, integration remains only very partial, although it is moving in the right direction.

Liferay Inc. recently introduced a marketplace. This is a veritable app store, where extensions can be selected to download and install (and soon, to buy) in a few clicks.

EE Marketplace

The main advantage of this marketplace is the visibility it provides to the extensions supplied by Liferay (and soon by third parties) and the ease of assessing them on a clean version of the tool. For applications in production, the integration, configuration and acceptance testing stages are nonetheless necessary in most cases.

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Core concept assessment With its roots in the world of content management, Liferay has a unique profile compared with the other tools in our selection.

Although it has a generally strong profile overall, it stands out for its excellent score on the “Permissions and access security” segment. It is however naturally weaker in content use.

Suitable uses As might be expected, Liferay is not very well suited to classic content management uses, namely institutional websites and marketing websites, the latter being even more demanding in the areas of predilection of CMSs.

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Conversely, Liferay is particularly well suited to intranet portals and social networks, and could be used very convincingly as a multi-site platform.

SPIP

Version studied: 3.0.8 Website: www.spip.net Community driven solution

Originally in 2001, SPIP was primarily used by web surfers to manage their own personal websites and on associations’ websites, but SPIP has since grown and is now used by private and public organisations to manage their professional websites.

http://www.spip.net/

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SPIP is one of the few CMSs to be able to claim client references that number in the thousands worldwide. This success can be attributed to the product’s simplicity, in terms of use as well as deployment and adaptation. The flip side of this simplicity is that SPIP has a number of limitations in respect of certain key content management functionalities, which clearly restricts it to the world of web oriented, as opposed to corporate oriented, content management.

SPIP is a French open source project (licensed under the GPL) and its community can be described as active, with multiple versions released each year and hundreds – if not thousands – of members.

SPIP’s software is written in PHP using MySQL and PostGreSQL databases and, on an experimental basis, SQLite. Released in 2012, version 3.0 of SPIP offers a multitude of new functionalities: an improved back office, the introduction of a data loop (looping all types of content, not just on SQL tables), better module management (it should be noted in passing that 23 plug-ins are installed with SPIP 3.0), new document management using the multimedia library, and more.

Key points

Structuring content By default, SPIP has a number of editorial objects (authors, categories, etc.) but two of them pertain to content management:

• Breves (news items) for the publication of brief information, comprising a title, a text and a hyperlink

• Articles for the rest, with native “title”, “intro” and “text” fields, plus other fields that are deactivated by default

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The Extra Fields module can be used to define new fields (tick boxes, dates, recipients, radio buttons, etc.) on existing editorial objects. The creation of a new editorial object (i.e. new content type) requires HTML / PHP development.

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SPIP’s file tree is similar to that of Windows Explorer. It contains a hierarchical structure of categories and sub-categories, with no limitations in terms of depth. It is, of course, possible to modify an article’s or a category’s location, but this must be done one by one.

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Like in other CMS solutions, keywords are used to create thematic links between different articles, regardless of their locations on the tree structure.

Keyword management is similar to the concept of “groups of words”.

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Each group can be associated with different types of content (articles, authors, document categories, etc.) and then administrated by the writers, the administrators, or both. It is also possible to identify whether contributors can choose one or more keywords per “group of words” and to specify if it is a large group (in which case we strongly recommend that one keyword be chosen from that group, but this is not compulsory).

This makes thematic browsing possible, although it must be incorporated into the squelettes (SPIP’s templates), unlike in other solutions.

Multi-site rollouts of SPIP have been possible since version 1.9, but require advanced skills (in SPIP and PHP) and remain complicated and tedious to set up. In other words, this function cannot be activated from the kernel or a module, and PHP development is the only available recourse.

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Versioning (called “revision” in SPIP) can be activated for the various content objects and enables a comparison of two versions of the same document, added on different dates.

As in many other solutions, additions appear in green and deletions, in red. In the event of an error, you can revert to the previous version.

Manipulating content

SPIP differentiates between the front office (the visible portion of the site) and the back office (the contribution interface). To access the management interface, contributors must go to the /write/ space and enter their login and password. However, once the system has recognised them, they will have additional menus available to them in the front office, which they can use to edit a page directly, view each article’s hit and popularity statistics, or recalculate the page (empty the cache).

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An article can have one of several statuses: in progress, for evaluation, published, rejected or in the dustbin.

SPIP has a very simple publishing process based on a single validation step. “Writer” profiles can propose content but cannot publish it without the approval of an “administrator” profile, who will (or will not) validate its publication. There are no modules for managing more complex workflows, as this management system, like the CMS itself, was designed to be as simple and functional as possible.

Using content The templates (called squelettes) are essentially based on HTML/PHP code, with the addition of a syntax specific to the CMS. SPIP can generate queries that will stream and sort certain information on a template, which the developer can then include or exclude. This is referred to as a “SPIP loop”.

