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Enough With The Good, Show Me Some Bad

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Today was one of those interesting days that seemed to never end. Some clients are just more difficult that others. Most clients hire you based on your expertise in a field, while some clients hire you just to get some work done that they don't have time to do. My current client, for the most part is easy to work with and values what I say, but there are always members of the team that "think" they know it all.

With that said, after giving demo's of various opensource solutions, I was tasked with yet another last minute task that needed to be answered sooner rather than later. The question this time was: "You've told me what's good about them, now tell me what's bad".

So here is my evaluation of misgivings in the OpenSource solutions I detailed yesterday.

Joomla

Although Joomla is a very nice CMs platform, it's designed for small websites. Which in itself seems to be a problem. As your site grows, so must your CMS, and the case of Joomla it seems to not grow fast enough for some sites. Joomla is more of a change it and leave it type of system. Make a change and forget about it. That must be the reason that there isn't any workflow inside the product as well. The fact that content creating, management and delivery are all done from the same instance is a bit of a scare as well. There also seems to be very little quality control of the project, with the number of contributors it has, I'm sure that's a heck of a challenge. All of these are negitive spots, but this one is huge, no support for multi-server environments or multisite management of a single instance. But other than that, it's pretty awesome right!

Drupal

Althought the community of developers wouldn't tell you this, Drupal has it's share of issues as well. One key factor for me in determining a good system, is whether or not there is a good workflow built in, Drupal has none. Highly traffic sites must be monitored for problems, and the problems could be from some of the 3rd party modules that you must use in order to gain functionality not inherent in the product. There is limited versioning, less than perfect LDAP integration and it doesn't support any commercially available database engine. Drupal to me started as something really cool, but over the years has kind of lost it's strangle hold on the OpenSource CMS community.

SilverStripe

The product I demoed was SilverStripe, and although it's a fairly new arrival to the OpenSource CMS world, it did start out as a commercial product. Like Drupal, SilverStripe has no integration with commercially available databases, which for some is a problem, for me I'm a MySQL kinda guy and that's well supported and documented. Wait did I just say documentations? Yes and I did, and finding documentation can be challenging, especially since you need to ask SilverStripe for that documentation. With it being a relatively new entrant into the PHP CMS circle, there is always the question of longevity. If I build this now, how long is it going to be around? Yes SilverStripe does provide support, but the free support lacks any real control or regulation. This is a problem, because the code to write templates is pretty messy and not as easy as one might like it to be. So there you have it. Some of the bad that you have to deal with when your using opensource. It isn't that commercially available products don't have the same issues, they just seem to have a lot more support dollars to make those issues disappear. In all I'm still really happy with Open Source and I'll still recommend Django to just about anyone that will listen, but always keep in mind there is no "one size fits all" CMS. If there were I'd already be using it.

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