web development and photography
Posts tagged open source
WordPress MU 2.7 released
Feb 1st
Finally, after much holding of breath and anticipation, WordPress 2.7 and its swanky interface comes to MU-world. Yay!
As is typical with the quasi-underground nature of WordPress MU, version 2.7 wasn’t so much announced as… became apparent. ie. if you happened to download it you’d find the version number was different. A WordPress MU forum thread showed the general confusion about whether 2.7 was still in beta, or an actual stable release:
http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic.php?id=10952
Anyway at first sight everything seems to be working fine after an update from WordPress MU 2.6. Plugins, even home-grown ones are doing their thing. I guess one of the main advantages of using a fork which is typically a couple of months behind the vanilla-WordPress is that any regularly-updated plugins and themes you may already be using will generally ‘just work’ with a new version of WordPress MU.
Hooked into Drupal
Oct 23rd
In my last blog I mentioned how Drupal really does seem to offer more than just the ability to get a simple site up and running quickly.
Framework
When you look at Drupal more closely you realise one key thing: it’s not really a CMS, it’s a framework. Granted, nothing quite like Symfony in terms of its level of sophistication, but a framework nonetheless. Even a fairly modest PHP developer can therefore take what’s there and build on it in quite surprising ways. The vast array of Drupal modules is testament to that.
Hooks
That’s what makes Drupal so alluring as a CMS. It’s founded on a system of hooks: naming conventions which ensure that pieces of code you write will get called in certain pre-defined situations.
The simplest example of a hook is the menu hook. If you build your own module, all you need do is put a function in it called mymodule_menu and whatever code you put in that function will get called each time the core code builds the main site menu.
The real elegance of the system is that almost everything is built from hooks. Even stuff which looks like it’s part of the core code, like user management. Well, that’s actually a module built up using hooks. If you want to build your own slightly different user module, you don’t need to change the existing one. Just copy it, taking out the bits you need, adding in your own bits. Before you know it, you’ve got your own custom user module.
Community
The learning curve can be a little daunting at first, assuming you want to get your hands dirty with some module coding. Luckily, there are loads of excellent books (I can definitely recommend Pro Drupal Development by John VanDyk), web pages, blogs, etc around to help. Just google them, they’re out there! That’s another great strength of Drupal: the community. No matter how stuck you are, how bad things look. Chances are there’s someone out there who’s been in exactly your situation and come out the other end.
Drupal as an enterprise CMS?
Oct 23rd
I’ve been looking a lot recently at Drupal not just as an open source CMS, but as a viable enterprise level CMS. Despite my earlier misgivings I think Drupal has a lot going for it, and it may be that over the next couple of years it will become a much bigger force in the world of content management.
Months of searching for a really good open source CMS had never really come up with anything that would meet my needs:
- free/cheap
- really easy for people to create and edit content
- great support, or at least a great user community I could turn to
- highly extendable by someone with sufficient coding expertise
- able to cope with lots of separate – but related – sites from just one installation
My first thought was Drupal. So simple, so lovely… but… but that’s just for small companies and society websites, right? OK, next!
Then I found MySource Matrix (developed by Squiz, an Australian company) which did everything except point 2 (and sort of failed on points 3 and 4, but that’s another story). Then I found Alfresco, which is really a document management system. As you’d expect, it did everything except point 2 because for it, web pages are just another form of document.
I was running out of ideas. But actually, after I was forced to think about the total lack of open source enterprise CMS, I started to wonder whether I really needed all 5 of the above. Maybe I just needed the first 4, and having a massively integrated multi-site system is something which I could live without.
Hoorah! Epiphany! Yes, Drupal does do everything I want. As soon as you start to realise that, Drupal seems to fit the bill perfectly.
Even better, the more I looked at multi-site capabilities, the more I saw how Drupal does allow for this, albeit in a somewhat limited way compared with the really big, expensive commercial CMS. Don’t believe people when they say that Drupal can only do small sites. It can do far more than that. With a little imagination and tinkering around it can actually do a vast amount.
