Content Management System Selection

Criteria

Desirable properties

• To do: articulate desired properties here.

Repulsive properties

• To do: articulate worse-than-useless properties here.

Potential realizations of these criteria

• To do: add other potential platforms.

Hypercontent

Advantages

• Hypercontent is a JA-SIG project. Eat our own dogfood.
• Hypercontent is written by Alex Vidgor, who's a smart and stand-up guy. To the extent that he has time to work on it, it works great!
• Incumbent. We're already using this solution, at least as much as we've figured out to use it.

Disadvantages

• Andrew Petro is really pretty frustrated with this solution. That's not by itself a reason to ditch it, but he does think this is a reasonable consideration. JA-SIG needs a solution that's not going to frustrate and stymie people with a demonstrated penchant for volunteerism for this organization.
• Unrealized potential. While technically it's true that one could configure self-service creation of profiles of uPortal deployments, e.g., the fact is that we haven't actually taken advantage of these features.
• Lack of features and growth path. Hypercontent isn't being worked on and maintained as much as other CMS solutions seem to be. It lacks some features that would be nice to have.
• Unusable. It's hard to use. It's hard to understand what it wants one to do at any given screen.
• Lack of adoption. Especially, lack of adoption among the volunteers trying to make JA-SIG websites happen. JA-SIG Hypercontent is the only place we use this platform, so we realize no synergies with other responsibilities and work.

Other comments

Confluence

Advantages

• We're already using it, with good adoption and good success
• Excellent featureset
• Available tooling for producing marketable websites using Confluence

Disadvantages

Other comments

Drupal

Advantages

• Unicon has adopted this for their website. This means that a major player and volunteer in the JA-SIG community has an existing investment and commitment to this platform. No guarantee of tremendous heroics by Unicon is included in this little bullet point, but it is fair to say that JA-SIG realizes efficiencies and advantages by adopting a platform that constituents are committed to making work in other contexts as well.
• John Fereira has positive prior experience with this platform
• It's quick and easy to bring up a functional site on which we can then iterate
• The Drupal platform open source project and community is very strong and robust, producing new releases and drawing on oodles of freelancers available to help with this
• JA-SIG could hire ex-Uniconer Chuck Crandall's outfit WebChuckWeb to professionally design, implement, maintain, and host Drupal-managed website(s).

Disadvantages

• A new platform JA-SIG hasn't traditionally used

OpenCMS

Advantages

• OpenCMS is an open source content management system, written in java, with a programmable API. The presentation layer uses JSPs with a set up opencms tag libraries.
• It's java, something we're all familiar with

Disadvantages

• No past experience with the product
• None of the "likely suspects" use this platform elsewhere than JA-SIG, and so are unlikely to realize synergies or efficiencies with their day jobs versus using solutions better aligned with what we use in our day jobs

Other comments