ugh, I couldn't think of a better subject title. Edit away if you wish.

I'm looking for a CMS system to wrap GT products and some other things and came across this site http://www.plainblack.com/

I'm building a site for a friend and I need to make it as automated as possible.

I thought of phpwebsite and geeklog but ... I thought I'd give perl a chance too.

any comments totaly appreciated.

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openoffice + gimp + sketch ...

Thought of using Zope (supports perl and python)?

A site with a decent list of some open source cms' out there: http://www.cmsinfo.org/.
A _great_ mailling list with talented heads can be found at http://www.cmslist.org/

I spent some time last winter trying to find a cms, perl, or php. PlainBlack, Metadot's Portal Server, CommPortal, all looked very good and were perl solutions. The limitation for me was that they all required root access and I am using a hosting account.

PostNuke, phpWebsite both were nice php solutions that would run on a hosting account. PostNuke has a very active community and would probably have add-ons to do most of the things you would want on a portal. Unfortunately, PN would become a replacement for GT products, not the gule that holds them together. ezPublish was php and needed root access.

The problem would be having an integrated sign in with GT products, hence the wait for GT Community. If you were handy at scripting, and wanted to be responsible for maintaining the scripts, writing custom code would be an option to fit the products together.
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Rob

SW Montana's Online Community
Modular Model Railroading

Thanks guys!

I actually found cmsinfo by accident while searching up about plainblack.
Zope seems like it's a little out of my league. I'm not a programmer but rather more of a hack at best.

plainblack seem very interesting but I'm having a fun time trying to get it up and running on my iBook. phpwebsite seems great but since I'm an updater type of guy I'd probably spend more time keeping up with their updates than actually doing site work

I'm doing 2 sites for friends so I need a solution pretty soon and easy for them to run. geeklog, postnuke and xoops are what I'm trying to decided between right now.

For my own site I'm waiting for the community.

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openoffice + gimp + sketch ...

Hard? perhaps if you want to create custom objects, but take a look at the zope book on zope.org. You will need root access, unfortunately.

It just depends on what you need. Do some searches in the cmslist and you may be able to pull some more information out. Lots of comparisons, guidelines on choosing a CMS, etc. Just recently, someone brought up ?post/phpnuke? (one of them) and they mentioned that it works right out of the box but the front page can make up to 61 queries so some optimization on your part may be required.

PostNuke is an open effort with a variety of authors and a rather dynamic community. I believe it and phpWebsite would be considered well programmed and stable. phpNuke is very popular, but tightly controlled by one man and does not have the reputation of being well written or stable.

Given the amount of addons and growth, PostNuke looked the most promising to me.
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Rob

SW Montana's Online Community
Modular Model Railroading

CMS bashing

yeah, phpnuke probably has the largest share but also the largest base of complainers (hmmm, sounds like M$ to me). Post Nuke was started by a 1 or a couple of major code hackers of nuke. Nuke came off of the code of thatware. Postnuke and phpwebsite definitely are choices but I haven't checked up on how muck nuke has been rewritten. Phpwebsite just boogles me about how many versions they pump out per month Geeklog though has got my interest since it seems stable, movement is going on in the community and the number of version updates seems pretty reasonable.

@zope
I'm gonna have to give it a look.


Thanks

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openoffice + gimp + sketch ...

The fastest and smallest footprint out of the box solution I can think of is mamboserver. 4.5 beta is great. WYSIWYG theme design and simple intelligent admin interface.

Otherwise it is Postnuke with AutoTheme to get really good control of your theme and content.