I noticed that during a recent thread regarding Farcry and SpeckCMS, not
many people had heard of SpeckCMS (www.speckcms.com). So, I thought I'd
provide a wee bit more info...
Speck is an object-based open-source content management framework that was
initially developed by Robin Hilliard
(www.builderau.com.au/askexperts/macromedia/). I got involved in the
development almost immediately after he released a rough alpha version in
May 2002.
Speck has been designed to be OS, web server and database independent and
has been tested on both Windows and Linux, with IIS and Apache and Access,
SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Firebird and MySQL (4.1 required). It can
also be used with CF5, as it is built using custom tags rather than CFCs.
It is a stable solution, which has been used in production for about 2 years.
Geoff Bowers mentioned that Speck is more of a toolkit than Farcry, and
that is true - Speck was conceived as a framework. However, it is
distributed with an example CMS (SpeckCMS) that provides a set of
out-of-the-box content management capabilities.
Farcry definitely does provide more for the end user out-of-the-box, but
from my limited experience with it and vast experience with Speck (read:
I'm biased ;), I'd have to say that I think Speck is simpler to extend to
provide custom functionality. Our development team is not made up of highly
experienced software engineers and is probably typical of many CF
development teams, yet everyone in the team is confident using and
extending Speck and they have even learnt something about OO development in
the process (ok, I did have to give a few slaps to get the copy 'n' paste
merchants to use inheritance, but corporal punishment is sometimes
necessary ;). I also know that Speck has been used by non-programmers for
content management requirements (apparently www.fashion.ie was built in a
weekend by someone who didn't know any CF when he started).
For the end user, we have found SpeckCMS to be a great success. We deal
with business people and medial professionals who tbh just see technology
as a necessary evil (and fair enough, they're probably right). SpeckCMS
allows content to be edited in-context, i.e. the user just browses to the
page they want to edit and clicks on the relevant edit link embedded into
the content. I'm not sure if Farcry also allows this, but I know many other
systems don't and we've found it to be a huge benefit that not only saves
us a small fortune on training and support but really impresses the
customers (ok, they are easily impressed, but perception is important).
Well, I've rattled on for long enough - hope this has been informative
Mark
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