Not a programming question I'm afraid, so moderators do what you will, but it is a question specifically for self-employed programmers running their own ISV sites.
If you publish your own shareware or freeware, do you use any CMS or templating system to streamline maintaining the website? Would you recommend any?
Two most important features I'm looking for that I couldn't find in any popular CMS/blogging engine, from my favorite TextPattern to WordPress, Joomla and Drupal are:
a templating system to maintain structural consistency of xhtml page layout
a hash table of user-defined values that works with the templates to substitute these values for identifiers.
Explanation: If you publish more than one application, the site probably contains several classes of pages that are nearly identical for each product: "Features", "Screenshots", "What's new", "Download", etc. These pages have the same layout and differ mainly in product-specific data. I'd like to be able to define "CurrentVersion=2.2" for product A, and "CurrentVersion=3.3" for product B in a "dictionary", and have the system generate two "Download" pages from the same template, replacing the "CurrentVersion" identifier with each product's respective value.
Other than that, I am looking for good support for static pages (the example pages above do not yield themselves to blog-like timeline treatment) and for design templates (themes), since I can't do graphic design at all (no skills, no tools, no talent). A good search function, esp. for the FAQs, is important. Another nice-to-have is easy (preferably wiki-like) way of linking to pages within the site. Some CMS-es, such as Joomla, make this simple and common task surprisingly inconvenient.
LAMP, and preferably free, since mine is a freeware-only shop.
I need no collaboration features and no multi-user content editing at all. My ISP doesn't support Zope, so that excludes some candidates.
I'm asking this question having spent months trying to find a solution that would help me leave static html behind and reduce the maintenance chores, such as updating the current version number on several pages manually. So what do others use to publish their software?
(Please do not reply by just saying "Try X". At least please say what makes it suitable or how it is better than other possible solutions. I've already tried a number of CMS engines, and they all seem to require extensive modifications to suit this particular need. Since my programming experience is strictly desktop-side Windows, tweaking these products is well beyond my skills (and my skin crawls to think of potential security WTFs I could unwittingly commit). Time is also a factor, since between my day job and my late-night coding, there's little left for learning how to write my own CMS from scratch - just typing static html would be more efficient.)
Wordpress is quite nice. It has a big community behind it so you can leech some plugins, like for SEO optimization, PayPal integration, Google Analytics statistics tracking, etc. And you also have a full-featured administration backend to manage all your content.
I would recommend Joomla 3.2.x. I have the same sort of project based websites, and this provides the flexibility for all of the different requirements. While WordPress is great the simplicity of it gets the better of it, Joomla is far more flexible and has a huge support network and extensions library.
Related
I am a computer programmer by training but have been away from web development for a while. I am doing a little bit of background research on various Python web development frameworks. I understand that Django, Grok / Zope 3, and Pylons are all good solid frameworks, but have little in the way of background working with them. Can someone explain to me the difference in approach of the each of the frameworks, and where one shines when compared to the others?
My specific use case is in building a web application that will recommend products to users based on a variety of user supplied information. Thus, it will take a fair bit of user input in the shape of a basic profile, product preferences, attempt to establish social relationships between users. It will also need to support staff uploading products into the system with labeled features that can be then matched to users.
On the last point, would parts of Plone help with providing an interface for non-tech people to upload products and descriptions of the products? Are piece of Plone easy to borrow? Seems like I shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel in terms of having a way for people to upload items for sale / recommendation along with some metadata to describe the items. Thanks for the help.
Based on your background and requirements, I'd advise you to go with something like http://pinaxproject.com/ which is based on Django.
Pyramid (the successor to Pylons) is a very low-level framework and you need to either choose the libraries or write all your application code yourself. For someone experienced this makes sense and gives you full control over your code. But it is a bit of a hurdle if you start from scratch and aren't familiar with the available libraries.
Django and Grok are both high level frameworks, with Django being the more popular choice. If you aren't familiar yet with using object databases or URL traversal, Grok is more time consuming to learn.
Plone is not suited for your use-case. It's a content management system and not a general web framework. Very little of the libraries it uses can be reused in a different context, certainly none of its UI. If you want to provide an engaging user experience with personalized content, Plone isn't for you - that's not what its been build to handle.
Disclaimer: I'm a release manager for Plone and Zope 2 / Zope Toolkit and have used Pyramid but not Django.
Dolmen project is a CMS built on top of Grok. Is very simple, but there are very few that use it. If you go with Grok, you could be able to reuse the GUI.
But As Hanno said, Grok is more time-consuming to learn than Django. Also Django has far more users than Grok.