Beforehand, you will need a specific template for each type of page (article, category, word, author and site), although templates specific to one category or article can also be defined on the basis of either a keyword or its identifier.

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SPIP includes native management of content syndication, either as it is published or by category.

The articles are transmitted in XML/RSS format and can be sent in full or as a summary with a limited number of characters.

An external website can also be automatically referenced via a simple URL link or the address of its syndication file, which can later be updated on a regular basis. A workflow can be created prior to publication of the syndication, or certain links can specifically be hidden.

Permissions and access security SPIP comes with three default profile types:

• A writer profile for people who write content and submit it for validation; they can also change the information on their profiles

• A limited administrator profile for people who manage certain categories on the website, in which they can validate all the content proposed for the categories they manage and create as many sub-categories as necessary; they also have writer rights in the other parts of the site and can also change the information on their profiles

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• An administrator profile, which is the most complete profile because these users have all the rights: they can manage the site’s complete configuration, create and delete authors, change the information on any profile, manage categories linked to the root, publish content in any category on the website without having to follow a workflow... in short, they can do anything!

Unlike other solutions, new roles cannot natively be created, nor can the list of rights associated with a role be modified.

SPIP has a Limited Access module that, as its name suggests, protects and limits access to certain areas (of categories) to authenticated, authorised visitors. This limitation applies to both the public part and the private space.

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SPIP natively includes a forum, a calendar and an internal messaging system. A few “interactivity / exchange” oriented modules are available on the SPIP contrib site. These include “My favourites” to manage favourites within the site, enhanced forum tools like “SPIPBB”, “share” and forward to a friend functions, a “roadmap” and more. Be sure to check carefully that these modules are compatible with SPIP 3.0, because this is not currently the case.

Technical platform

SPIP 3.0 is not resource hungry and only requires the following configuration:

• Apache or compatible server (versions above 1.2x)

• PHP 5.1.0 and up

• MySQL 5 (recommended, particularly to be able to use certain modules), SQLite3

• NetPBM, Imagick Convert, GD1, GD2 (with Freetype for |image_typo filters)

• Embedded jQuery 1.7.2

SPIP 3 offers better module management. Over and above the technical overhaul, this new version integrates “repositories” that can search for new modules from amongst the many currently available (approximately 340 “stable” modules) and install them directly via the back office.

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Core concept assessment SPIP, the one French tool in our selection, earned respectable scores in most categories, with its one weakness in content structuring, accentuated by the difficulty of implementing a multi-site architecture using SPIP.

SPIP’s technical platform is its strongest aspect, thanks in particular to its solid performance.

Suitable uses In terms of possible uses, SPIP’s profile is relatively versatile, even if it fails to excel in any one domain.

Its good “Technical platform” score does however allow it to shine when it comes to custom sites.

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TYPO3

Version studied: 6.0 Website: www.typo3.org Community driven solution

TYPO3 is the fruit of several years of labour by a Danish guru by the name of Kasper Skårhøj. The product was released late in 2000, since which time a very active community has developed, particularly in the Germanic countries.

http://www.typo3.org/

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In terms of ready to use functionalities, TYPO3 is one of the richest tools on the market. It offers just about everything one might want, all of which nicely polished. Rights and contribution management, caching, authorisations, templates and more: it’s all there, with very few limitations. One of the functionalities available in TYPO3 is image manipulation, which allows images to be resized, thumbnails to be created and titles to be generated dynamically as images. One of its major strengths lies in its modular expandability. A module can add a series of functionalities to TYPO3, but it can also modify a previously integrated functionality without altering TYPO3’s source code, thus maintaining its compatibility with future versions of the tool.

TYPO3 is a 100% community based solution published under the GPL.

TYPO3 is written in PHP and uses a MySQL database.

Key points

Structuring content Each TYPO3 extension can define appropriate content types for its use. In other words, all the fields needed organise and serve content, such as news, FAQ questions and answers, etc.

Choosing a page type

Custom extensions can offer completely integrated functional content that can be used with all TYPO3 tools.

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References can be made between content, running from the simplest parent-child relationship to the most complex arrangements. The interface helps the user to set up relationships: search engine, auto-complete, dynamic insertions, and so on.

It is possible to manage, in detail, the fields that can be seen and modified by each user and group. Many validation rules can be applied (required field, special formats such as currency, date, e-mail address, etc.), as well as input wizards ranging from the calendar to the WYSIWYG editor.

In terms of the organisation of content, pages are positioned in a tree structure, although TYPO3 also provides for the storage of lists of content (lists of news items, events, etc.). This dual hierarchy/list arrangement translates as the existence of two view modes.

Page mode allows for most contribution actions: addition/deletion of pages and content.

Page mode is highlighted in grey on the left banner, as well as on the selected page. In the right banner, you can see the different columns of content, and each symbol is a link for the input of new content (see Section 3 for details on the actions that can be performed in Page mode).

