Wiki

My only question: where did you get your rather large HAIKU logo image? - I haven't been able to find one with the "shiny leaves" - only the SVG version.

The RailFrog wiki is here:
https://secure.cvsdude.org/trac/railfrog/cms/wiki

Join the mailing list and post a "I want to help" mail with an introduction of your skills, experience, etc., whatever you find useful.

It would be nice to have a few more developers on their front (only if you're not a potential Haiku developer, of course ;).

Unfortunately, it's not that simple. We need ACLs, a blog, and maybe we want to translate our website into other languages. A wiki is not very powerful and its content is very static. It's not very easy to use (we want WYSIWYG). There are no powerful templates/layouts. We would have problems uploading BeBook and other material. We prefer a real CMS. The original MediaWiki does not even allow to automate blog creation. Only Semantic MediaWiki has a query feature. And IMHO, that's still not enough for a good solution.

We tried nearly every CMS out there (except for JSP-based ones). They are too complicated. Plone seemed OK, but it's a huge monster and when I recently gave it another try I found the interface too overloaded, so we'd have to rewrite the whole interface.
But the blog thing: we don't want to have all those blogs spread over the net (DarkWyrm, Axel, Marcus, Sikosis/Phil, etc.). They must be *centralized* on our website. Too many people are disappointed about the lack of progress on our website. You have to dive into the community to see what is happening. This will change. Our new website must be better than anything before. It must be very professional. We want to attract commercial donors and we want to collaborate with commercial projects. We need a platform that is powerful enough. Wikis are not as flexible as a CMS. Of course, you *can* create a blog-like something, but it won't work the way we want. The intro page should be more dynamic, showing recently closed bugs, SVN activity (LoC graph), and a blog that replaces our newsletter and the news items. Everything should be automated. We don't want to manually manage everything like in a wiki.

Our dream is to have a community CMS where everyone can get an account (like in a wiki). Everyone should be able to contribute (like in a wiki), but any changes must be approved by the moderators before they go public. Yes, Plone does this, but I prefer having a separated frontend and backend because people should stay logged in when browsing our website and still not be annoyed by extra buttons (here, Plone is too overloaded).

Yeah, I wanted to adapt it to our needs, but in the end it seemed to be more work than Trac (esp. since Charlie and Mikael offered to help). BTW, if someone here is a Python developer and would like to adapt Trac for us feel free to contact us on the haiku-web mailing list. Well, Collaboa would work, too, but you'd have to coordinate that with Charlie and Mikael. The requirements are listed on our wiki's team page.

Sorry, but we really tried *every* well-known+free+non-JSP CMS. ;)
They are plain unusable. They make far too complicated and inflexible assumptions. Writing a simple article is pure hell. XOOPS has an (sorry) idiotic and overloaded interface that does not focus on the most important problem: content creation. Our developers must not have to fight with complex interfaces. Instead, browse the page you want to change/create and start writing! We don't want to have special tools categories. We want a dead-simple page tree on the left and the contents on the right. Unfortunately, such CMSes often are not powerful enough:
* no blog/news
* no ACLs
* too inflexible layout
* too slow
* too ugly
* no versioning
* no moderation (less important)
* not multi-lingual (less important)
Somehow web-designers seem to think that they have to make their CMS extremely complex and inflexible when adding features. I got really frustrated when digging through more than 50 CMSes...

The only usable CMS was drag-n-drop based and written in Flash (and it was commercial), so, again it was not acceptable. :(
RailFrog is my last chance+hope.

EDIT: of course, if you know a CMS that is dead-simple and solves our problems then please tell us!

wkornew,

You could create a custom solution, but then you need the skills to do it, and there are other implications (see the end of my post). On the other hand, you may not find a CMS that perfectly fits your (high) standards, but you can certainly compromise in some areas and find a solution that meets your overall goals close enough. From my experience, you have to be both flexible and realistic with these things. :-)

News submission in XOOPS is extremely simple: a couple of clicks, select a topic, fill in headline and body fields, and click send. Depending on your settings, the submission either goes for review, or goes live right away. It can't get any easier.

There are many modules for article creation in XOOPS, so it is not possible to rate them all together, as this would be a blanket-generalization. Nevertheless, no matter which one you choose, there will be a learning curve, and it will not be as easy as writing an article in a word processor (although some may get close). There is, for example, an article module that supports SPAW, FCK Editor and HTML Area third party WYSIWYG text editors (see http://www.xoops.org/modules/repository/singlefile.php?cid=95&lid=1555).

XOOPS has modules (in many cases more than just one) for many purposes, including but not limited to: news, FAQs, wikis, forums, calendars, classified ads, e-commerce, blogs, downloads, links, directories, document management, polls, help desks, knowledge bases, and graphic libraries (the list is simply too long to put it all here). And all the modules integrate with your site. Check this out at http://www.xoops.org/modules/repository/ .

Access control is pretty thorough in XOOPS, and you can pretty much control every aspect of the site by creating user groups with various levels of access. XOOPS is available in many languages, and it is fairly easy to localize modules (you just have to edit one or more text files). Its look and feel can also be customized using templates (there are plenty of XOOPS templates). I think, all things consider, it would be a good compromise.

Correct me if I am wrong, but RailFrog seems to be just a set of (very nice) ideas/goals, but with no developers to implement them yet. It all sounds very nice, but realistically it is not wise to put all your eggs in that one basket.

CMS packages may not be perfect, and each one has its idiocyncracies (or idiocies, if you prefer) as well as a learning curve. But they are also for the most part well documented, and they have a developer/user community to back it up in case you need help (you will need to); you can also find a wealth of informatiom about them on the web.

When you go with a custom solution, you usually rely on one person who, no matter how reliable/trustworthy, may want to move on to different things at some point; you are then left with a code base that nobody understands.

Not that I am advocating XOOPS over the rest, but I though you would want to know a little bit more about it, and perhaps also be aware of the benefits of a CMS over custom solution.

Edit: I just saw the post about Drupal, and although I have never used it, I understand it is very good as well.

I tried to force me into using XOOPS about four times. No, it just doesn't work. I actually hate it. :) It forces me into its own philosophy (separate different kinds of content). It was not at all obvious how to create content and it wants me to enter information that I don't care about. I need a minimalistic interface, reduced to the bare minimum. BTW, Drupal is only slightly better than XOOPS. I was able to create content after a few minutes, but never felt comfortable because it seems to force me into its own organization scheme, too. We want full freedom. We need a simple page tree that can be organized the way we like.
Did you ever try Plone? It's a lot better than 99% of the other CMSes out there, but it's still not good (out of the box). But they got the base concept right. You have a page tree and different kinds of items (page, news, file, etc.) within that tree. Wonderful. If only the interface were not so bloated (when logged in) and slow.

We don't want to have a custom solution. And to clarify: RailFrog has a nice and active development and design team behind it and they will soon have their second coding sprint. This will hopefully bring it to a useful state, so we can officially use it. The advantage for Haiku is that they actually want to do something that is very easy to use and they want our input. The project is young and can be shaped. If something is wrong they can correct it.