 |
Ranked # in Free Website Platforms |
|
BEST FOR:
RECOMMENDED FOR:
|
|
 Description:OpenCMS is a free website development platform, also referred to as an open source content management system (CMS). It allows non-technical content managers to easily create and modify website content fast and efficiently. OpenCMS is fully customizable through its browser based interface, it comes with an easy to use editor similar to well known office applications. |
|
OpenCMS - Simple And Smart |
|
|
April 17, 2012
|
|
Submitted By: Balaji Company Size: $10 Million - $50 Million in revenues |
|
| Set up Process - It is easy to set up, it's a java app, simple word file deployments and easy steps to configure your application and database. Customer Support - Very good wiki and forums. Tech support team responds to the queries ASAP way. I felt professional consultancy support was expensive. Customization - Yes, as this is a open source, you have full control of the code base, we are able to extend publishing, grid/pods, VFS, Spring / Maven Integration. Additional resources - Again wiki, attending openCMS Conferences and participating in the forums makes life easier. Features - Direct Edit makes editorial team life easier, easy extension for integrating with JEE Frameworks - Spring / Hibernate / REST. Moving to cloud is in progress. | |
OpenCms - Built For Speed And Availability |
|
|
April 17, 2012
|
|
Submitted By: HERNAN MARSILI Company Size: $1 Million - $5 Million in revenues |
|
| We used OpenCMS for commercial projects mainly. They have community support and paid support by Alkacon Software or their partners. OpenCMS was always built for performance, with multiple levels of cache, they are the only solution with a solid CMS CLUSTER module. We have used the product in over 20 projects mainly in media: newspapers, magazines and interactive portals using third party customization modules. On version 8, OpenCMS became much user friendly. Everything is based on drag and drop and on version 8.5 EDIT INLINE is implemented across the modules. | |
OpenCMS: A Mature CMS Tool |
|
|
April 16, 2012
|
|
Submitted By: Rubén Morán Company Size: $50 Million - $150 Million in revenues |
|
| OpenCMS 7 here. (I'm not an expert, I just keep it running) Setup process: Easy to get up and running. You have to bear in mind that you are going to develop an apache-tomcat solution. You have to decide between mod-proxy and mod-jk and, set some apache rewrites/jk-unmounts in case, etc. Set up the workers and all that java machinery. You need somebody familiar with Apache-Tomcat. In our installation we have two developers uploading new classes to the server. Reboot is needed to apply changes in classes, and sometimes rebooting is slow as its recommended to let tomcat shut down nicely without forcing. It's open source but not all of it is Free Software. To do some things like replication/load balancing, you have to pay for the modules, or set up a tomcat high availability solution. I don't think documentation is any good. It's open source but very limited. It's not open like Apache/Python/Postgres etc. so you don't have a community supporting behind it. What you have is consultant companies. It's not the same thing. Things you can't do, at least in OpenCMS7: You can't get a static export of your content a working web mirror. I had to do that a web part, and I had to do it by wget and hard scripting. Alkacon don't want you to stop using OpenCMS or move your content away. Things you should do: Don't let it too obsolete and update. Our set up is getting hard to update to OpenCMS 8. Anyway for content management it's a mature tool I think and highly customizable via java classes, but you have to bear in mind that moving away from it once you start using it can be difficult. |
|
Complicated Setup Process But A Powerful Tool |
|
|
April 16, 2012
|
|
Submitted By: Jose-Manuel Gomez-Garcia Company Size: $10 Million - $50 Million in revenues |
|
| Setup process: The learning curve as a developer or project leader is steep but OpenCMS is a powerful tool for content based websites. Customer support, If you rely on the Open version, is based on forums and the experience of other developers. I can't tell you anything about training because I used the Open version. The customization you can get with the tool is almost complete. You can do whatever you wish if you have the right team of designers and developers. Besides, you need to design the content arquitecture that better suits your requirements before starting to develop any feature. | |
OpenCMS 7 Review And OCEE Cluster Package |
|
|
April 16, 2012
|
|
Submitted By: Giovani Spagnolo Company Size: $10 Million - $50 Million in revenues |
|
| Setup process in OpenCMS 7 is very straightforward. In a few minutes you can have a standard installation running. However, customizing the frontend theme is not as easy. Specially theming special pages like 404 and 503 might take you some time. Alkacon customer support is great and fast (as long as I have used it for Alkacon OCEE Cluster Package, which is a paid module). Setting up Alkacon's OCEE Cluster Package is also easy and getting a standard setup is a matter of a few minutes. I have adapted custom adhoc modules for managing newsletters and videoconference. It is still hard to find a central place to "shop" for OpenCMS modules, and graphic themes are nearly impossible to find, specially "web2.0-style". Overall system stability seems great, even in clustered environments (the environment I have tested OpenCMS7.5.4 with has a two node DB server and two node AS with OCEE). Best features in OpenCMS are the publishing queue, on-demand and full website static export and source code editor for system modules and (obviously) content pages, which makes it very simple to apply quick fixes directly. What OpenCMS still lacks is a way to store binary files in the Real File System natively, to avoid ever-growing database storage needs and memory consumption. | |
