Preserved Topic: That whole CMS question...

Okay, I need a CMS - It doesn't need to be free. What is the best out there?

Here's the deal - it will be for a sight involving a good deal of dynamic content - ie reviews, user reviews and polls...and all of this needs to be able to be integrated dynamically with the search results produced by accessing a rather large database.

The CMS needs to support user roles/security features. Also, the possiblity for somehow managing actual user database (that is, the "surfer"s membership) would be good, but i don't know if that's really available.

I'm also looking for something that's quick, able to handle all of this - ya know, it'd be nice if I could still use PHP/Perl etc. to do some things, that way I don't always need to rely on slow, bulky template languages.

Any thoughts? What is out there being used by the "top sights" ya know? This is for a site for three tech magazines, so the amount of content may be somewhat considerable, but not CNet sized, at least not yet.

didnt you ask the same question some time ago with the only difference that this time its not open source?

ah, well ok.
if you wait a few months i could probably give you a good recommendation cause im doing a seminar on professional CMS this semester and i have already lots of studies and books about that on my desk.

but in your case its more a WCMS what you need. (Web Content Management System)

check these sites:
http://www.hartman-communicatie.nl/content/tools.htm
http://www.cms-list.org/about
http://www.cmswatch.com/
http://www.contentmanager.de/ (german)
http://www.edocmagazine.com
http://www.ibit.at/kunden/ipage/ (german)

yes, i did post this earlier...but adding to that just seems to lose it, and i tried to give more info.

Here's the other thing - what might anyone know 'bout Vignette's Content Management Suite? I read up on it and it seem quite extensive, but quite how *expensive* is it?

yes, vignette has a good name in business, but isnt mentioned in the books i have.

i think they dont have fixed prices. you contact them and tell them what you need and then they offer you a version that fits your needs at a certain price.

Well, Vignette, MS CMS and all the really BIG solutions are basically packages that doesnt run out of the box. They are more of gigantic toolboxes that run on one or more servers, priced by CPU that gives you lot's of shortcuts in setting up and customizing a large CMS.

Prices, well, let's just say that they can start at $50 000 and just go up, fast! I'm subscribing to a mailinglist on the CMS-theme, and figures that are mentioned with these systems are $250 000 -> $500 000 once it's developed and ready to run.

Based on the info you gave I'd take a wild guess and say that this might be a wee bit expensive.

If you want something simpler but based on a commercial product you could take a look here at http://www.roxen.com/ they offer a personal edition in the download section that more or less runs out of the box (webserver and everything is included).

This basic version is based on java/jsp and a database, should need arise you can expand it to the full-fledged XML/XSLT version that holds everything in it's own CVS.
This does require quite a lot of XML/XSL knowledge to create all the user interfaces though, plus it costs. Somewhere in the neighbourhood of $15-20 000, at least last year. Setting up the templates for it can be a bit of a b*tch since everything is hacked up HTML in proprty-files (at least the version I worked on), but it's pretty flexible once you are done.

And no, I don't work for them, however I've had a developers course on it appr a year back at my last job.

If you want to go the M$ way, you can take a look at http://www.episerver.com/ (click upper right corner for english version). It' might be MS all the way, but it's well designed, lot's of caching for fast access, quite easy to customize and a really, really sweet admin-interface with all kinds of rolebased permissionlevels, page-templates wysiwyg, formgenerators and much more. And it's priced around $7-8000.

Contact them to see if you can get an eval-version, I think you can, but you need to bind it to a fixed IP. If you don't hate MS, this is a really nice setup.

For more options: http://www.google.com/search?hl=sv&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=content+management+system+CMS&l r=

<edit>
This is also a good read: http://www.alistapart.com/stories/cms1/
</edit>
/Dan


{cell 260}
-{ a vibration is a movement that doesn't know which way to go }-

[This message has been edited by DmS (edited 10-08-2002).]