CMS Mania!

Submitted by Chandrashekar Babu on November 29, 2004 - 10:07pm.
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Its been quite a while since I went on rounds checking for other Content Management Systems. This time, I came across two neat CMS solutions:

  • Xaraya - The website was well polished and attractive, but I had a tough time getting their CMS to work on my machine. Perhaps I'll wait till it gets stable. But from what I found, it was supposed to be full-featured user friendly. But it does seem to look a bit complex.
  • Etomite - This CMS was the most user-friendly, yet powerful and well-designed CMS that I've come across lately. Infact, after the initial install-and-test cycle on it, I was tempted to migrate my website onto this CMS now ;-). Okay, I think I'll spend some more time with it, understand its features and stuff well and then think about the migration part.

I get a feeling that making dynamic websites is longer a pain as it used to be (atleast on the technological front). With a lot of readily packaged solutions available for free, I guess the most crucial part of website development right now would be its design. Now this is where eal creativity kicks in - the need for creating individuality and originality. Of course, there are a lot of templates available, and most of them attractive and innovative. Adopting one of these templates would be feasible perhaps for a personal website (like mine ;-)), but for an official website, this might mean compromising on the website's individuality.
I hope this issue could be tackled too, sooner or later.

On the side line, I happened to search around for a slim wiki tool and found WackoWiki. Wiki has changed a lot since the days of Twiki that I had setup in my earlier company. Infact, I remember majority of my ex-collegues struggling their way through its interface (maneuvering the mouse across a clutter of links, and editing HTML tags inline in text area were a pain) and the whole effort was silently abandoned after a few months. The wiki today has become more user-friendly (when I mean users, I meant non-programmers/non-techies). Infact, it was just a minute deal to set WackoWiki up, and start on with it. Great stuff indeed.

I guess its high time I get started on my official website with a proper CMS, wiki, bugtracking system and Project Management system in place. The whole tool-hunting was a mere exercise to fetch the right set of tools to integrate onto my site.