ColdFusion Content Management Systems

I have finally decided on a content management server for a client. I was given a long list of requirements, but after some investigation (which has resulted in some changes to the requirement list) we have decided on a FarCry. The key points in the decision were:

  • a hosted solution is not an option
  • must run on ColdFusion MX as the application server
  • must run on Oracle and MySQL out of the box
  • support workflow and editor notification
  • support templates and container based designs and components
  • price (the less expensive the better, the initial budget I was given was less than $5,000 for the CMS)

There were a number of content management systems that met these criteria including: Ektron CMS100 and CMS200, PaperThin, SiteExecutive and FarCry. 13amp‘s SparkPlug was strongly considered given the US$500 enterprise license, however it really wanted MSSQL or Access as the database. This removed it from contention. The Ektron CMSes were very close, however the annual pricing model did not meet the requirements. And PaperThin and SiteExecutive look like fabulous entripse products with an enterprise price (starting at around $20,000 for PaperThin, is my understanding).

We have decided to go with the FarCry CMS. We have set up a test instance on ColdFusionMX against a Oracle9i database. The final decision will be the amount of effort to create a completely XHTML 1.0-Strict and CSS2.0 set of templates. The goal is to have a content management system that will enforce standards compliance throught templates and editor tools.

Does anyone have any experience with the different HTML-area editors creating standards compliant code? I am looking at htmlArea (2.0x generates horrible code); Ektron’s eWebEditPro; PBEditor; RealObjects edit-on 3.x; EditLive for Java; and others. I would really like this to work in any browser (Mozilla and IE preferably, but Safari and other KTHML alternatives too). The creation of XHTML 1.0-Strict and CSS2.0 compliant content/code are requirements.

ColdFusion-based Content Management Systems

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2003 at 2:46 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

  • http://www.highcontext.com/ David Gammel

    We’re in the process of deploying eWebEditPro from Ektron. Too early to give it a review but based on spec it looks like the best one out there for generating valid code.

  • http://www.engel-cox.org Glen Engel-Cox

    eWebEditPro requires a PC (i.e., no Apple, no Linux), I believe because it links to Windows DLLs.

  • http://antinomian.com Eric

    I’d be interested in anyone’s findings with regards to CF based CMS solutions above the $5,000 ceiling imposed here. If price isn’t an issue, are there any more feature-rich tools out there for CF developers? Thanks in advance…

  • http://www.emojo.com Jeff Rhys-Jones

    Hey thanks for considering us!

    Cheers from London,

    Jeff

    Jeff Rhys-Jones
    Technical Director, Emojo Ltd.

    p.s. it is ‘Emojo’, not ‘eMojo’!

  • http://www.emojo.com Jeff Rhys-Jones

    Urrk!

    Thanks for the change, we’re so very nearly there! ‘eMojo’ has now been changed to ‘EMojo’. What we’d really like is ‘Emojo’!!

    Now I know I’m probably pushing my luck with this, but – well, I thought that it was worth a shot.

    By the way, if you have the spare time, we have a handy item on Emojo.com which helps one know how to pronounce the words ‘Emojo’ and ‘Affino’ and also explains why they are what they are! The link to the item is here…

    http://www.emojo.com/About/Index.cfm?ccs=83&cs=385

    Anyway, keep up the good work!

    Cheers,

    Jeff

  • http://davidcrow.ca/ David Crow

    Thanks Jeff for correcting my mis-capitalization of Emojo. Hopefully, I will get it correct at some point.

  • http://davidcrow.ca/ David Crow

    I came across an additional ColdFusion based CMS today in a random search, and they aren’t very far from me in Toronto. HotBanana [ http://www.hotbanana.ca/ ] located in Barrie, ON is a CF-based solution.

  • http://www.sybrondental.com Darrell Johnson

    David, your post has been invaluable. thanks

    We are just starting the search for a CFMX based Content system for our company. I’ll keep you all up to date as our choices narrow. We do need a system with some installed base and a strong support model.

  • http://farcry.daemon.com.au/ Geoff Bowers

    Only just stumbled across your post — thanks for the vote of support. I think it’s worth noting that FarCry use to be a commercial solution we sold locally for about 15-20kUS per server. It took a lot of courage to open source the code base and turn the company around to have a purely service driven focus. The response from developers and new clients has been great — but the best evidence of that is the range of new sites being built using FarCry technology. Hope to see you on the farcry-dev mailing list :)

  • Robin Hilliard

    Thanks for including Speck in your survey. The great thing is that there is a whole Spectrum of CMS solutions out there using Macromedia technology – starting with Contribute, then solutions like Speck for your traditional CF tag scripting people, and then frameworks that make the most of CFCs such as FarCry and Shado.

