[Hamara-devel] better CMS than liferay ?

[shirish]

correction in-line :-

On 05/07/2015 12:00 AM, shirish wrote:
> 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.


I hope I was not rude to people, if somebody takes an offence to how I 
bought out the issues that then I 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