This mode is used for classic contribution actions (creating and editing pages and content).

Page mode

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List mode is used to view all the records on the current page, not just the content, which is the case with Page mode.

This mode can also export records to a .csv file (that opens with Excel).

List mode

TYPO3 natively includes multi-site management: multiple sites can be created on the same instance. In practice, extensions, configurations, templates, users and much more can then be pooled. For example, you can merge the hosting and management of the sites of hundreds of subsidiaries or of your intranet and extranet sites. The level of pooling is fully configurable on a site by site basis, ranging from complete separation to advanced sharing.

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Managing multiple sites

TYPO3 natively handles content versioning in a manual process used to create “branches” of the same content. In addition, each change is automatically saved to a history log. This makes it possible to back-step in the event of an error. The tool can graphically display the differences between two versions of a content item.

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Manipulating content The front office and back office, also referred to as the front end and back end, are a website’s two main interfaces. The insertion of content through front-end editing allows functional administrators to perform all the most common contribution actions.

In this respect, the emphasis was placed on dynamics and administrator-friendliness. This allows content to be positioned by dragging and dropping it.

Back office management interface

Workspaces are used to work on instances that are “parallel” to the site, separate from the live instance that is visible to visitors.

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Administrators can assign spaces to contributors. These latter can then create, modify and view pages and content in these independent spaces.

Linear workflows with X levels are applied when moving between workspaces. An interface dedicated to controls provides for centralised administration.

For each workflow status, the users or user groups responsible for validation are notified.

This practical workspace functionality makes it possible to schedule thousands of changes to come online, en masse.

Previewing changes

The differences between two versions of the same page can be viewed either horizontally (see above) or vertically: the current, live version and the workspace version awaiting validation.

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Using content Templates define the structure and graphic appearance of the pages and content you use on your site:

• Zoning: content positions, e.g. a banner for the header, a footer with a list of links, a central column for the main content and a right column for the menu

• Look & feel: all the styles used on the site (colours, visuals, font, title, numbering, etc.)

Organising a page’s zoning

There are virtually no limits on rendering: an Internet/intranet site, a mobile site, a 100% Flash design, and so on. TYPO3 provides unparalleled flexibility.

It lets users select the templates for each page they want to use, based on the rights assigned to them.

In this way, you can assign different graphic identities to pages, depending on their content.

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Managing pages

Permissions and access security TYPO3 provides for the creation of users and groups with cross-cutting profiles. The particularly fine granularity of roles and rights allows for professional use, even in environments with the most demanding security requirements.

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Managing content access rights

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Managing module access rights

We would also like to note that TYPO3 can be connected to an LDAP directory / Active Directory so that it can be better integrated with your company’s security policy.

Technical platform

With its thousands of extensions, TYPO3 boasts an extremely broad functional scope. It is often nicknamed the “Swiss army knife”.

TYPO3 is built on a solid abstraction layer. It can run on a very wide variety of platforms.

Beginning with TYPO3 4.2, all the solution’s versions share the same prerequisites:

• OS: Linux (recommended), FreeBSD, Solaris, Windows or Mac OS

• HTTP server: Apache 1.3 or 2.x (recommended), IIS 5, 6 or 7, nginx or lighttpd

• PHP: 5.2 and up (5.3 for TYPO3 versions 4.6 and later), PHP accelerator recommended

• Database: MySQL 5.0 and up, PostgreSQL Oracle or FireBird via DBAL

TYPO3’s software architecture allows it to achieve very attractive performance levels, thanks to its detailed cache management.

There are several levels of caches in TYPO3:

• Global by page: can cache an entire page; very effective but precludes any user customisation

• By block: supplements the page cache with recalculated blocks; allows for customisation and dynamic content while maintaining excellent performance levels

One of the TYPO3’s main strengths is its modularity, i.e. the possibility of adding functionalities by expanding the system’s kernel. A large community of developers publishes extensions online. Before integrating these extensions, we recommend that you carefully assess their maturity and their quality.

Extensions can be added at any point in the life of the site. This implementation provides for great freedom to act, makes the solution easily upgradable and promises its longevity.

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Module management interface (activation and dependencies)

For this, TYPO3 offers a comprehensive module installation and management interface with embedded monitoring (update) and dependency functionalities. The database’s structure is automatically modified during the install process.

To date, the number of available extensions is estimated at more than 5,000.

Core concept assessment In terms of its cover of the core content management concepts, TYPO3’s scores were excellent on the whole.

Three points on the fringes of content management - collaborative contributions, social functions and portal functions - did however dampen its results in the topics of content manipulation, permissions and access security, and content use.

On this last point, TYPO3 was also penalised more than solutions that banked on CXM.

