[Hamara-devel] better CMS than liferay ?

[shirish]

Hi all,

Confession time - I hate our website because it looks woefully 
incomplete and also unfriendly.

I know that we have used liferay CMS but for some reason it doesn't seem 
upto the task.

I had a chat with Vik today about various CMS alternatives. All and any 
PHP-based CMS's are out because of security and any other reasons.

So we are left to figure out if there are any other alternatives out there.

If we choose python then there are few that I liked :-

a. Plone - I guess everybody knows about Plone. It's one of the oldest 
CMS's around. Pretty matured and have seen it can be scaled like 
anything. Pretty powerful and yet has a very understated look.

https://plone.org/

b. Pinax - http://pinaxproject.com/

c. Mezzaine - http://mezzanine.jupo.org/

There is a whole lot of CMS based on python which can be seen at 
https://wiki.python.org/moin/ContentManagementSystems

Java also has quite a few hits by itself :-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_content_management_systems#Java

a. dotcms.com and demo.dotcms.com -  I like it very much

b. opencms - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCms

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:OpenCms_inline_editing.png

http://demo.opencms.org/livedemo/overview/


There is a huge list of number of CMS and feature comparison can be done 
between them at http://www.cmsmatrix.org/


Feature list we need to think of for our site :-

a. The biggest reason would be human unfriendly URL's :-  The URL's 
produced by liferay are crap, not easy to remember or process. If as a 
user I had to share it with people I would rather not share or use a URL 
shortener which is just a temporary solution. It seems Liferay 6.1 has 
friendly URL's, dunno which version we are using.

You can look at http://demo.dotcms.com/ for all the links it has as can 
be seen.

b. Network Responsiveness - The site feels a tad sluggish. I can share 
Mozilla's network inspector stats and perhaps we could find what the 
issues without caching and even afterwards with caching as well.

c. Responsive UI for smaller displays - For the last couple of years, 
the new thing which has sort of come in 'Responsive UI'. What this means 
is depending on the abilities of your device/display the site should 
give you the best experience. If you have a small display, then 
unnecessary decorations, UI should fade out gracefully and only the 
elements that are needed are shown.

d. Sitemap - We should have a nice and easy sitemap which eases 
navigation. Currently we don't and content is harder to reach as people 
have to remember where they have to go for the content.

e. Social media - Right now our social media channels (twitter,facebook) 
seem like second cousins or something. That needs to look far better and 
be more dynamic because right now all the content from social media and 
blogs etc. are static, these should be fetchable, pushable to people.

The simplest example is if I want to read the earlier blog posts or 
earlier tweets from the homepage that isn't possible. I have to go to 
twitter to see previous posts or/and go to the blogs to see the previous 
blog posts which isn't easy to people. We should have a follow button on 
the homepage where the twitter account is so people can follow us.

Also think of whenever we also get diaspora.

Multisite, Multi-lingual, WYSIWYG text-editor are also features among 
others that we need to take into account.

A good Q&A can also be seen at 
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16751891/java-based-cms-with-restful-service-api-to-access-content/16760846#16760846

I will be downloading some of the videos shared therein and search a bit 
more but do think we need to improve our site by a factor of ten if we 
are to be of some worth.

What would be interesting is if we are able to do use FOSS analytics 
tools (NOT google analytics) to also see how the website is faring and 
where there are bottle-necks within the site.

I hope I was not rude to people, if somebody takes an offence to how I 
bought out the issues that we have then say sorry straightaway.

My only grouse is how the site looks and what all we can do to make it 
look better and professional. The more easier it is for people to trawl 
through our stuff, higher the possibility of having more conversions.

I am also thinking of as a person who has no insight into HTML and any 
technology, if we are facing issues with getting content in and out, for 
a person who would have much more limited skills than us without the 
patience that we have, they will not stay at the site for long.

There are lot of ideas to improve the layout, functionality and features 
but let's get the basics right.

If people want to use liferay, have no issues with that but would need 
them to work on the features shared above and many more such features 
that need to come.

Look forward to feedback from everybody on the team.

Till tomorrow.
-- 
Regards,
Shirish Agarwal,
Community Lead,
Hamaralinux.org