Thursday, April 17, 2008

Seagull CMS first impression

Today I gave a Segaull CMS module (1.3) a try. Was interested about its features, and what benefit it has over Publisher module, which is a bit aged cms solution for SGL, and is it ready for production use without any tweaking.

CMS beats Publisher in almost every aspect (faster, smarter,more configurable), so it could be a solid solution if you dont need multilingual support (although it could be around the corner, but I dont know how far the corner is :). Publisher has multilingual support on the other hand.

CMS supports: types & attributes of content (nice feature), versioning (although I couldnt figure out how can I select the version of the published content, but maybe that is my bad). Give the wiki a try for more details.

Found a small bug in category management (images for TreeView are not referenced correctly) nothing serious, another one in navigation (add a page that is link to content, save and try to edit it, it doesnt fill the edit form correctly) more serious a bit, but there is workaround, fill everything again on edit :).

It has some really nice AJAX interface, so things are kept simple yet usable.

The next step will be to use CMS functionality to store user generated content like CV-s etc, interested in how it could be used along with other modules, but I am sure that it will perform well.

Only few things are there that are making me to stick with Publisher:
- the code comes obfuscated with community version, and sooner or later I will need some customization (though that can be done by extending cms classes),
- multilingual support (most of sites done are not english on my side), lack of it is showstopper atm
- still have some environments with php4 installed, and CMS requires 5.2, but if I make serious threats to root on host he will upgrade for sure, as all such upgrades have to be done sooner or later as php4 is not supported any more, and I am the root...

So Demian and Julien did a great job as CMS module is getting mature CMS solution. Cant wait to see how it develops further.

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