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Suitable uses Nicknamed the “Swiss army knife” of CMSs, TYPO3 is indeed quite versatile, with excellent suitability for custom sites in particular.

Being highly content management oriented, it performs slightly less well on the more unusual use cases of intranet portals and social networks.

Finally, it is not as strong in creating marketing websites as other, more specialised solutions.

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WORDPRESS

Version studied: 3.5.1 Website: http://wordpress.org Community driven solution WordPress was created in 2003 as a fork of the software solution, b2. Developed primarily by Matt Mullenweg, WordPress has experienced growing success over the years and is now supported by a sizeable community.

WordPress is an extremely comprehensive and rich blogging tool, which also allows it to be used to build websites. It is one of the most advanced blog tools there are. The product’s roadmap is very dynamic, with new versions released roughly every six months. Version 3,

http://wordpress.org/

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released in June 2010, saw the merger of WordPress and WordPress MU, providing for native integration of multi-blog management. More and more companies are using WordPress as their CMS, over and above its initial blogging capabilities. It is true that, with its fundamentals and the richness of its modules (more than 18,000 listed), WordPress is a real alternative to “classic” CMSs.

The new version of WordPress (3.6), now available in beta, is expected to integrate numerous innovations: set-up of mechanisms to create galleries and videos based on a back office selection of several elements easily, display of audio and video files directly on the site completely in HTML5 and with no need for a plug-in, revision improved by the incorporation of a timeline, and more.

WordPress is distributed under the GPL. It is developed in PHP on a MySQL database and includes a number of APIs and a highly evolved system of plug-ins, with thousands of available extensions.

Key points

Structuring content WordPress integrates posts and pages in the form of a single content type. This approach is fine for blog use but can become frustrating for more evolved needs that often require dedicated content types.

For several versions now, WordPress has had extensions that resolve this issue. These include Custom Content Type and Custom Type UI, which are widely used by the community and which can create new content types for which the user can define custom fields.

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Each post created in WordPress can be assigned to one or more subjects called “categories”.

Unlike keywords, categories can be arranged in a hierarchy. For example, a category of “French” could be created under the parent, “Cinema”.

Within the same category, posts are listed by publication date, starting with the most recent.

A series of tags (also known as labels or keywords) can be assigned to each post. Each tag is clickable and takes the user to a list of the content attached to it. This approach allows for

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interdisciplinary navigation of the site by its users, while ignoring the menu and the categorisation “imposed” by the webmaster. These tags can easily feed a keyword cloud.

Formerly known as WordPress MU, the multi-site management functionality is directly integrated with WordPress 3.x. Simply changing a variable in the WordPress configuration file will activate it. This issue can be handled in two different ways in WordPress: by sub-folders or by sub-domains. In the latter case, an action on the host server is required.

In respect of versioning, WordPress has integrated the principle of “revisions” since version 2.6, allowing writers to compare two versions of the same post by means of different syntactic colours (deletions in red and additions in green). You can revert to a previous version of the post at any time.

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Manipulating content The Edit Flow extension makes it possible to install a multitude of functionalities that foster collaborative work (calendar of published and upcoming content, addition of a widget on the dashboard to centralise content statuses and expected actions, possibility of setting up internal annotations, and more).

By default, Edit Flow has a validation path with the following statuses: Pitch, Assigned, In Progress, Needs Edit and Ready to Publish. The path’s order can be reorganised with a simple drag and drop, and customised post statuses aligned with the organisation of your in-house work can be created.

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Using content WordPress currently offers more than 1,700 different themes for optimum customisation of your site’s graphic charter. These themes can be installed by downloading a .zip file or directly via the back office. WordPress even has a wizard to help you select the theme(s) based on many criteria (dominant colour, number of columns, width type, desired functionalities, etc.).

Each WordPress theme has additional options enabling a great deal of customisation without typing a single line of code. Depending on the theme, you may be able to define a background image, header image, the desired width type (fixed or variable) or the different information linked to the CSS style sheet (font, colours, etc.).

Each theme has a widgets tab that can be used to enrich the side column with a wide variety of elements (archives, recent posts, calendar, categories, recent comments, feeds, links, search, etc.) that can be activated, deactivated or reordered by dragging and dropping them.

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For the most common pages in WordPress, some themes may offer additional pages. The possibility of creating custom pages remains, but this would entail their creation and writing in PHP.

WordPress offers native site syndication (accessed simply by adding the suffix “/feed” at the end of the domain name). From the settings, outside RSS feeds can be imported and a number of options can be defined, such as the number of elements to display, the content’s date and author, and so on. These feeds can then be reused in other places on the site, in the form of widgets.

Lastly, it should be noted that WordPress has many extensions to improve syndication, as well as content aggregation.