Delving deeper… I saw that there are now companies offering enterprise level SLAs for Drupal. Specifically, I found Acquia. It’s a company set up by the founder of Drupal himself – Dries Buytaert – to offer the kind of hand-holding that’s put people off Drupal in the past. OK, it’s a very new company with no track record. But the signs are good.
I think the moral to this story is: make sure you know what you’re looking for from a CMS. Don’t just assume you need the most expensive powerful beast out there. Don’t even assume you need something that fits in exactly with your organisational needs. Chances are that in most situations, your needs aren’t quite so written in stone as you might think.
MySource Matrix and Squiz
May 7th
I’ve been looking recently at an open source enterprise CMS called MySource Matrix. It’s written in PHP5, and unusually for open source CMS actually seems to be able to cope well at enterprise level.
It’s built from the ground up on an asset basis. Everything is an asset: users, content, permissions, workflow. The whole lot. This allows for a great deal of flexibility and power.
Who?
It is not particularly well-known, at least outside Australia – where the core development has taken place. No one I’ve mentioned it to has heard of it before. It has been adopted by a few organizations (mainly local government and universities) in the UK. In Australia is has a wide user-base, having been originally adopted by the Australian government a few years ago.
This means that there is a good amount of independent support and development from a growing community of users. Being open source anyone can look at the code, make their own improvements, etc. However it’s a complicated system, so any tinkering on a full-on live system would be pretty scary.
Squized
That’s where Squiz come in. Basically this Australian-based company developed the system with grants from the government a few years ago, and released it as open source. It’s been evolving under their guidance ever since, and they’ve added in about a dozen (not open source) plugins. The plugins is one of the ways they make their money.
The other is to provide support for the system. Even though it’s open source, few people would be brave enough to take it on and tame it. Apparently they are beginning to encourage other companies to offer some support services, such as website design. But they are understandably pretty protective about being the sole company to offer full support.
It costs a bit
This is where one might reasonably have some concerns about MySource Matrix. It may be free, but the support and setup isn’t. And because no one else (apart from the wider user community) can offer support, you are in some senses just as locked in to this CMS as a traditional licensed CMS. Of course, the difference is that you might be locked in, but at least you haven’t spent £50k or more on a license. Money that would just rub salt in the wound should things start to go wrong.
Not that other open source CMS leave you any less locked in. For example Plone, a hugely popular CMS, is notoriously nightmarish to configure to your needs. Companies offer assistance, and once again you can end up tied into their particular solution or version of the core.
Not all open
Not everything in MySource Matrix is free. The extra modules (which are pretty crucial) are provided by Squiz under an SSV licence. Anything you do with them is their property. Does this matter? Well, I don’t think so. How often would you really want to tinker with the source code of someone else’s plugins. I guess it just encourages you to make your suggestions to them, and let them do the hard work. Of course, you have to pay for this. But you’d probably not want the development hassle anyway.
Summary
As a summary, I’d say the MySource Matrix/Squiz ticket looks promising. It has some obvious concerns, but they don’t seem to be concerns that are unique or particular to this CMS.
Open Source CMS?
Apr 30th
At the moment at Kent we’re considering our options for CMS. We’ve been looking at enterprise CMS, and had a few fairly impressive demos of their capabilities.
But at the end of one demo, someone asked the sales guy why we should pay almost double the price for a licence than a competitor was asking, and over £150k more than an open source CMS we’d seen. Bear in mind that all the CMSs we’d seen seemed so similar that my CMSized brain had begun confusing one with another.
Their answer was telling: it’s more expensive because it’s better. Trust me.
Expensive is a good thing?
