The Next Step

Lately I’ve been asked to research open source CMS options for a number of different reasons. I work for a consulting company that specializes in web site redesigns and CMS implementations. We’ve got a long and storied history with .NET-based solutions such as Sharepoint and Sitecore, but not so much history with less Microsoft-y solutions. I’ve spent a lot of time lately researching non-Microsoft systems and I want to share some of my thoughts. Here, I’ll discuss the three systems I’ve spent the most time on: Alfresco, Drupal, and Plone. I examine them particularly with regard to managing a fairly large, mostly static site for clients generally in higher education. There is a desire to have some kinds of social functionality available, but any such content would need to be under very tight control. With that in mind, I set out to figure out which one would be the most attractive to this type of client. Today: Alfresco.

Alfresco talks big and for good reason. They offer a huge range of enterprise content management services while other systems we use manage only web content. Most of the projects we work on don’t require those enterprise features (such as document management) so the web part is really all I was interested in. Unfortunately, Alfresco’s background is in document management, not web content management, and it shows. While the model works well enough for developers, content authors will probably be confused by the interface they have to use. It’s all based on Java and XML, and templates are built using an XML templating language of your choice. Alfresco offers a lot of examples in Freemarker but I used XSLT. When I used the system, all content definitions had to be manually created by a developer using an XML Schema. I believe that Alfresco has recently rolled out a new feature that allows you to generate these schemas using a tool, but haven’t had a chance to test it. The real thing to remember about Alfresco is that while it is open source, it isn’t really free. You can get the community edition for free, but you get a better version with more up-to-date bugfixes and features if you pay. Alfresco focuses on interoperability. You can get at the Alfresco repository using Java or PHP, as well as a REST architecture, and it supports several relational databases including MySQL and Oracle. It’s language-neutral, so it’s really meant for pulling together multiple web applications under one roof than to handle a single web site, which is what I’m looking for.

Bottom line: Alfresco is good for a huge organization with lots of applications that it needs to keep in line, but is looking to only manage some of the content, with an eye toward pulling more of it into the CMS later. The kind of project I’m thinking about is one that would probably live entirely contained within an Alfresco implementation. So not the best match for what I want, but definitely a good product to be aware of for companies trying to take control of a number of disparate web applications.