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Permissions and access security Rights management is based on pre-defined roles. Depending on his/her assigned role, a user will be able to access different tasks, ranging from post editing to extension management, by way of user management or comment moderation. Out of the box, WordPress comes with five roles:

• Subscribers: can only manage their own profiles

• Administrators: have unrestricted access to all the site’s functionalities (configuration and content)

• Editors: have rights to posts, pages, categories and comments

• Authors: can publish and manage their own posts

• Contributors: can write and suggest their own posts but cannot publish them directly on the site

Some extensions make it possible to create additional roles.

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Inter-user connections can be handled by BuddyPress, an extension that gives WordPress a very extensive social dimension.

Designed by Andy Peatling in 2008, BuddyPress integrates many functionalities: activities feeds, profiles, groups, friend management, messaging, blogs, forums, comments walls, and more, which can be further expanded by additional extensions.

BuddyPress is perfect for creating a complete social network.

Technical platform A Linux environment is recommended, with your choice of Apache or LiteSpeed, although technically, WordPress can run on any server that supports PHP and MySQL.

Although PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0.15 are listed in the prerequisites as sufficient to operate WordPress, some modules are more demanding and will require at least PHP 5.3 and, if possible, MySQL 5.1.

We recommend that you activate the Apache mod_rewrite module to manage your permalinks. This module is compulsory for multi-site management.

WordPress extensions can be managed directly from the dashboard.

An extension can be searched for, installed or uninstalled, activated or deactivated, or configured, directly from the dashboard.

Like other CMS solutions, WordPress has a “repository” server that stores all the modules and themes. In addition to the tradition uploading of a .zip file, extensions can also be installed via a remote server. This is the same principle that WordPress uses to check for and notify you of any modules requiring an update.

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Core concept assessment WordPress combines solid scores with a very balanced profile.

The tool’s few limitations include content life cycle management, role and group management, as well as CXM options.

Conversely, WordPress has a number of undeniable strengths: its ergonomic management interface that is easy to master, excellent referencing capacities and a large number of available extensions (although the most popular are often sold at a price).

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Suitable uses The vast number of plug-ins developed for WordPress make it a highly versatile CMS that is able to meet the needs of a wide variety of use cases.

It is however less suited to intranet portal and marketing website issues than other CMSs that have elected to emphasise one or the other of these subjects.

At the same time, it is able to create a social network - which is unusual in a content management tool - thanks to possibilities for extending the functions linked to user profiles (for example, using the BuddyPress plug-in).

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OTHER OPEN SOURCE CMSS

Ametys Version studied: 3.4 Website: http://www.ametys.org Vendor driven solution (Anyware Services)

Ametys is a software suite that manages websites, portals and collaborative EDM tools.

Developed by Anyware Services, an integrator in Toulouse, it was designed using a selection of open source components, in-house web ergonomics skills and seven years of project experience developing web solutions. These components are based on a 100% J2EE platform that can be used freely under an open source license.

http://www.ametys.org/

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Ametys now powers more than 30,000 sites and resolves the admin issues of large scale websites. The solution is used by more than 30 French higher education establishments, as well as by public administrations (ministries and local governments) and large industrial groups.

Its ergonomics are very similar to standard office automation tools, making it very easy to master.

Centurion Version studied: 0.2 Website: www.centurion-project.org Vendor driven solution (Octave & Octave)

Centurion’s CMS was launched in 2009 by the Parisian agency, Octave & Octave. 10 people contributed to its creation (Laurent Chenay, Mathias Desloges, Nicolas Duteil, Takumi Kobayashi, Franck Maurin, Florent Messa, Maxime Perillou, Antoine Roesslinger, Claire Sosset and Raphaël Theet).

Centurion is a member of the family of CMSs built on a framework (Zend in the present case). This type of architecture offers numerous upgrade possibilities and is particularly well suited to demanding projects that require modifications that would be cumbersome on other, more packaged CMSs. Yet Centurion still comes standard with many content management functionalities, such as multi-site management, searches, menus and navigation, life cycles, multilingualism, a cache system, comments, group management, and more.

Centurion is published under the BSD license.

Technically speaking, it is built around PHP technologies and is based on Zend and jQuery frameworks.

CMS Made Simple Version studied: 1.10.3 Website: www.cmsmadesimple.org/ Community driven solution

CMS Made Simple was created in 2005 and its version 1.0 was published by Ted Kulp, now the product’s Project Leader, on 10 September 2006. As its name suggests, the basic idea for the concept was to create a CMS that would be easy to use.

Although it is relatively young compared to TYPO3, eZ Publish and company, CMS Made Simple already offers an impressive functional scope (thanks in particular to its 400+ available modules), all of which with a no-frills interface. Its template system is relatively flexible and makes it easy to position any given information. Its only black spot lies in its management of multilingualism, which is not yet completely efficient.

