♠ Alternatives ♠

As mentioned before, we recommend the use of WordPress for website content management, unless you have extremely particular needs or are building a site specifically oriented towards a particular audience.

Drupal

Drupal is a powerful choice for content management, with a vast assortment of modules to extend functionality where it’s needed.

Drupal allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Tens of thousands of people and organizations are using Drupal to power scores of different web sites, including

* Community web portals
* Discussion sites
* Corporate web sites
* Intranet applications
* Personal web sites or blogs
* Aficionado sites
* E-commerce applications
* Resource directories
* Social Networking sites

The built-in functionality, combined with dozens of freely available add-on modules, will enable features such as:

* Content Management Systems
* Blogs
* Collaborative authoring environments
* Forums
* Peer-to-peer networking
* Newsletters
* Podcasting
* Picture galleries
* File uploads and downloads

and much more.

Although Drupal is extremely flexible and has proven to be an extremely valuable platform overall, we have found that it is oftentimes almost too complex for the average small business (Dragonfly Networks caters primarily to small businesses), and although the vast assortment of available modules makes it a tempting choice, we’ve found that it is a much more complex endeavor to roll out a Drupal-based site than a WordPress or Geeklog-based site, which tends to drive up the overall costs involved.

This is not to say that Drupal is a poor choice for your project; quite the contrary. If you have the budget and need a scalable content management system that can support hundreds or thousands of users, Drupal might be the perfect choice. If you have such a project and would like our assistance developing your website, we are adept Drupal developers and would love to talk with you about your options.

Geeklog

Geeklog is a PHP/MySQL based application for managing dynamic web content. “Out of the box”, it is a blog engine, or a CMS with support for comments, trackbacks, multiple syndication formats, spam protection, and all the other vital features of such a system.

We’ve had several successful site deployments based on the Geeklog codebase, and have nothing but good things to say about it. The development community is somewhat smaller than WordPress or Drupal, but the lead developers run a tight ship and are very proactive about security updates, which is quite refreshing.

Blog/CMS Features

* Create, Schedule, Post and Edit articles in multiple topics
* Save story drafts until they are ready for publishing.
* Control over formatting used in articles (HTML whitelists)
* Control over acceptable content (filtering of offensive language)
* Embed images or other content in articles
* Multiple Authors can post
* Submissions from users
* Support for comments, trackbacks and pingbacks
* Export and import in all common syndication formats (RSS/RDF/Atom etc)
* Spam detection and rejection
* Robust calendar feature with support for personalized calendars.
* Support for OpenID and other remote authentication methods.
* Extendible via numerous Open Source plugins.

Administration Features

* Easy to install with an automated installer
* Fully support for internationalization and localization
* Easy to use admin interface
* Admin interface has complete configurability for all Geeklog functions.
* User-specified theming engine for custom look and feel.

Security Features

* User accounts and access controls.
* Robust *nix-like security model for all objects which can be extended for use in plugins
* Access can be defined for each article, topic etc
* All passwords are stored encrypted.
* All admin access is logged.
* All errors are logged.
* Complete error logging on all forms and SQL calls.

Developer Features

* Plugin support with API for developers.
* A fully configurable block system, with php-in-block support.
* Well organized codebase, use of PHP’s Object-Oriented features.
* Thin database abstraction layer allowing Geeklog to be ported to DBMS’s
other than the defaults (MySQL and MSSQL supported directly). them to be satisfactory for the most part

Joomla

Joomla is another option that has proven itself to be user-friendly, flexible, and functional.

Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.

Joomla is not our first choice for a variety of reasons, but we have deployed sites based on Joomla and have found it to be a satisfactory content management system.

Catalyst

If you are trying to build a web application that requires custom functionality that is simply not available from the above choices (or the many other choices in the realm of CMS software), we are proud advocates of Perl’s Catalyst framework, and would be delighted to discuss your project with you and evaluate your needs to see if Catalyst might be the solution you are looking for.

Catalyst is comparable in many ways to the popular Ruby on Rails framework, Django (Python’s framework for web applications), or Symfony for PHP. However, since it is entirely written in Perl, it is compatible with the multitude of modules freely available on the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN), which makes developing prototype applications a breeze.

Hosting, however, can be a bit of an issue, as not many web hosts support Catalyst on their lower-end offerings. Typically, a Catalyst application would be designed to run on a dedicated server. This means that unless you are able and willing to spend the time and money administering your own web server, or are willing to pay someone else to do that for you, it may be prohibitively costly.

However, if you’re serious about Catalyst, like we are, we’d be pleased as punch to sit down with you and discuss the possibilities of your web application. Give us a call at (612) 298-9875 or contact us online.

Other Platforms

If you need something specific, it never hurts to ask. Although Dragonfly Networks specializes in developing websites for clients based on the most popular and successful open source CMS solutions, we are also knowledgeable in a variety of other areas. So, if you don’t see your platform listed here, you might just want to drop us a line anyway, to see if we have experience with your desired platform of choice.

It never hurts to ask!