Content Management

Content Management and Content Management Systems CMSs are an area of interest for the non-profit/voluntary sector for a number of reasons, e.g.:

• web-presences and functionality becoming more sophisticated
• the need to communicate and manage increasing amounts of content
• the need to address accessibility and usability requirements.

There are a number of well-established OSS CMSs. This page is for pointing to OSS resources and discussing CMS tools and issues.

What is Content Management?

A Content Management System (CMS) is a system used to organize and facilitate collaborative content creation. Recently, the term has been associated with programs for managing the content of web sites. Web Content Management (WCM) is also used to refer to these programs. - (from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

There are a number of other good links on the wikipedia entry for Content Management, (with wikipedia being one of the best known implementations of a wiki)

CMS Comparisons

• OpenSourceCMS.com - for comparisons of OSS CMSs.

Although not necessarily aimed at the end user, there are a number of sites apart from OpenSourceCMS.com that deal with news, listings and feature comparisons amongst CMSs (with varying degrees of scope), such as:

• the International Association for Open Source Content Management (?!))
• http://www.cmsmatrix.org/ (not just OSS)
• http://www.la-grange.net/cms
• http://www.cmsinfo.org/
• http://www.contentmanager.eu.com/
• http://cms-news.org/
• OSS CMS discussion on Slashdot: http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/18/0043234&from=rss

OSS CMSs

Mambo OS http://www.mamboserver.com

A CMS as recommended by Don De Silva in his talk. Example Mambo sites:

Plone http://plone.org/

Site includes documentation (e.g. Plone How-tos, and details of book "the Definitive Guide to Plone" (http://plone.org/documentation/books/definitive-guide) Example Plone Sites:

Plone also has a "live" (bootable from CD) distribution: http://zope.org/Members/aho/LivePlone/

Drupal http://www.drupal.org/

Example Drupal site:

• http://www.spreadfirefox.com/
• http://onthecommons.org/
• http://www.ofbyandfor.org/

Zope http://www.zope.org/

Other less established tools

• Civicspace http://www.civicspacelabs.org/ - started during the Howard Dean presidential nomination campaign: "CivicSpace? is being built with the needs of distributed organizations in mind. It will give you and the supporters within your community a solid framework for organizing and engaging those around you in action. But it also will allow you to plug your community into a network of other communities where you can share your ideas, knowledge, relationships, and organizational information. CivicSpace? is built on top of the Drupal open source platform and content management system. It is an unforked distribution."

Relevant postings/threads from email discussion lists, blogs...

On the international Circuit Riders lists, there have also been a number of relevant threads since mid 2004, for anyone interested in looking into the archives:

Riders Talk:

• "Jeffrey Veen on open source CMS"
• "Open Source Web Building Tools"

Riders Tech:

• "Plone evaluation" .e.g pointing to this evaluation:

http://zope.org/Members/jetfu/plone-WhereIsWhat/howto_view

• "Like YahooGroups?, but open source"
• "content management systems"

(sign up to the international lists at http://npogroups.org/lists)

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