Eclectic Echoes

I have an upcoming project that will require a CMS system (as opposed to an extended blog system like MT or WordPress.) Some of the functions I could get away with a creative use of MT to make it work, and I will continue to look at that as an option, but I am also checking the “full featured” open source CMS solutions as well. What I’m looking for is:

1. output XHTML/CSS
2. granular user/group rights control (guests, users, authors, publishers, admins) based on site sections
3. easy to use backend for authors and publishers who would have little computer expertise, or no desire to learn another interface
4. built in text area editor or simple plain text filter that outputs valid XHTML, smart quotes and doesn’t mangle UTF-8 characters
5. MySQL based
6. friendly URI’s, preferably built in, but at least with a scheme that allows fairly easy mod_rewrite rules
7. not a complete pig on server resources

There are other things I am looking for of course, but those are some of the bigger stumbling blocks I am seeing with other systems available right now…

So far phpWCMS is out because of it’s backend and user/group management mainly. I really like this system for the most part, and if this site was going to be all techies using it… but the site in question needs to be as simple as possible for authors and section administrators. The backend is not bad for a tech/geek, but for a non-geek author — it requires multiple screens to input an article, which for some of the contributors could be confusing and unwieldy. It also does not appear to have the ability to define groups of users and assign them rights on a per site section basis. On the plus side, while it does not generate clean XHTML out of the “box”, with only about an hour’s playing I was able to re-build the site layout with XHTML and CSS , no tables and list item menus and get it to look good and validate. With it’s built in editor / filters though I am not confident it would stay valid XHTML.

Next up? phpWebSite, but maybe I should start looking at Drupal, or maybe just go back to MT3 with multiple blogs as the CMS especially since many of the sections will be news or blog based anyways.

In preparation for a move to a new server, I am cleaning up the entries that are now XHTML1.1 validable. So far it has been fairly painless although tedious. I had some sloppy entries (ones that in truth would not validate XHTML 1.0 transitional even!) but have gone through the last two months worth of stuff and verified that they all validate to XHTML 1.1 At this point everything back to the William Shatner songfest entry validate. Once everything validates, the static pages will stay here but the weblog will move to a new domain and server, with suitble messages here to redirect along with noindex instructions for the search engines. The content that is here now will be duplicated on the new site as well.

Update — March 2005

Since moving to WordPress and using a pre-canned Theme, this site is not XHTML1.1 validable. I will be working on my own theme and going through the template to make it 1.1 valid again, I think, maybe.