From fork-admin@xent.com Mon Sep 30 13:52:46 2002 Return-Path: Delivered-To: yyyy@localhost.example.com Received: from localhost (jalapeno [127.0.0.1]) by jmason.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D83C616F7E for ; Mon, 30 Sep 2002 13:48:39 +0100 (IST) Received: from jalapeno [127.0.0.1] by localhost with IMAP (fetchmail-5.9.0) for jm@localhost (single-drop); Mon, 30 Sep 2002 13:48:39 +0100 (IST) Received: from xent.com ([64.161.22.236]) by dogma.slashnull.org (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id g8S6XBg17611 for ; Sat, 28 Sep 2002 07:33:12 +0100 Received: from lair.xent.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by xent.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id B35872940A2; Fri, 27 Sep 2002 23:29:09 -0700 (PDT) Delivered-To: fork@example.com Received: from pimout2-ext.prodigy.net (pimout2-ext.prodigy.net [207.115.63.101]) by xent.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 31DA329409A for ; Fri, 27 Sep 2002 23:20:01 -0700 (PDT) Received: from MAX (adsl-64-171-27-180.dsl.sntc01.pacbell.net [64.171.27.180]) by pimout2-ext.prodigy.net (8.12.3 da nor stuldap/8.12.3) with ESMTP id g8S4FoI7444696 for ; Sat, 28 Sep 2002 00:15:59 -0400 From: "Max Dunn" To: "'FoRK'" Subject: RE: OSCOM Berkeley report: Xopus, Bitflux, Plone, Xoops Message-Id: <000001c266a5$b5ba5600$6401a8c0@MAX> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-Msmail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook, Build 10.0.3416 Importance: Normal In-Reply-To: X-Mimeole: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2600.0000 Sender: fork-admin@xent.com Errors-To: fork-admin@xent.com X-Beenthere: fork@example.com X-Mailman-Version: 2.0.11 Precedence: bulk List-Help: List-Post: List-Subscribe: , List-Id: Friends of Rohit Khare List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2002 21:15:36 -0700 X-Spam-Status: No, hits=1.6 required=5.0 tests=IN_REP_TO,KNOWN_MAILING_LIST,RCVD_IN_MULTIHOP_DSBL, RCVD_IN_UNCONFIRMED_DSBL,T_URI_COUNT_3_5 version=2.50-cvs X-Spam-Level: * I attended the same conference, and was impressed by a few systems that Jim didn't mention. In terms of CMS, the following all had apparently been used in some fairly large implementations and looked like some pretty strong competition to commercial systems: - Midgard, http://www.midgard-project.org/ , a PHP-based content management framework that with other programs combines to be a full CMS - Redhat CCM CMS, Java-based: http://www.example.com/software/ccm/cms/ - OpenCMS, Java-based: http://www.opencms.org There was agreement that usability has not generally been an open source strength, but both Plone and Xopus represented some real movement towards improving that situation. I was impressed by the spectrum of perspectives on XML. Some took for granted that XSLT was relevant to content management, others took it just as for granted that XSLT was irrelevant and seemed happy to ignore XML almost completely. I attended realizing that "content management" is generally used to apply to *Web* content management, but I was still a bit shocked how completely out of scope document management was (almost no consideration of the potential print/PDF dimension to content other than the occasional "...and you can use FOP to make PDF" as if that was functional): this seems more the case in open source content management than in commercial content management, and probably makes XML easier to ignore (if HTML is the be-all and end-all of the output...). The honesty was refreshing, Phil Suh complained about the state of current tools (both open source and commercial), and I wish I'd written down what he said, something like "it sucks so extremely, it sucks so widely, and it is so generally sucking, that it seems sometimes there is no hope." For a moment there was contemplation that perhaps commercial systems scaled so well that the commercial "big boys" were really much more functional than open source, until someone pointed out, "OK, take some average blog software, spend $500,000 on the rollout... it'll scale pretty well." Another quote (citing Brendan Quinn): "content management problems are either trivial or impossible." Mac OS X is getting popular, of the laptops there it was an even 1/3 each of Mac, Linux, Windows. I am sure it wasn't news to Jim, but I can't wait to try Subversion, a CVS replacement that supports some of the newer features of WebDAV: http://subversion.tigris.org/ I'm also eager to try Xopus, I hope the developers make it back home safely, they said they'd only been in America four days but were already homeless... Max