hello,
actually i am in front of the same decision as Toccamonium. either to start with phpwcms or contenido.
the latest links in this thread are not very helpful for this decision. therefore the following links are more targeting:
http://www.opensourcecms.com/
http://www.cmsmatrix.org/matrix
but i think we both (Toccamonium and me) are just steps forward of this basic considerations. now we need to directly compare both cms with their special features. so i want to push the questions more into details knowing that most of you will only have experience with phpwcms.
i installed both cms locally and tested some first steps and the look&feel, but also tried to have an eye on important things like url rewriting, css layout and usability.
to introduce contenido a little bit: it uses a frameset for the backend, welcomes you with orthographical mistakes in setup and login screen, makes use of global vars and uses a "workaround" for globals = off and the source contains german comments. and it seems to make deep use of phplib classes (db, template, auth, session), that were developed under php3.
the backend is quite easy to understand and clearly structured. contenido also provides insite-editing. editors access can be restricted down to specific single article.
i still could not find out about url-rewriting in contenido, but they told it would work with apaches mod_rewite. contenido has individual containers for use in templates and it seems to be able to handle several website clients at one cms server. maybe the documents were immediately rendered and cached in filesystem, so they can be used without the system, but i am not sure about the dynamic contents. for editing the same document in 2 languages you seem to have to switch the whole site to the other language and then browse again to the article you want to edit.
contenido uses the double number of tables in mysql than phpwcms.
the frontend uses css layout, so tablefree sites are enabled.
by **** phpwcms uses a frameless backend with a fantastic looking layout, but the icons are too small. with a higher screen resolution you have to be very concentrated to not miss the icon.
the structure is also clear and easy to understand though i don't know if some of the functionality is still not implemented in the actual plain dev version without additional modding (ie. the link to gtmod points to nirvana?). multilanguage documents are provided on one page, so you can edit the same text in all neccessary languages on one page. css layout is supported such as url rewriting. phpwcms has additional built-in features such as search and sitemap (both links are still not working for me in my frontend example?)
now for discussing my questions and the problems:
1. url rewriting in phpwcms is not very useful when urls still contain the "?" character that is clear sign to search engines to not identify this dynamic page. is there another way of rewriting?
i already found a short documentation of the parameters given by comma. i think i will need them as soon as i want to integrate my own module so the module should provide the links in this way.
2. what do you think about insite-editing. in my opinion this is a nice feature of contenido because customers have a straight imagination of what they edit on their site. you click on a headline or text and can edit it directly in the same place. do you think this feature would be hardly requested by customers?
3. phpwcms provides some predefined styles or container templates for articles such as plain, html, link list, image. can i create my own containers? or is everything that can be ever imagined already integrated and i just have to style it? where can i edit these containers?
4. how are documents stored, rendered, cached? does the server has to work every time when a document is requested?
same for images generated by graphical text mod. will those images generated on every page request or are they cached?
5. is it possible to exchange the default backend icons with some larger ones?
6. can i build up more than one navigation structure? maybe then i can create 2 different site clients in the same system. but next problem is user rights then ...
7. how deep can i create user rights or restrictions? it seems that i can just decide between complete backend access or backend access with administration or frontend access. by the way when should i need to login to the frontend?
8. where can i create user groups? the backend link "users & groups" provides no functionality and "user administration" just lets me create users not groups.
9. are there any other advantages or features which i will only get with phpwcms?
maybe i will think of other questions, but for now you maybe can help me out by answering the questions above. hopefully we get some points into discussion. thanking you in advance.
