Content Management Systems
Written by: Ilbra Abramian
Source: Shipyard
Skill Level: Novice

Postnuke

Although I spent no more than half a day playing around with Postnuke, I can confidently say, that anyone wanting to customise their website's look and feel should avoid using Postnuke.

On first impression, Postnuke looks like an already complete and running cluttered website with A LOT of links and options.

On closer inspection, Postnuke gives you the choice of removing the options. To clarify this I will use the analogy of removing peices of an over-featurised and complex puzzle. Doing this, doesnt really change the look of the site, it just empties it of what it previously had.

So you are probably wondering how to add features in Postnuke to make it look to way you want. To customise the look and format of the provided postnuke template, is to play around with alot of intense perl code or alternatively, hope that a patch exists somewhere on the world wide web that implements what you want.

I had to do exactly that in order to have a multi-folder feature on my Postnuke website. However, the time it took to fiddle around with Postnuke configurations to make the patch do what I intended proved to be an ineffecient use of time.

Some other CMS systems that I stumbled across include Bicrolage and Article Manager for a low cost solution. However, if you are happy to spend a more time, money and effort on running a department of CMS specialists, then Vignette($500000 plus) and the free Zope or Red Hat CCM are super-powerful tools.

Zope and CCM are used by huge organizations like NATO, the World Bank, and the US Navy. In such organizations there are hundreds of people who need to upload information to a website or intranet, and they will have a huge range of varying needs - hence the complexity and expense of this class of CMS.

• What's a CMS?
• Citydesk
• Postnuke
• Conclusion

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