On Fri, 2005-03-11 at 22:59 -0600, Andres Monroy-Hernandez wrote: > Stephen, > > In my opinion, one of the best CMS written Perl is WebGUI: > http://www.plainblack.com/webgui. But I am not sure if you must have > root and shell access to install it. > > By the way, Oddmuse looks pretty cool. I'll give it a try. > > -Andres >
I'm one of the core WebGUI developers. I haven't been doing much with it recently because we're going through some massive API changes in preparation of upcoming stable branch (you know the drill- "it's ready when it's ready") and I've been incredibly busy with other stuff. . . Anyway: progress is being made rapidly, though, and I feel confident we'll be stable soon. WebGUI, in terms of high-level tools for managing websites, sits a level above Plone/Zope and a few levels above other toolkits like Axkit, HTML::Mason, and OpenACS. (Mason is very cool, I'm just picking it up after years coding CGI::Application/HTML::Template apps, writing my first HTML::Mason/Alzabo e-commerce system.) The neatest thing about WebGUI is that it conceives of websites the way a lot of people do- to WebGUI, a site is just a bunch of pages with "things" on them. Those things can be articles, discussion forums, blogs, image galleries, Syndicated RSS content, FAQ lists, etc. You can copy an already created object and paste it elsewhere on the site, create "shortcuts" to objects, and in the new branch drag-and-drop content around the page to re-arrange it. With WebGUI I can create feature-rich user-managed sites very quickly, and non-technical folks can manage them. One exampe: update a blog, a user just needs to sign in, move to the page, hit "new posting", type, and hit "save". More advanced folks can do a lot more, obviously. WebGUI is pretty easily extended (once you learn the API) and doesn't reinvent the wheel every chance they get- we use a plethora of modules- HTML::Template, CGI.pm, HTML::TagFilter, HTML::Highlight, etc. There is a bit of a 'maverick' feel to some of the development (I'd love to see stuff generalized a bit more so that it can be released to CPAN) but overall there is a very competent developer community. WebGUI dictates very little about how a site should look- you aren't trapped into the three-column "boxes on the left, boxes on the right, content in the middle" paradigm at all, you can drop stuff anywhere and arrange your auto-updating navigation stuff in a bunch of different ways. Nearly everything is templatted in HTML::Template, and you can edit the templates right in your browser. Unlike some of the pukey PHP systems out there, you don't have to edit a mixture of code and presentation or deal with this false templatting of "skins" where can only change very specific bits related to presentation. You can make it look *however* you want, without a lot of non-obvious boundaries. The entire management interface is translated into some ungodly amount of languages, it's got a user/group based permission system and a MUCH improved internal search engine in the new branch. To run WebGUI with acceptable performance it needs to run under mod_perl. For some hosts that may mean you can run it without root access, and I suppose you could install without shell access, too. But that would suck. If you're familiar with perl and *nix, you probably wouldn't have a lot of trouble setting it up. I host a bunch of WebGUI instances for clients, it's pretty stable and can handle a lot of traffic- I had one client that got hammered (including two slashdottings) around the election and WebGUI (and some custom mod_perl handlers) took it easily. Of all the CMSs I've evaluated, WebGUI offers the best chance that non-technical users will actually be able to use it quickly without a lot of custom development and huge amounts of training on your part. I've got a bunch of clients that barely understand how anything works about the web that can still keep stuff up to date. Stuff I want to see get better is a meta-data system that allows for faceted classification and more complete XML/RSS creation from "wobjects." I really dig it, the demo ( http://demo.plainblack.com ) really *does not* do it justice, even though it's still pretty neat. Keep in mind the demo is running the beta, so there will be some stuff that's broken. -DJCP > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Stephen A. Jarjoura > Sent: Friday, March 11, 2005 11:50 PM > To: [email protected] > Subject: [Boston.pm] advocacy, et al. > > > > The prospect of wading through tons of OO PHP code in order to customize > a CMS is disheartening. Having to learn Python just to use some of the > great Python based CMS's is even more depressing. I just wanted an easy > to use, easy to set-up and install, easy to theme, Perl based CMS. > Further, (believe it or not) I don't have shell or root access to the > hosting web server. Some compromise, somewhere, needs to be made! > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Boston-pm mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