CMS Made Simple is published under the GPL.

http://www.centurion-project.org/

http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/

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Technically speaking, it is built around LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) technologies. It also supports PostgreSQL databases.

concrete5 Version studied: 5.5.1 Website: www.concrete5.org Community driven solution

concrete5 is a member of the new generation of user-friendly CMSs, even though its first version, developed by Franz Maruna and Andrew Embler, dates back to 2003. Regular faces at advertising agencies, the creators built concrete5 following three simple rules: “Keep it simple”, “Keep it flexible” and “Keep it robust”.

Today, concrete5 is a mature product that is rapidly making a name for itself in the United States, thanks to its real masterability: it is one of the rare CMSs that do not require in-depth programming knowledge. Its modularity is exemplary, especially as concerns the layout of blocks and page elements. Content is typically created in the site’s front office. A few basics, such as multilingualism, still need to be shored up.

concrete5 is published under the MIT license and, as such, is entirely community based, with no fee based Enterprise edition. However, some of the extensions available on the market are sold for a price.

Technically speaking, concrete5 is built around LAMP technologies (PHP and MySQL in particular). It is based on free libraries like ADOdb and JSON.

DotNetNuke Version studied: 6.1 Website: www.dotnetnuke.com Vendor driven solution (DotNetNuke Corp.)

The DotNetNuke story began in early 2002 when Microsoft published two “demo” applications from its new development platform (VB .Net, C#, etc.) and encouraged developers to use and contribute to them. This was the basis from which IBuySpy Workshop – later to become DotNetNuke in 2003 – was born, the brain child of its creator, Shaun Walker.

DotNetNuke is a relatively comprehensive CMS with a sound architecture that offers strong modularity (with nearly 2,500 modules available). It has supported multilingualism since 2010, which had previously been the main obstacle to its intensive use in France and Europe.

DotNetNuke is distributed under the relatively permissive BSD license. Since the creation of DotNetNuke Corp. in 2008, an Enterprise version offering a number of additional components and services has become available.

http://www.concrete5.org/

http://www.dotnetnuke.com/

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Technically speaking, DotNetNuke is built on the framework, ASP 3.5, and so enjoys the benefits of a robust technology that interfaces easily with any Microsoft application. That being said, it is very difficult to find database providers other than SQL Server which, for some, limits its “open source” attributes.

Lutece Version studied: 3.0.2 Website: http://lutece.paris.fr Vendor driven solution (Paris City Council)

At the end of 2000, the representatives of the arrondissements on the Paris City Council expressed a desire for their own web portal. In response to this request, in 2001 the Paris City Council decided to develop “a tool for the administration and online publication of a web portal”. And thus, Lutece was born.

Lutece is a robust CMS with a vast array of functionalities that is updated with every new version. Beyond its content management functions, its modular architecture captures the attention, which enabled the development of dozens of functional extensions, in the space of a few years, mainly targeting local authorities: co-branding, an electronic admin form, paperless sessions, etc.

Lutece is distributed under the BSD license, after a vote by the Paris City Council on 23 September 2002. It was the first free software released by a local government.

Lutece uses a JEE platform, runs on all Java servers (Tomcat, JBoss, GlassFish, JOnAS, etc.) and is based on the best open source bricks on the market: FreeMarker, Spring, EHCache, Lucene, Apache Commons, etc.

Magnolia Version studied: 4.5 Website: www.magnolia-cms.com Vendor driven solution (Magnolia International Ltd.)

The first version of Magnolia was published on 15 November 2003, by Obinary, which became Magnolia International Ltd. in 2006. Magnolia had tremendous success from the time of its launch, making it one of the most active projects on SourceForge. In 2009, Gartner included Magnolia in its Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management.

Magnolia comes standard with numerous content management functionalities, making it one of the best in the field. These functionalities include multilingual publication, workflows with dependency checks, RSS feed generation and aggregation, front-end editing, multiple themes, multi-channel support, CMIS standard support, and the list goes on. Its cover of the basics of content management is very comprehensive. However, only just over 50 modules are available from the Magnolia “store”.

http://fr.lutece.paris.fr/

http://www.magnolia-cms.com/

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Magnolia is available in two editions: a community edition distributed under the GPL and an enterprise edition distributed under a commercial license.

Magnolia is written in JEE and is based on the best frameworks, the likes of Spring, Struts and more.

MODX Version studied: 2.1.3 (MODX Revolution) Website: www.modx.com Vendor driven solution (MODX, LLC)

MODX is a fork of the CMS, Etomite. It was created by Raymond Irving and Ryan Thras, later joined by Jason Coward then Shaun McCormick. MODX has won many prizes in recent years, namely at the Open Source Awards organised each year by the English company, Packt: 3rd place in 2010 (Best Open Source PHP Content Management System), 2nd in 2009 (OverHall Winner) and 1st in 2007 (Most Promising Open Source CMS).

