I've had only two enquiries relating to the facelift that we're getting around here, thanks to my two visitors. For those who are interested in web development Nomoa.com is now running using the Xaraya CMS and part of the rationale is listed on the following pages ...

Some nice touches because of the move is the facelift, you will find some new faces from the 'current' theme, and if they don't break I hope to set it up so members can select their preferred theme, but some are still a little broken like their hoster.

Most new faces are directed 'lifted' from design work at http://www.wyome.com or http://www.tangant.com who by releasing their themes as GPL not only makes the house a lot prettier, but also gives me ideas how to really mess the place up.

There's nothing as dangerous as a knife wielding maniac.

Anyhow, if you want to check out the technical 'merits' of the Xaraya CMS please visit their homesite at http://www.xaraya.com or read on for my drivel.

John Cox, one of the Xaraya developers has a nice table of featuresets to CMS/Blogging systems over at  http://www.wyome.com/img/blog.html you could also test many of them out for yourself over at http://www.opensourcecms.com but do remember that these are only some of the solutions out there. Many commercial source vendors have wonderful products that may fit your requirements.

To wit.

I've tried a lot of the OSS CMSs out there partly for nomoa.com, for customer web design systems and also partly for trying to find a workable Trouble Ticket management system.

YES. nomoa.com is now running/converting to Xaraya

A few things that have really come to light with Xaraya is integration of great tools.

Article Creation using the WYSIWIG editor (tinymce) is GUI.
Offline Article Creation using a blogging tool (e.g. wbloggar.com wbeditor.com blogjet.com) is much better than Postnuke, and more recently is developing support for MovableType APIs which will allow submitting summary and body context separately (so summary shows on frontpage/summary-view, and user clicks on "read more" to see the rest.

The key requirements for my CMS were:

    a. Windows Installation compatible
    b. OpenBSD installation compatible
    c. Customisability

a. Windows Installation Compatible

My main machine (laptop) is an XP sp2 system which also runs VMWare for a Virtual Unix box. Windows compatibility was a requirement to minimise the drain on resources on my work machine to design and review the CMS.

It was also important to be able to move files back and forth from Windows, since I much prefer the visual text editors in Windows (Macromedia Dreamweaver and www.scintilla.org scite.exe) than the console unix ones [I hate the GUI editors in X-Windows)

b. OpenBSD installation compatible

OpenBSD is my preferred Unix environment, not Linux, so the CMS had to cleanly install and function under OpenBSD for me to have a compatible Unix environment for testing. This also gives me a chance to review any strange behaviour in the CMS from the standard development environments (Linux/Windows) to make sure that it will deploy 'easily' to the hosting site.

c. Customisability.

There are two parts to customisability, the templating/themes and the addons.

ADDONS: It was not as important to have all the 'features/addons' as phpnuke/postnuke although it will have been really nice. Fortunately the design has allowed others to add the 'addon' functionality into their base designs. For example, the Xaraya extension to gallery2 is currently maintained by the gallery team.

ADDONS: Gallery. mentioned above
ADDONS: Forum. Xaraya comes wth its own Forum software/module but I do have all those old forum postings on the pnphpbb2 postnuke module. That was converted back to phpbb2 (phpbb.com) and the forum software installed. An integration exists only in authentication and I'm liking the CMS enough that I am scheduling to do a full integration of the phpbb myself (wow)
ADDONS:Other (Flash Games et. al.) Don't really need, although it was fun for some visitors.

What I liked about Xaraya, didn't like about Postnuke (or other CMSs).

1. Customisable Theming/Templates
2. Article Administration
3. Account Administration
4. Active, Open development Team

1. Customisable Theming/Templates
-----------------------------------------------------

There are major, major advantages of the of Xaraya's templating/Theming system compared to other CMSs. The Xarayazied web links on xaraya.com let's you see sites that don't look like CMS. The three major site designs I've done with Xaraya (www.govt.to, www.revenue.gov.to, www.environment.gov.to) all came from manipulating existing html sites and converting their design to Xaraya. Except I've only now got content for revenue.gov.to so that I can work on changing their front-page to a simpler design (similar to irs.gov.to maybe?)

    a) XML not PHP, not Python, not Perl, not some strange Document Markup language
    b) You don't have to look like all the other *Nuke/CMS systems.
    c) Sample Themes that don't look like the regular stuff
    d) Every display item can be customised separately (or left to the default)

    a) XML not PHP, not Python, not Perl, not some strange Document Markup language

    This was a serious turning point for me, I don't like PHP perverseley and I don't like learning some arcane DML just for a theme.

    The advantage with using XML is that I'm not interspersing code with display context in a confusing manner (this is also true for Python/Perl template engines.)   Not that I know much about XAML, although I've been trying, but the Xaraya Templating Engine (BL) seems to be attaining the next holy grail of GUI development, separate of display from logic.

    b) You don't have to look like all the other *Nuke/CMS systems.

    Not that I'm proficient with the coding, but one drawback, advantage of Xaraya's Templating Engine is that you can make your CMS look nothing like the other CMSs out there. One key example is that Xaraya allows you to set up a different layout for:
         i.) each of the modules it supports,
         ii.) within the 'articles' modules you can have a different layout for each publication

       So far, my only foray is to have a different 'frontpage' than subsequent pages., but my goals for nomoa.com is to have a different layout for each Category as well.

    c) Sample Themes that don't look like the regular stuff

    There are not as many available themes for Xaraya as the other Nuke CMSs, but there are a good bunch available with the distribution, as well as being significantly different that you can get ideas and context from the different samples that you can use on your own theme.

