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Flexo7 > WhyAnotherCMS

Introduction

CMS is about managing content. A natural approach to managing content would be to put the content in a central repository and manage it from there. This would have the benefit of only needing to take care of versioning and multiple document versions at just one place.

In common open source content management systems of today, this does not happen. Even if it does, a usual content management lacks flexibility. How much for example would a content management system cost you, that has a configureable workflow, multi-language support, has revision-support, a decent api and is easy to use?

That's where Flexo7 comes in.

Background

Quite a few people involved in Flexo7 developement come from phpWebSite. While phpWebSite is a very powerful CMS that's easy to use, it certainly lacks a couple of things that inhibit it's corporate use:

  • No Roadmap. Want to know when a certain feature is available? This is not going to happen. Either you like what you have right now or look for a different solution.
  • No Versioning. If you change content, you'll overwrite your old version of it. The Wiki-Module is the only exception as of now.
  • No common Interface Style-Guide. Every Module looks completely different. This makes training users harder.
  • No final API. Even though phpWebSite is already a few years old and has a couple of different classes for the same stuff (eg forms and templates), there's still no final API, let alone a documentation of it.
  • Cluttered Community. There is a big phpWebSite community. The problem is of course, that it is cluttered amongst phpwebsiteforums.com, phpwebsitemanual.com, sourceforge, appstate.phpwebsite.edu, the phpwebsite community wiki and a couple of other places.
  • Lack of metadata for documents. Want a list of all titles of your documents, spanning all your modules? No chance. And I didn't even start about knowing all the authors of documents, last time of change, item creation date, etc.
  • Lack of metadata for users. Want to know the first- and last names of your users? Install the contact module, which is 3rd party. Want to add additional metadata (referrer sites, etc.)? Not possible right now.
  • Lack of directory support. There's no LDAP, no Active Directory and no NT Domain support. Even if you implement the external_authentification, you'll still be unable to fetch additional information about your users from there.

Features

Take all the stuff that's lacking in phpWebSite, implement it from start and you'll have a new CMS. That's basically the story of Flexo7.


Last modified 2005-11-15 20:04 by rck