Along with concrete5, SilverStripe and others, MODX is a member of the new generation of CMSs that focus on contributor comfort and so offer interfaces of the highest quality with meticulous ergonomics. But strictly speaking, MODX is not a CMS but rather a CMF (Content Management Framework) that, similar to Centurion, has an extremely vast potential for adaptation, by means of plug-ins, snippets, variables, models and more. The learning curve is not flat, but it is well worth the trouble.

MODX is distributed under the GPL.

It is written in PHP and runs perfectly with MySQL. It should be noted that MODX can also run on PostgreSQL, Oracle, etc. Likewise, for its web server, MODX runs on Apache, but it also works on IIS, lighttpd, Cherokee and more.

Plone Version studied: 4.1.4 Website: www.plone.org Foundation driven solution (Plone Foundation)

The first version of Plone was released more than a decade ago, in 2001. Although it is an “old” CMS, it is by no means an inactive one. Plone.org even reports 200 to 300 regular kernel contributors, 300 integrators in 57 countries and thousands of users worldwide.

http://www.modx.com/

http://www.plone.org/

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Its latest version, Plone 4, is known for its performance compared to the other CMSs on the market. Its switch to Python 2.6 was largely responsible for this, after which its community announced a 50% improvement in performance over version 3. But Plone is not just a fast CMS. It is also a complete CMS with one of the largest functional scopes in the world of content management. In its most recent versions, Plone has also become more ergonomic, with revisited interfaces equipped with many interactions like the forms framework based on jQuery Tools.

Plone is distributed under the GPL.

It is built over the Zope application server and its CMF (Content Management Framework) extension. Plone offers installation tools for many different platforms: Linux, BSD, Mac OS X and Windows.

SilverStripe Version studied: 2.4.7 Website: www.silverstripe.org Vendor driven solution (SilverStripe)

SilverStripe came to life in the early 2000s, at the company of the same name. Its first versions were distributed under a commercial license. The first open source edition of this CMS from New Zealand would have to wait until version 2.0, released on 7 February 2007.

SilverStripe primarily owes its success to the quality of its graphic interface. Contributors/webmasters can change a large number of parameters (page formatting, content, approval path, etc.) without any particular technical skill sets. More than 350,000 downloads have already been recorded, which clearly demonstrates the interest aroused by the CMS. Over and above its ergonomics, SilverStripe is appreciated for its content management basics like multiple environments (draft/production), previews before publishing, content versioning and more. On the extension side, SilverStripe has some 300 extensions provided by its community or its vendor.

SilverStripe is distributed under the BSD License.

It is written in PHP5 using an MVC (model–view–controller) architecture. It is based on the PHP Sapphire framework, likewise distributed by SilverStripe.

Umbraco Version studied: 5 (Jupiter) Website: http://umbraco.com Vendor driven solution (Umbraco)

http://www.silverstripe.org/

http://umbraco.com/

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Umbraco is a Danish open source solution created in the early 2000s by Niels Hartvig. The original project was not distributed under an open source license, which type of licensing only began in 2004. Along with DotNetNuke, Umbraco is the open source CMS leader when it comes to .Net. Today, Umbraco reports more than 1,000 downloads a day and more than 110,000 active projects around the world.

With Umbraco’s cutting edge position, its more famous, leading counterparts like TYPO3 and eZ Publish have little on this product. For example, template creation adopts the standards of .Net development, with its use of masterpages and controls. Content can be structured to a great level of detail, even just with a mouse. It is just as easy to manipulate content, namely via XSL files. Lastly, Umbraco is natively expandable and has many extensions made available by the community.

Umbraco is distributed under the MIT License.

It is written in C# (on the ASP .Net MVC environment) and enjoys the development and exploitation capacity of the Microsoft suite. On the database end, Umbraco is no longer dependent on SQL Server (since 2008). It also supports MySQL and VistaDB.

But also Other, lesser known solutions are worthy of your attention. They may be new on the market, on the fringe of classic CMSs, or simply foreign solutions that are little known in France. At any rate, we recommend that you explore:

• Mura: http://getmura.com

• Novius: http://www.novius-os.org

• Rubedo: http://www.rubedo-project.org

• XWiki: http://www.xwiki.com

http://getmura.com/

http://www.novius-os.org/

http://www.rubedo-project.org/

http://www.xwiki.com/

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SUMMARY

Before we conclude this white paper, we would like to offer you a detailed vision of the criteria we used to assess the nine main solutions presented here.