The advantage of using Grok is that you can profit from Zope Component Architecture almost without writing ZCML and using decorators instead.
With Pyramid/Pylons you get a very simple framework and nothing else. It is a decoupled framework, so you are free to use whatever templating enginge you want (Mako, Genshi, Jinja, Cheetah), you are free to choose sqlalchemy, zodb, mongoDb, etc., and you are also free to choose the url mapping scheme (traversal vs. django-style mapping or a combination of both). You can also use ZCA here if you want. For starters this might become quite confusing or verbose.
Django is a kind of monolithic framework that gives you one way to do stuff. That's why it's easy to learn and a very good option. But, in my experience, you sometimes get to a point where you want to deviate from Django standards and it simply cannot be done without patching a bunch of stuff.
And, as for Zope3, I'd recommend you to download a copy of BlueBream and se how it does for you.
As a Plone user I can say that creating Content Objects in Plone is difficult. There is not much documentation on how to do it and it is complicated. Some recommend using UML and specialized Plone products to make it easier but that introduces yet another dependency.
I mention the problem with content objects because your "products" (not the same as a Plone product) would probably be represented in Plone as a content object which you would need to write yourself.
Plone is best when users and editors are entering and approving text in the form of news articles, press releases, photos etc. When that is the use case there are predefined content objects for such things so one does not need to write them oneself.
--Jonathan Mark
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We're thinking of moving from our existing installation of MediaWiki to something more feature-rich. I'm trying to find all the pains people have with MediaWiki today (mainly it's poor handling of external documents and less-than-perfect editing capabilities - compared to Word).
We are using a wiki for design, spec, process guidelines. We have several external documents (docs, powerpoints) that we are currently putting on a shared folder and linking to from the wiki (because uploading files is not very convenient in MediaWiki).
We are trying to make the friction minimum, so that nobody will have an excuse or reason for not using it.
Some options we're considering are Confluence, Trac & Sharepoint. Money is not a big concern, only ease of use (and maintenance) and feature-fullness. What would you use?
I would plug the details of my specific feature needs into the excellent WikiMatrix choice wizard and let it make recommendations.
I would advise either
Foswiki ( http://foswiki.org ), (forked by the whole developer community of TWiki to avoid trademark threats), for a feature-rich and fully open programmer's wiki. Drop on #foswiki on irc.freenode.net to chat with the community.
Mindtouch's Deki Wiki ( http://www.mindtouch.com/ ) clearly the most user-friendly advanced and innovative wiki out there, a modern commercial + open source offering. Great integration with Office docs.
I would avoid Confluence. Confluence made a design choice (forbidding mixing html in pages with Wiki syntax) that proves deadly to any attempt at wysiwyg, as it uses a standard HTML editor for WYSIWYG, and this converts it on save in a very limited subset of it, yielding frustrating surprises for the users (foswiki for instance keeps as html the parts the wiki syntax do not handle like bullet lists in table cells). Confluence have many great sides, notably its integration with atlassian great tools as their JIRA bugtracker, (we use it at work for this with good results) but do not plan to customize it.
There are many good choices on hosted wikis too (Google sites, based on the awesome jotspot engine is one).
Never use Sharepoint of course. Its wiki capabilities are a IE-only joke, and Sharepoint whole architecture is braindead (storing all data - even huge docs - in a non-distributed database goes against Microsoft own recommendations). If you want a DMS with good Office integration, have a look at KT (Knowledge Tree) instead. http://www.knowledgetree.com/ . For political reasons we were forced to use Sharepoint at work but we limited it to basic document managing (never use the MOSS higher layer, as it breaks compatibility between versions) and integrated a foswiki frontend to it (dumped document list & metadata in xml and provided navigation in foswiki, and search with a google box)
But my real advice would be to ... wait for Google wave, that promises to revolutionize the wiki concepts.
Disclaimer: I am part of the foswiki community.
Before you move away from Mediawiki I would urge you to consider the many extensions available. IMO there arent many wikis that offer more features that MW, especially when you consider the number of extensions. See http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Extensions
For example, for editing there are browser based editors similar to Word. And there even macros for Word that allow you to export from MS Word to your Wiki, from within Word.
Also, check out the Semantic Mediawiki extensions. These give enormousness benefits in the area of Knowledge Management.
I would personally recommend against moving from Wiki to SharePoint. The huge problem there is SP's dreadful handling of images.
First of all I would stay away from Sharepoint. Period.
I would not consider switching to Trac either, since Trac has special focus on issue tracking, and poor support for external documents.
