There are a number of healthy sites built using Mason. My firm Vinq uses Mason as our primary platform for building knowledgeplex.org and dataplace.org, two sites we developed for Fannie Mae Foundation; these sites incorporate content management functionality, personalization, search, maps drawn with Mapserver, and many more features. We've been very happy with Mason, as it adds a lot of easy- to-use syntactic sugar around some basic mod_perl functionality.
That said, there are also newer content management systems and frameworks which might be even better for your needs. If you're open to PHP, I would look at Drupal or others from the tons of open source CMS systems available -- you can visit http://www.cmsmatrix.org/ to comparison shop among them. Another increasingly popular choice is Ruby on Rails -- it's supposed to be pretty easy for programmers to pick up Ruby, and then become extremely productive if they are building database-backed sites that follow the cliches which the Rails developers have anticipated. The screencasts at http://www.rubyonrails.com/screencasts are pretty impressive. If you are attached to Perl as I am, but want to leverage some out-of- the-box CMS functionality, you might consider Bricolage, which was developed by the original author of Mason. Or you can go with raw Mason. I would say that the reason there's not much traffic any more is that it is quite mature at this point. There's a great O'Reilly book about building sites with Mason, and the concise, well-written documentation at masonhq.com is more than enough to get going. --Mark Torrance On Aug 10, 2006, at 1:02 PM, Duncan Garland wrote: > Hi, > > I've got a potential application for something which sounds like a > content > management system to me. 70 or so different users must be able to > submit > products descriptions, including photographs. The system then has to > maintain a standard look and feel and add features such as on-line > purchasing, one-line surveys, standard menus of links and a few other > things. > > I looked at Mason before and it might be suitable. > > So .... > > i) Is Mason intended for this sort of application? > > ii) Is Mason still an active product? It's 5 years since it was > released and > there doesn't seem to be much traffic on the developers mailing > list. Amazon > adopted it in 2003. Do they still use it? > > I'd be grateful for any feedback. > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > --- > Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, > security? > Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your > job easier > Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache > Geronimo > http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel? > cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 > _______________________________________________ > Mason-users mailing list > Mason-users@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mason-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Mason-users mailing list Mason-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mason-users
