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From: "Max Dunn" <maxdunn@siliconpublishing.com>
To: "'FoRK'" <FoRK@xent.com>
Subject: RE: OSCOM Berkeley report: Xopus, Bitflux, Plone, Xoops
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Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2002 21:15:36 -0700

I attended the same conference, and was impressed by a few systems that
Jim didn't mention. In terms of CMS, the following all had apparently
been used in some fairly large implementations and looked like some
pretty strong competition to commercial systems:
- Midgard, http://www.midgard-project.org/ , a PHP-based content
management framework that with other programs combines to be a full CMS
- Redhat CCM CMS, Java-based: http://www.spamassassin.taint.org/software/ccm/cms/
- OpenCMS, Java-based: http://www.opencms.org

There was agreement that usability has not generally been an open source
strength, but both Plone and Xopus represented some real movement
towards improving that situation.

I was impressed by the spectrum of perspectives on XML. Some took for
granted that XSLT was relevant to content management, others took it
just as for granted that XSLT was irrelevant and seemed happy to ignore
XML almost completely. 

I attended realizing that "content management" is generally used to
apply to *Web* content management, but I was still a bit shocked how
completely out of scope document management was (almost no consideration
of the potential print/PDF dimension to content other than the
occasional "...and you can use FOP to make PDF" as if that was
functional): this seems more the case in open source content management
than in commercial content management, and probably makes XML easier to
ignore (if HTML is the be-all and end-all of the output...).

The honesty was refreshing, Phil Suh complained about the state of
current tools (both open source and commercial), and I wish I'd written
down what he said, something like "it sucks so extremely, it sucks so
widely, and it is so generally sucking, that it seems sometimes there is
no hope." For a moment there was contemplation that perhaps commercial
systems scaled so well that the commercial "big boys" were really much
more functional than open source, until someone pointed out, "OK, take
some average blog software, spend $500,000 on the rollout... it'll scale
pretty well." Another quote (citing Brendan Quinn): "content management
problems are either trivial or impossible."

Mac OS X is getting popular, of the laptops there it was an even 1/3
each of Mac, Linux, Windows.

I am sure it wasn't news to Jim, but I can't wait to try Subversion, a
CVS replacement that supports some of the newer features of WebDAV:
http://subversion.tigris.org/

I'm also eager to try Xopus, I hope the developers make it back home
safely, they said they'd only been in America four days but were already
homeless...

Max