I would consider switching to Confluence, since:
Money is not an issue (as you said)
You want to minimise maintanance work (as you said)
You want to use wiki to handle external documents (as you said)
I'm typically a strong advocate of open source technology, but with the requirements you gave, I just don't think they would make you happy. For instance if you had personnel available for maintaining and providing customisations to your system, I would definitely suggest trying out Foswiki, which also would otherwise fit your needs very nicely. However, if you really want to stay away from any extra maintance work, Foswiki is not a good option.
I work on Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware and I'll share a few links. This question comes up quite a bit so we have a dedicated page: http://tiki.org/Tiki+vs+MediaWiki
We're thinking of moving from our existing installation of MediaWiki
Tiki & MediaWiki are both PHP/MySQL so you can use the same server.
Tiki has a built-in importer: http://doc.tiki.org/MediaWiki+importer
to something more feature-rich.
Tiki is the http://tiki.org/FOSS+Web+Application+with+the+most+built-in+features
We are using a wiki for design, spec, process guidelines. We have several external documents (docs, powerpoints) that we are currently putting on a shared folder and linking to from the wiki (because uploading files is not very convenient in MediaWiki). We are trying to make the friction minimum, so that nobody will have an excuse or reason for not using it.
http://doc.tiki.org/WYSIWYG
http://doc.tiki.org/File+Gallery (instead of your shared folder)
http://doc.tiki.org/Docs (web-based ODFs)
http://doc.tiki.org/Spreadsheet (web-based)
http://doc.tiki.org/Slideshow (web-based)
http://doc.tiki.org/Draw (web-based)
Some options we're considering are Confluence, Trac & Sharepoint. Money is not a big concern, only ease of use (and maintenance) and feature-fullness. What would you use?
Tiki is Free/Open Source. But if you have money burning your pockets :-)
http://tiki.org/Donation
You can also hire a consultant to provide training/support and to accelerate the implementation and/or sponsor feature development
http://info.tiki.org/Consultants
Have you considered sharing your Word documents with Google Docs? It has revision control and collaboration features like a wiki, as well as a rich text editor that can import and export plenty of formats.
It sounds like TWiki would be a great option for you as well. I haven't used it myself, but it also has a rich text editor, as well as tons of enterprisey project management features in it.
A lot of people seem to like Confluence. I personally don't know it. If you are not already at it and you want something feature-rich than xwiki could be something for you.
I'd add FCK Editor for WYSIWYG, get a decent document management system to run alongside the wiki and carry on with MediaWiki!
Currently our team is using MoinMoin as a wiki for IT and it's so nice.
We want to promote to use wiki for end-users because some of them are interested. On the wiki we'll share and edit requirements of aplications, for instance.
I think MoinMoin is not the more user-friendy (but I love to use it) that's why we are looking for the best user-friendly wiki for end-users/customers
For yourself MoinMoin is obviously user friendly. =) Seriously, consider all users and try to figure what kinds of usage patterns you have. MoinMoin is a reasonable choice since it's such a simple program. You can often help your non-programmer users by adding a feature or two to MoinMoin. Developers are up to speed with it and you have all the content there already.
That said. Mediawiki is used for lots of general wikis out there today. Including Wikipedia. An aspect of user friendliness is recognition. Mediawiki might feel more friendly because users are more familiar with how it works. And Mediawiki is widely adapted. Lots of extra features you might want to add to help your users are already written as extensions. And Mediawiki's extensions API is really good so you can easily automate your own verticals when the need arises. Mediawiki is reasonably feature rich without being totalluy overloaded. It has categories and templates which both come in handy for keeping things DRY and using the wiki in various processes. It shares lots of its syntax with MoinMoin since both have the same ancestor (syntax-wise).
I'd probably go with Mediawiki.
Visit Wikimatrix.org to determine what features you need and what tool is best for you. I often mention Foswiki.org as a very nice and userfriendly tool, but it really depends on the features that you need.
I have yet to see any Wiki that is more end-user friendly than Confluence.
Just the most important reasons:
While other Wikis say they have WYSIWYG editors, what they actually do is enclose selected text with markup when clicking an icon. That is not WYSIWYG, that's code injection! In Confluence 5 all editing is done from a visual editor (you actually DO see what you get right away straight within the editor). With the ability to add macros (markup) by powerusers.
In almost all other wikis the users are entirely responsible for creating and maintaining the link hierarchy. This means broken links and orphaned pages will be the norm. In Confluence all pages are automatically added to a page hierarchy and sorted by name. You can enable the tree browser via the Documentation theme to make browsing the wiki even without manually added links convenient. Lastly you have the ability to reorder pages in any order via drag & drop.
