Well, I volunteered at the last
SPI board meeting to re-do the
SPI website, as it was old and outdated.
So, I
posted a message over to spi-private and
spi-www asking for ideas.
The main one that came up was using a
CMS. Now, I've had a look at various CMSs in the past, and none of them have come up trumps. Also suggested were other options such as using Embperl and svn (which I use for the
Debconf site), but this isn't user friendly enough for many people, and a wiki, but I'm not convinced a wiki is the best thing for a static site.
The main issue that I saw with using a CMS for the SPI site is the requirement for it to be truly multilinugual. Unfortunately, this does sort of knock out a SPI Project,
Drupal. Another less important issue is the storage engine. Ideally, this should be postgres, as it's another associated project :) Thirdly, the software should be free (as in DFSG, not beer).
So, this leaves a few options. After many hours googling and lots of suggestions from the lists, I had a short list.
- SPIP
It seems to handle multilingual sites ok, but has two problems. Firstly, it's a php3 site. Although it should work in php4 and php5, it's still not going to be optimised enough. Secondly, it's written in French. This means that I can't hack it if needed
- Flux
PHP5, and using nice XML/XSLT. Has multilinugal capabilities, but it's admin interface is almost impossible to understand
- Brainfood
The CTO of Brainfood contacted me to suggest Brainfood as a possible solution. However, it's not yet open source. It also doesn't seem to support multilinugal sites. It's also written in Java, and may not work in open source systems
This leaves one which I've found,
Plone. It has issues, but it's the best I've found. Namely, it requires Zope. This means that every time you change it's skin, the entire Zope server requires a restart. Not even a reload, but a full restart. However, it's multilinugal facilities are very good, and it has a nice management interface. It does have lots of plugins that extend it's functionality, which is nice.
One of the problems I'm having at the moment is to get news items to have a 'Effective Date' of 1998, as the management interface only seems to go back to 1999, and I need to put old items on there. I also need to work out how to run it under Apache, and possibly use postgres as a storage engine.
So, all in all, Plone wins the day, due to it's ability to host multilinugal sites, and it having a management interface that doesn't suck.
For those that want a sneak preview, see
the testbed, but don't expect it to work perfectly :)
