On Sun, 9 Jan 2000, Corbin Harris wrote:
> Questions,
> Given that I have no programming skills & intermediate HTML skills, how
> complicated would it be to install Midgard & get things working in a short
> time?
Installation is going to require someone with moderate knowledge
of Unix (except for RedHat/x86 and Mandrake I guess).
After installation the HTML skills required are not different from
what you'd need for any site.
While Midgards' content management and layout engine is powerful and
easy to use without PHP programming, you'll be missing out on the
good stuff. But since content and layout are well separated it's
easy to bring in expertise to do the layout & programming and
leave the day to day care of the content to your editorial staff
even when the programmer is long gone.
> How difficult would it be to transfer my current site (built using
> Dreamweaver on Macintosh) to Midgard?
I'm not too familiar with dreamweaver but I'd say 'it depends'.
If you eschew the Midgard style management it's easy but again,
you'ld be missing the good stuff. Expect to spend a little time
to separate the common parts of your site into the reusable
Midgard styles and the per-page content.
> Once up and running how difficult is it for editorial staff to update
> content?
Easy. With a little script content can be published (to use the
Netscape term) directly to the Midgard site, and Midgard includes
an formatted text parser that will convert paragraphs separated by
empty lines into HTML on the fly for easy text entry.
> How does Midgard compare to commercial products? (such as those I mentioned)
Midgard is pretty close to Dispatch in concept although Dispatch currently
has some features that are still on our todo list. I don't know E-Grail
well enough to comment on it although from the looks of it it's a great
product.
You'll find Midgards' reusable (inheritable) styles simple to use
but extremely flexible to be an invaluable feature.
> What other alternatives are available?
The only other content management systems that I know of in the OSS
realm are Zope and aolserver.
> I may have future questions. I'm tasked to give my managers options for our
> website so the site can be more dynamic, but the fact I'm on almost zero
> budget limits my options, so any advice would be greatly appreciated.
I think you'll like Midgard (now there's a surprise, eh?) but don't take
my word for it. To get a taste of what you can do with midgard, head
on over to http://midgard-demo.marlowes.com/ and experiment (but mind
that all experiments are destroyed every 12 hours).
Emile
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