However, Confluence is rather costly for > 10 users. But well worth it if you can afford it, or you don't need more than 10 editors. Pure "readers" do not count towards users if anonymous viewing is enabled.
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What features should "Tomorrow's" wikis include? How might they incorporate Web 2.0 features like AJAX? What other features are they currently missing? What do you want to see from the next release of your favorite Wiki?
Edit: How might a Wiki be integrated into other products? What "neat uses" could wikis have?
Preview-as-you-type works very nicely indeed here on Stack Overflow. Many wikis don't do that.
Make it really easy to link between pages, eg. that, as you type, the wiki finds likely pages you may be referring to. That way you can make links without having to know the exact title of a target page, and bouncing on the shift key to WriteInCamelCase, or throwing in square brackets. Make it very easy to link to other websites outside the wiki, too (and by "easy" I do not mean like wikisisters, which, if I remember correctly, is like foowiki:ALinkLikeThis).
Similarly, if you can generate links within text automatically, you could, for example, have a mail system that wikifies your email. You create a wiki page, say, for Joel Spolsky, and references to Joel emails in your inbox become links to that page, which you can find by clicking "what links here". (This probably needs something along the lines of Bayesian filtering to prune the stray references to other Joels... your Bayesian Classifier learns that if the context is smart and getting things done, it's Spolsky. If it's flying Viking kittens, it's morely likely Joel Veich).
A variety of RSS feeds for tracking changes would nice, too. (Diffs, full text, changes on pages I've edited, ...)
Wikipedia has grown a fairly colossal categorisation system ("Fictional Cats", anyone?); laying a taxonomy over a wiki's flat namespace could provide another way for users to find their way around. Wikipedia's doing this a little, but in fairly limited ways so far: there are links to the relevant category lists, but you can't, for example, look for a composer called "Smith".
Similarly, wikis give you this big graph of interconnected nodes, of how closely your community sees the relevant concepts as being. Is that interesting? Is that useful? Does anyone who isn't google want to think about this stuff?
PS. If you believe Paul Graham's definition of Web 2.0 as "Democracy, Don't Maltreat Users, and Javascript works now", wikis are two thirds Web 2.0 already.
I am personally already tired of wikis. Wiki as a software is outdated, now it is about wiki as a feature (like my favorite new website, stack overflow).
The main advantage of community wiki — more editing — came into existence when we introduced "Suggested Edits".
With "Suggested Edits", anyone, even an anonymous user, can edit anything — so long as another experienced user reviews and approves their edit.
I'm in the process of choosing a wiki tool, and have looked at numerous packages over the past week. I'm sure there are dozens I haven't even heard of yet, probably good ones. But in general, here's my "beginner's mind" take on the problem.
Wiki markup should be abandoned. A wiki that is limited to wiki markup will only be useful to 'nix hacks and others who get excited about doing things the hard way and insisting that everybody else is stupid. I mean, Morse code is fine with me personally; I don't get what was wrong with a nice, clean dash-dot-dash. Or smoke signals, they were nice, except for the carbon footprint. But times change, and we have to change with them.
Real users (business users, customers, clients) want rich text editing. Period. And when a wiki tries to support both rich text and wiki markup, the results are not pretty. The model is confusing and (apparently) difficult to implement. The fckeditor extension at wikiwiki is a nightmare, for example. It's just not worth it.
Wikis need better access control. The idea that all content should be open to everyone is fine for an open, public, non-profit wiki like this one. But in the business world, that's not how it works. Restricting access is not evil, it's reality. Wiki tools need to do a much better job of providing access control: access to pages and groups of pages based on role or group membership, where groups can be formed by anyone on an ad hoc basis and users can belong to multiple groups and pages can be accessible to multiple groups, at the whim of the page's creator.
Those are the two things that I want, above all else, and I haven't found it in open source, at least not out of the box. Which, of course, is why open source is open source.
There's been some interesting work using wikis for testing and software development. EG, movement towards literate programming -- allowing pages to exist as both code and documentation that is compiled down into one or the other (or, I suppose, both simultaneously).
They have a regular session about this at the annual WikiSym conference.
I think one direction of Wikis is going from open ended collections of documents to an "everyone can edit but with more structure" applications like SO.
Another direction that I've seen is more direct integration with other project support tools, so project planning, issue management, and all that stuff.
Personally, I think the next big direction is going to be some sort of multimedia based Wiki, not just a Wiki where multimedia can be embedded in the text.
I really like MediaWiki. It's widely used and free/Free. The markup syntax is straightforward and allows you to do enough basic styling that you don't need to use custom HTML or to use a WYSIWYG. I assume by "sexy web 2.0" you mean Flash/AJAX, but I like MediaWiki because it works cleanly with basic HTML/Javascript (you don't have to wait for custom widgets to load, etc...).