Ok so this isn’t exactly a brilliant sell. But this raises a key point, and one which is becoming more and more prevalent in software development. Is more expensive really better? In fact, maybe freely available open source can be even better still. Not only do you often have the same level of expertise going into a piece of software, but typically the experts are far more numerous. The risks are no greater (no companies going bust on you), and bug fixes and security holes are often spotted quicker and fixed sooner than in proprietary software.
Open source isn’t free
But before we get carried away with open source, it’s worth standing back a little and looking at the real costs of open source. For small applications in small-scale operations, open source is now a no-brainer. If you just want a small blog for yourself or company, why would you pay for blogging software when you have such great open source blogging tools?
It gets a little trickier with enterprise level software. It gets particularly tricky with CMS. The reason is again one of complexity. To get any CMS to do what you really need and want takes time and technical skill, neither of which are free.
Open source is cheap
One of the first things sales people from a big CMS vendor will say when you mention open source is: ‘oh but you’ll just end up spending loads of money and time trying to get the thing to work’. They say this as though this wouldn’t apply to their product. But just say someone could offer me the same level of support they could offer, but without the licence fee.
Why do I want an expensive licence?
Buying in a CMS with a costly licence doesn’t seem likely for us, and is becoming an increasingly unattractive option for institutions and companies with a reasonable amount of in-house expertise. My personal feeling is that the gap between expensive ‘enterprise’ level CMS and open source CMS is closing, and the benefits of paying perhaps as much as £80-100k (or more) just for a licence are becoming very unclear.
Things get blurred when you consider what you’re really getting for a full-on enterprise CMS. The actual licence itself gives you the right to use a piece of software which out-the-box will be pretty much useless for your actual needs. Generally you will have to pay about 20% of the licence each year just to pay for support and maintenance (updates and the like).
Support
And you will need that support. Don’t think for a moment that you’ll buy a CMS, press a button, and all your problems will be solved. All too many people who buy a CMS have this romantic notion somewhere at the back of their minds, because of course everyone wants an easier life. The sorts of issues to be sorted out with the vendor will be: how do you migrate your existing content? Maybe you’ll have to think about content types too. And of course there’s the whole area of permissions and roles and groups, never mind more technical questions to do with server setup, caching, etc.
So now you’ve got through the first 6 months or so. You’ve spent maybe over £100k on your CMS, and it’s not really what you’d hoped for. The new website you’d been promising hasn’t quite happened yet, and maybe the support you were promised isn’t all that great because the vendor has just secured a much more lucrative contract. Would you be in this position had you gone down the open source route?
No promises
Well the answer is: quite possibly. But you wouldn’t have lost so much money. Open source CMS doesn’t promise anything more than a licensed product. But it doesn’t promise anything less. The point is that you’ll still have to do a lot of in-house development, tweaking, fiddling, server configuration, etc. But now you’re doing it without the costly licence looming over you.
But what about that crucial support? Open source means you’re on your own, right? Not so. An increasing number of companies are there to help you, for a fee. Back to money again, but at least you’re now only paying for support, not that ugly fat licence. And even better, because the product is completely open source, and company is able to support it as well as any other. There are no monopolies on support licences.
Drawbacks
So there must be drawbacks to the open source route? I suppose the main one is that there are a limited
number of open source systems which can reasonably call themselves ‘enterprise level’. Plone, MySource Matrix, Magnolia, OpenCMS are the ones that spring to mind, and each of these has its drawbacks in terms of either usability or a broad enough user-base. Each has a company or companies who will support you as much as you’re willing to pay, but again we’re back to the licence model, where there’s that nagging doubt that you’re locking yourself into something from which an escape may be tricky.
Conclusion
In conclusion, you can spend a lot of money on buying a licensed CMS. And then spend a lot more money on support for that product. Or you can get something for free, and spend the money you would have spent on support… on support. Does that sound ridiculously obvious? Few institutions and companies (curiously) feel comfortable with the thought that a free product could ever be as good as an expensive one, even though all the evidence is beginning to suggest quite the contrary is true.