  • http://www.weblogic.gr/ Dimitris Siskopoulos

    Please check out our CMS too:
    http://www.e-publish.gr/setlang.cfm?lang=uk

  • Lloyd Steadman

    You may also want to consider AssetNow (http://www.assetnow.com). It works very well for me and the pro version has one of the best HTML editors I’ve seen.

    Regarding HTML editors for CMS, do not underestimate the need for a spell checker! ActiveEdit (http://www.cfdev.com) is a good HTML editor that has an integrated server side spell checker.

  • http://www.asdren.com Alex Aguilar

    Thanks for the excellent compilation of Coldfusion CMSs.

    As for a good cross-platform HTML-area replacement. I use Editize.
    Works great on Macs running Safari.

    If I know the client is Windows/ie centric then I recommend SiteObjects Editor.

  • http://www.easyconsole.com Angelo Gregoriou

    Please free to visit http://www.easyconsole.com.
    A very interesting CFMX-based CMS.

  • http://www.cylogy.com Brice Dunwoodie

    This is a very useful article for those who are entering into a CMS procurement process and are considering a ColdFusion based solution.

    We have worked with both PaperThin’s CommonSpot and with NetQuest’s NQContent. They are both very solid products, each addressing different parts of the user spectrum. CommonSpot is very robust wrt process management, segregation of sub-sites (eg, business divisions), granular authoring and control, personalization, and extensibility.

    NQContent’s current version is built around a concept of Articles, and thus currently has a more rigid concept of “content”. It does have a very easy to customize architecture, a strong workflow system, an intuitive admin interface, useful add-on modules, and a solid security framework. Another important feature of NQContent is that it is extremely strong in the area of rapid application development. The product provides a GUI interface directly into your database where by one can manipulated the schema (ie, modify the tables), enter data, and extract data for use in pages. This element of the product could potentially save you thousands in custom development costs — not to be overlooked.

    Its not 100% accurate, but I would characterize CommonSpot as a business/process solution and NQContent as more of business/technical solution.

    Both of these products run on and take advantage of the new features in CFMX. Both of these products are due for a new major release in the next 2-4 months.

    Hopefully this is helpful. You can also track more general CMS information at http://www.cmswire.com .

  • Gobo

    David,

    It would be interesting to know your experiences with FarCry to this point. I’m considering implementing it for a client, but it’s taking a while to understand what’s going on internally with the software.

    –Thanks,

  • http://www.mynevadacounty.com Dave Bloch

    We’ve been using Emojo’s Affino CMS for about 15 months now, and I’m an unabashed fan. Be sure you look carefully at what it takes to create the page templates; Affino has a GUI (the “Design Centre”) that really works well. Training non-technical staff to do at least basic content editing is easy. Lots of features built in that other systems require you buy other applications. Check out the site; I do that one (along with our Intranet site and 3 others on the same server) — and I’m a one-person shop.

  • http://jozecuervo.com Jose Hernandez

    I love this page…

    I work for the University of California at Santa Cruz in the student affairs dept. http://studentaffairs.ucsc.edu We are currently looking for a scalable CMS for our department and the units we support. As far as a real-world example, we have almost every OS and browser to support on both the content-creation end and the receiving end. We have no money thanks to the politicians. We have dozens of existing CF forms and applications that we simply cannot live without. We also want to help academic departments and student media implement their own CMS solutions, who all have their own servers, OS’s, webservers, databases, and staff. Its a bloody mess- just look at the UCSC site and you’ll see thousands of pages that look like they have nothing to do with eachother.

    One day I’ll graduate but for now this is my mess. I’m looking for something super robust and scalable and simple to help maintain a consistent look and feel for my campus, or at least a branch of it. FarCry looks like the solution we are going to adapt. We have also considered a slough of LAMP solutions, in the open spirit, but everything I’ve seen so far looks too complicated for my likings – I don’t want to learn linux or zope or any new languages this year, ColdFusion is enough for now.

    Any suggestions from y’all? Any foreseeable brick walls with FarCry?

  • http://davidcrow.ca David Crow

    I had to put our content management project on hold for a couple of months. I needed to reallocate my team resource to put out some additional fires.

    The project is set to relaunch on November 17. I’ll post my progress.

    The FarCry solution is very page based. The templates are fairly easy to set up and configure. My biggest complaint is the search capabilities and the lack of a thesaurus. Version control is great.

  • Ian Van Audenhaege

    It is my understanding that FarCry is moving to the UNIX platform… I think this is very important since CF is going in the same direction.