What makes wikis reach their potential of usefulness is the community that develops around them more than the software itself. You need to find a niche where people are both passionate about (but not criminally insane about) the central topic and have enough technical prowess to log on to a website and edit some text.
"Wiki" is ultimately just a pattern:
Open editing by all/most visitors
Integrated revision tracking and rollback to reduce the cost of mistakes
Simple syntax for cross-linking between articles, and auto-creation of stub articles when referenced
That's not a perfect description, but it's a combination that isn't particularly magic. Successful wikis combine those things with a critical mass of people creating and maintaining content.
The next step, IMO, is less about web 2.0 shininess and more about the integration of better structural information. Adding any metadata beyond "this points to that" is an exercise in brute force hand-markup. Maybe microformats? Maybe the development of more structured knowledgebase software that uses wiki-ish editing UI but a smarter backend? I'm not sure, but I think better handling of the structured data is really the next wave.
Extensibility.
Check out DekiWiki, they are doing an excellent job with this.
DekiWiki extensions
The wiki-of-the-future will be completely editable online, concurrently by everyone. Check out EtherPad for a demo of the techonology.
For me, in terms of Enterprise style uses for a wiki, I have a couple of thoughts;
An effective way to keep and synchronise a central, web based wiki with multiple, offline, desktop style wiki's for people on the go
To move towards wiki as a function as opposed to wiki as a system, so we can integrate the wiki collaborative system into other things
Do you use a wiki in your company? Who uses it and what for. Do you share information between projects / teams / departments or not?
We use ours to store
Coding Style docs
Setup and Deployment procedures for web servers and sites
Network diagrams (what are all the servers in Dev, Staging, QA and Production called etc.)
Project docs (pdfs, visios, excel, docs, etc.) are stored in SVN. For the non-techies we have links to those docs in the wiki that point to an up-to-date share on my box. (tip: some wikis provide source control integration but ours doesn't)
Installation and Setup procedures for development tools
Howto's on things like using our bug tracking system, our unit testing philosophy
When doing research on a topic I often capture the important information in a wiki page for others to learn from
I've seen them used to keep seating charts in medium to large size organizations for the new people
At my previous company all of the emergency contacts and procedures for handling a critical outage where available on the front page of the wiki
The best part about a wiki is that it's searchable. Some wiki's support searching inside uploaded or linked docs as well.
If you setup a wiki and encourage or even require people to use it the amount of information that will accumulate can be amazing. It's definately worth the effort especially if you have someone in IT with some spare time on their hands to set it up.
Do you use a wiki in your company?
= We use it for the purpose of a Knowlede Based. Basically it is a wiki but many more functionalities intagrated.
Who uses it and what for
= Employees. Knowledge Sharing, Preparation of collaborative-documents, etc.
Do you share information between projects / teams / departments or not?
= Depends on the requirements. It is possible to set permissions between users.
We use a wiki, for documenting our systems. It's updated gradually as things update and evolve. It should go without saying that there's benefit in that, however whether you use a wiki or other methods is worth thinking about.
A wiki is great for collarborative editing. The information shouldn't go stale in theory, because as people use the systems they have the opportunity to keep it up to date.
However we have found in our organisation that people struggle a little with wiki markup. Especially tables. I think a solution that has wysiwyg editing would be better if you have non-highly-technical people editing it. Sharepoint springs to mind, but it's expensive.
I use a wiki as my virtual "story wall" for agile development. All of my stories are written and organized in the wiki. While my customers are reasonably local (we can have face-to-face meetings), they aren't co-located. To enable better customer interaction I've resorted to a wiki instead of a wall-based story tracking mechanism. It also works a little better for me due to the fact that I often have multiple, concurrent projects and limited wall space in my cube. In a larger team with more focused projects and more wall area, I'm not sure I'd make the same choice.
My company uses a wiki for project-planing but also for storing documentation and ideas.
I have found that a wiki is a great way to link the programmers in the company with the business-people.
When someone who are not on the programming-team comes up with an idea or finds a bug, it's a loot simpler to let that person document it in the wiki.
I think it's an important aspect for a small company like mine to easily synchronize the business-team with the development-team. A wiki helps with that, since it gives the feeling of being a part of the development process, instead of having to ask the programmer directly about every little detail.
we have MediaWiki to store technical information that is not ready to be published in other formats - specification drafts, diagrams (via GraphViz extension), results of short investigations, etc.
I also think this question is a wiki too :)