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Drupal eZ Publish HippoCMS Jahia Joomla Liferay Spip TYPO3 WordPress

STRUCTURER LE CONTENU

STRUCTURATION DU CONTENU « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « «

MULTILINGUISME « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « «

ORGANISATION DES CONTENUS « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « «

CAPACITES MULTISITES « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « «

MEDIATHEQUE « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « «

GESTION DES VERSIONS « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « «

MANIPULER LE CONTENU

INTERFACE DE GESTION « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « «

DEPOT D’UN CONTENU « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « «

CYCLE DE VIE « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « «

CONTRIBUTION COLLABORATIVE « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « «

EXPLOITER LE CONTENU

GABARITS « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « «

ACCESSIBILITE « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « «

REFERENCEMENT « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « «

SYNDICATION, EXPORT/IMPORT, LIENS RESEAUX SOCIAUX « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « «

ANIMATION DE RENDU (CXM) « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « «

RECUEIL D’INFORMATIONS « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « «

FONCTIONS DE PORTAIL ET PERSONNALISATION « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « «

MOTEUR DE RECHERCHE « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « «

MOBILITE « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « «

UTILISATEURS ET POLITIQUE DE SECURITE

UTILISATEURS, GROUPES ET ROLES « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « «

FONCTIONS SOCIALES (mise en relation) « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « «

ANNUAIRE « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « «

IDENTIFICATION UNIQUE « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « «

SOCLE TECHNIQUE

FRAMEWORK / BASE TECHNIQUE « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « «

API DISTANTE « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « «

PLUGINS ET EXTENSIBILITE « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « «

PERFORMANCES « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « « «

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CONCLUSION

In conclusion to this white paper, we thought it would be useful to examine how the tools presented in our selection could be grouped together based on similarities in their suitability for the different use cases we considered.

Here are the results of that analysis.

TYPO3

We decided to begin with TYPO3.

It is of interest to study it first, because it is the archetype of the open source CMS, driven by a community that is large but not excessively so, chiefly comprising professionals with recognised technical expertise, a community that was able to increase its quality while remaining within the traditional scope of CMSs.

This has had the following effects:

• Natural capacity for the creation of institutional websites

• Potential to create marketing websites effectively, limited by the lack of major work on CXM (which occurs more often at the initiative of marketing professionals than technical experts)

• Capacity to adapt for the creation of many custom sites, thanks to its open source DNA

• Technical quality naturally leading to effective multi-site functions

• Intranet portal and social network aspects fairly undeveloped because they fall outside the traditional scope of CMSs

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DRUPAL / WORDPRESS

To continue our analysis, we will move, in alphabetical order, to Drupal and a solution with a similar profile, WordPress.

In this case, the solutions have characteristics that are similar to TYPO3 but with one important difference: they are both open source CMSs driven by communities worldwide, here with a very heterogeneous composition of both technical experts and more marketing oriented profiles, who were able to enhance the product’s quality, as well as its functional scope.


• Natural capacities for the creation of institutional websites

• Potential to create marketing websites effectively, limited by the lack of sufficient work on CXM (which was however initiated a little more strongly for Drupal)

• Capacity to adapt for the creation of many custom sites, thanks to their open source DNA

• Slightly less rigorous technical quality due to the communities’ varied interests, which naturally lead to less impressive multi-site functions

• Well-developed social networking function at the impetus of the communities

• Intranet portal aspects fairly undeveloped because they fall outside the traditional scope of CMSs

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EZ PUBLISH / HIPPOCMS

We will now proceed with the same analysis of eZ Publish and HippoCMS.

For both these solutions, a vendor initiated the project, so they are two open source CMSs driven by vendors, thus assuring the technical quality of the product, but also the consistency of the roadmap for expanding their functional scopes.

It so happens that both vendors wanted to orient their products in similar directions, with the following effects:


• Excellence in creating marketing websites, thanks to the CXM orientations decided by the vendors




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JAHIA / LIFERAY

Moving on to Jahia and Liferay, two solutions with the unique feature of being suited to similar use cases, despite the fact that they respectively come from the worlds of CMSs and portals.

For both these solutions, a vendor initiated the project, so they are two open source CMSs driven by vendors, thus assuring the technical quality of the product, but also the consistency of the roadmap for expanding their functional scopes.

It so happens that both vendors wanted to orient their products in similar directions, with the following effects:


• Potential to create marketing websites effectively, limited by the lack of substantial work on CXM (which was not the orientation chosen by the vendors)



• Excellence in intranet portal and social networking aspects, thanks to the orientations decided by their vendors

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JOOMLA! / SPIP

We will end our analysis with Joomla! and SPIP, which present similar profiles.

They are both open source CMSs driven by large but not excessive communities (chiefly French speaking, in the case of SPIP), that were able to retain their simplicity and have stuck to the traditional scope of CMSs.



• Potential to create marketing websites effectively, limited by the lack of sufficient work on CXM


• Minimum handling of multi-site functions, which are not a priority for the communities in question


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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to take this opportunity to thank warmly all those who worked on this white paper:

• Grégory Becue

• Patrice Bertrand

• Pierre Frouge

• Romain Leleu

• Leslie Martin

• Martine Metzger-Doucot

• Emmanuel Quedville

• Amélie Vaysse

CMS open source - Guide Open Source

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