  • http://www.weblogic.gr/easynews/index_uk.htm Dimitris Siskopoulos

    Our second and “lighter” CMS is EasyNews. It’s major feature is that it the content can appear on ANY server, even free servers.
    Check out some REAL demos on free servers:
    http://easynews0.tripod.com/
    http://www.geocities.com/easynewsdemo/

  • Lee Aston

    Hi,
    can anyone recommend a good host for Farcry? Please email me if you do.

    Regards
    Lee

  • Jodeo

    I’m looking for a CHEAP (free?), simple TextArea replacement tag for ColdFusion that will allow the user to input their page content/copy with formatting (B/I/U, etc), possibly upload images, and post to datasources (such as Access. Yeah, I know… “Access? Crimony!”). It’s a simple, low-budget project.

    Being Mac-platform friendly is strongly desired but not essential.

    Thanks.

  • http://davidcrow.ca/ David Crow

    I started using Editize for my content editor. It works okay, we are having some issues getting it to work well with MozillaFirebird but it seems to work for Safari 1.0 on Mac OS X.3.

  • http://www.ravenpro.net David Brannan

    Please check out our CMS. It is called StoryCMS v2.1 and under our product section.

  • http://brannan@mac.com David Brannan

    The URL to StoryCMS v2.1 is Raven Productions.

  • Chris Hefferon

    David –
    My understanding is that eWebEditPro can be configured to produce strict XHTML with the simple setting of an attribute. I used this in a few CMS projects, but to be honest, the published web sites had no real requirement for XHTML so the adherence to the standard never really got tested. Overall, despite having no affiliation with Ektron, I found the eWebEditPro product pretty robust (for WYSIWYG editing), easy-to-implement and easy-to-use.

  • http://caravelcms.org Michael Sherer

    If you’re interested in an Open Source/Freeware solution, you might check out the Caravel project. It supports multi-platform editing, is the closest to WYSIWYG editing in a CMS that I’ve seen, scales to thousands of sites, integrates withe LDAP, lets you create, display and post to RSS channels, let’s you dynamically create personal sites just by authenticating to the enterprise directory, etc.

    It’s written in PHP, website metadata is stored as LDAP objects (a very cool and powerful back-end architecture), runs on Linux, OpenLDAP and Apache, but conceivably could be totally platform independent.

    I’m biased since I’m the project manager, but it’s a pretty exciting project that’s just going public. We’re also looking to start a technology development co-op for vertical market applications. See http://co-op.caravelcms.org

  • http://davidcrow.ca/ David Crow

    eWebEditPro is okay, but it requires a PC running IE. Since I develop primarly using a Mac running OS X, it limits my user base.

    I have been using Editize very successfully (we had a minor issue with the code base on MozillaFirebird, but it was an error with the production server having an older version of the code). It works really well, though sometimes the xhtml support is not as far along as I would like it.

  • http://www.weblogic.gr/easynews/index_uk.htm Dimitris Siskopoulos

    This is the second CMS from our company (www.weblogic.gr). It is the only CMS that can show it’s content to ANY site, even if it does not support Coldfusion (or any other scripting languages) and databases…
    Check out the demos on tripod.com
    http://easynews0.tripod.com/

  • http://www.hotbanana.com Chris Adams

    David, thank you for post about Hot Banana in August 2003.

    Hot Banana 5 has just been launched and it is the most cost-effective, easy-to-use, yet feature rich Web Content Management systems on the market today. Hereís a link to the site: http://www.hotbanana.com. Itís built on the ColdFusion MX platform. I invite you to take the product tour: http://hotbanana.com/hot-banana-tour/.

    From your posts, I see that XHTML, CSS and accessibility compliance are priorities for you. The Hot Banana team has worked very hard to make Hot Banana compliant. Currently we are working on converting some of our customersí web site designs into W3C compliant sites. If you would like to learn more about how we accomplished this task and where Hot Banana is headed in the future, please contact me.

    Thank you,

    Chris Adams, Hot Banana Product Manager

  • http://www.kencook.com David White

    Curious how Macromedias Contribute CMS will hold water against FarCry and SparkPlug?

    Any feedback regarding your experiences with these packages would be greatley appreciated.

  • Brandon

    I am looking at ActiveWeb 3.0 and FarCry. Does anyone have any knowledge about ActiveWeb 3.0 by Lomtec?? (www.lomtec.com)

    It is CF-based and only $2,950. Sounds good but I would like some feedback as I try to compare.

  • Nathan Shaw

    Anyone have experience with SparkPlug? The feature set and price tag look pretty good for most of our client’s needs. Just wondering if anyone is actually using it and what they think of it.

    Thanks,

    –Nate

  • http://www.stinkylittlefriend.com nkosi

    As you have switched off your comments function for earlier posts, I am posting here.

    Regarding your CF CMS research in mid 2003. Has Farcry satisfied your requirements? or do you wish you had chosen one of the other products??

    Cheers