    Again, there are plenty of themes available for postnuke, phpnuke (and even commercial ware) but again, those are PHP scripts that I've grown to detest.

     d) Every display item can be customised separately (or left to the default)

     Each module has a directory within its module which displays the results of the modules output ./modules/([modulename]/xartemplates.

    In general templates will be something like: user-main.xd (for user view, main context) which can be overriden in the custom templates easily using:

    ./themes/<custom-theme>/modules/[modulename]/user-main.xt (note the use of .xt as opposed to .xd)

    This allows for complexity or simplicity of a theme depending on how much or little you wish to change.

    For example: by default when an article summary is displayed, articles/xartempaltes/user-summary-news.xd  the article's category image is displayed div right-justified which displays right-justified on a line by itself.. In the change that I'm making (themes/ants_nomoa/modules/articles/user-summary.xt), to be uploaded to nomoa.com, I will make that same image div float:right (which displays right-justified to the block, allowing the text to float around it.)

The change makes is a significant display difference (original design did not display the image)

2. Article Administration
-----------------------------------------------------

Every submitted item/content is/can be an article. By default the Xaraya System is installed with these available 'Publication Types:' News Articles, Documents, Reviews, FAQs, Pictures, Web Links, Random Quotes, Downloads.

If you want to publish a news item, you can use a "News Article" publication type which essentially is an article with different Data Types available to the user. Done correctly, Xaraya publishes/holds every item as an article and all the other modules are customised handling of these articles. If you want a different type of article (such as Recipes) then you just create a new Publication Type (in the administrator web interface) which sets the "Labels" and the Data content. There are now some sites who allow downloads (exports) of their Publication Types so you can include them (import) into your own site's Article Types.

The advantage of this system is that now (a) we are not restricted by the designer's concept of what are useful publication types for our website (b) we are not dependent on the designers for customising the publication type for our site.

There are at least 4 status per article type (and you can have more control by using the 'workflow' module instead of the 'articles' module)

    * Deleted
    * Submitted
    * Approved
    * FrontPage

And the articles can be grouped into as many 'categories' (otherwise known as Topics) as you wish. This allows Web Links to be separated (i.e. User has to browse News Articles :: Tonga separately from Web Links :: Tonga) or you can have all Tonga related "Articles" under Tonga. I like the 2nd option, so when the user 'clicks' on the "Tonga" category there are presented both with the  list of News Articles and Web Links in that Category. [Obviously at this point one has to consider which is the best means of presenting such diverse information]


3. Account Administration
-----------------------------------------------------

Permissions/User Security always seemed a 2nd thought with the way Postnuke/PHPNuke was designed. With Xaraya they actually bit the bullet and had a lot of bugs for many months (years?) so that they can use a security model based on something that other 'real-enterprise' people are using. Plone's mechanism seems more mature, and both seem to follow something that Java Enterprise designers have been pushing with the use of REALMS and other stuff.

Anyhow, this mechanism simplifies for me how I am supposed to be able to restrict or create 'member-access' sections of the site, or even more minute items like 'general-member' 'silver-member' 'gold-member'

As a matter of fact, for this one issue I was ready to dump Xaraya earlier on (alpha stage) to do development using Plone.


4. Active, Open development Team
-----------------------------------------------------

Development/User discussions are mostly through IRC and the mailing list, both of which become a great library of information and ideas.

If an OSS project has an active development/raporte as this group then its great for the developers and the users. Plone has a larger userbase, development team and discussions.

PHP
=============
I've tried most of the variants of PHPnuke (e.g. phpnuke, postnuke, myphpnuke, mambo) and found that:
     a) display/layout customisation was PHP programming and I hate PHP.
     b) phpnuke is the only one with a plethora of addons/plugins for community sites
        . the others soon become lacking in certain areas
    c) mambo looks like it has a number of great designers on board, so it looks real nice by default.

Tikiwiki ? looks real flexible but outrageously ugly?

Perl
==============
The only Perl CMS I tried is the slashdot.org derivative and that's real ugly.

I was attempting to play with some Trouble Ticket/CMS system but just required too many modules that was conflicting with other stuff on my system.


Python
==============
I've tried a number of their frameworks; webware, cherry, spyce, zope, twisted and none of those is python programming, and their frameworks not CMS's.

The only Python CMS I really liked is plone (www.plone.org) and it is very featured, but unfortunately it is dog slow in testing and even though it is a real featured 2.0 release I'm waiting for their next major release which will hopefully use the Zope 3 engine instead of Zope 2.

Commercial Ware.
==============
interactivetools.com has a number of packages including Article Manager, which is what MatangiTonga is using and that's real nice (I bought a copy for review on a clients set up) but it was taking too long to find out where the template customisation goes so I dropped it. Interesting aside is that the system generates html files instead of running from a database (i.e. faster page responses to users.)


AN FYI on the Current Nomoa Theme - "ants_nomoa" & "ants_nomoa_print"
===========================================================

* Drop Down Menus are Pure CSS (no Javascript) which works by default for Mozilla browsers and uses a 'fix' for IE6.
* Menus are hard-coded into the template because I haven't figured out how to get it dynamically created from the database (i.e. I can generate the menu items, but their all screwed up with the markup so that it doesn't display 'correctly.')
* Likewise, the menus on the left can be auto-generated, but they are currently created into the CMS for display reasons (the display looks nicer)
* Banner Graphic is loaded using CSS, so that it is only downloaded once with a user visit. Subsequent visits use the cached CSS (i believe that's the standard browser behaviour) which also uses cached banner.