I am currently investigating the WebGUI Content Management System at the moment. We want to cut down on the amount of editing that we need to do because we seem to have a lot of applications in the queue to develop and the editing is taking up too much time. There are various other reasons but I won’t go into those.
The website says that it is hard to install but this is nonsense it was fairly straight forward once I decided to use MySQL. I have only scratched the surface of it at the moment but it looks quite capable, I tried to get it into Postgres but had no success, there were various errors all reported as log files having the wrong permissions but a quick look in the logs showed me it was dodgy SQL.
Being a Postgres advocate/diehard I would have preferred to use it but considering its not a supported platform and we are not trying to run Amazon then MySQL will do the job.
If it turn out to be easy to use I might just use it on my own websites.
I have been making some headway with WebGUI today and it is a very competent system although there are a few things I would like done differently. They are using tables to make up the main page structure which works but I would like to use CSS instead. I have posted some questions to their site about this. If the table problem cannot be fixed by them I might try and hack it into shape myself.
I think that we will trial it on one or two of the smaller sites then if it proves to be a good way to go move all our sites onto it. Luckily most of it is in Perl so if there is something I don’t like I can change it myself.
Well! I got my questions answered today and it does not look like WebGUI will be suitable for what we want. I am now on the hunt looking for a CMS that will cater for our needs.
I have noticed Bricolage but it looks like a lot of work to install and look after. In fact I tried to install it tonight and it has been a complete pain in the ass and this is with Debian Sarge (We run woody on our production boxes). There are a lot of dependancy issues with it. On a plus note it does run on Postgres which I like. Another thing that worried me is that it has to be statically compiled into Apache and I have been unable to find a definitive answer why this is the case, very odd.
To be honest having had a good look at most of the Open Source CMS systems that are around and for what we need they are either overly complicated, immature or using PHP/Python when we really want Perl. I am not entirely keen on writing our own but I am sure that between us we could come up with a bespoke solution using Template Toolkit ( I can hear people cry “Reinventing the Wheel”)
I suppose writing our own would mean some reinvention but this way we would get exactly what we want and not have to fudge around various issues which is why we are where we are.
Well, its not up to me so I’ll keep hunting in the hope that a perfect solution will land in my lap.