dotCMS Online Resources

I’m working for a company called yura.net, I’m really lucky because a lot of us there have known each other since our university days, and it can be fun working with friends. I digress.

We’ve been looking for a content management system (CMS) to manage our:

  • website content
  • various projects and clients
  • support pages (wikis, faqs, forums)
  • basically everything necessary to administer the company

We’re looking at dotCMS (NB: the Community edition, not the Enterprise edition) because:

  • it’s Java based (so are most of our current projects)
  • has a flexible plugin API (we’ll need to develop a few plugins to get our projects talking to the outside world)
  • can manage multiple sites (as well as our own project pages, we’ll be hosting a large number of our clients’ websites)
  • can manage users and permissions across multiple sites and services
  • is free and open source (speaks for itself)
  • once you’re used to it, it’s really easy to set up and for clients to use

I’ve used dotCMS to configure a couple of test sites, and it’s really simple and very flexible. In the past I’ve always used WordPress as a CMS for clients because it’s easy to use. I think dotCMS might be easier both to prepare sites and for clients to understand and use them. I haven’t been fully converted yet though; it’s still early days, and dotCMS has its shortcomings which I hope will be addressed in the new release (v1.9, I’m using 1.7a).

The main problem I have with it is the lack of a built-in forum. The way our business is set up, a lot of our products and services will need a forum feature. Ideally clients would have a single account to use across them all – a ‘single-account-for-many-services’ idea is part of what attracted us to dotCMS in the first place (since many our clients will be administering multiple sites through our services), so this is a potentially big problem. We’ll either have to find a forum that meets our requirements, that can integrate with dotCMS and our various projects, or we’ll have to develop one from the ground up, to our own specifications.

Getting detailed information can be hard, too, compared to products with well-established communitites like Drupal and WordPress. The online support for dotCMS isn’t in the same league as some of these other systems. With dotCMS, i’ve reverted to some old school troubleshooting sK1||z0r to get over the inevitable stumbling blocks eg. mailing lists, iRC (there are some things that can never be replaced). You can see the official list of online resources for dotCMS here.

I’d encourage anyone who uses, or considers using dotCMS to use some of these resources, like the forum, to leave a Q&A trail of support. Things like this can be just as useful for future adopters (or potential adopters) as they are for you. And the added activity in the dotCMS community can serve to further motivate the developers, and encourage more to join us adopters on the bandwagon, which is a good thing.

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