By modul on
Hi all,
There are quite a few opensource CMS's around, Drupal obviously (oh well :-) ) being the best of the lot.
There are also a series of ridiculously priced commercial CMS's around (see, for instance, the list at the bottom of this Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_content_management_systems ). There's a whole lot of > $ 15.000 CMS's. There's even one which starts at $ 90.000.
I'm really wondering: what kind of unheard-of things would these supposedly top range CMS's have to offer that a mature Drupal site cannot offer??? If anyone could give me some examples of the functionality which these commercial CMS's can offer, and which Drupal could never offer?
Ludo
Comments
Coming into daily contact
Coming into daily contact with a ridiculously overpriced (and extremely unstable) CMS gives one a unique perspective on this.
Expensive CMS:
1) Community support is non-existent.
2) Bugs take an age to be fixed.
3) No third party code means no functionality besides which we program (In Java)
4) Overly complicated backends mean crashes that occur often without any clue as to which of the 16 million components/processes has failed.
5) Releases are few and far between.
6) Feature requests don't happen
BUT.
It publishes out static files (that can include dynamic PHP/JSP/ASP/CFM driven content) to any server capable of displaying it. Meaning no Drupal bootstrap overhead, no 150 database requests per page view and the site still works wonderfully when the CMS invariably crashes.
Sounds Like IBM WebSphere!
I'm involved with Content Management using IBM WebSphere on a corporate website. I agree your assessment of expensive CMS products. Although I would never publicly compliment the content manager that comes with IBM WebSphere, I will say that there are a couple features that I appreciate:
1. Multiple site maintenance in a single interface with search capabilities for content across all sites.
2. Locked draft mode which allows the editing of content without interference.
3. Staging and production work flows for content approval.
4. Version management to roll back any and all changes to a site.
5. Content and design templates for all content types.
Aside from that the application does crash constantly and has no immediate support lines or forums. In fact, our company is terrified to lose the few people who understand WCM (for short) well enough to know what to do when it goes down.
Ooh, we could only hope for
Ooh, we could only hope for IBM Websphere!
In theory we've got everything you just mentioned. However, none of it works.
1. No index server means no search (Yet another blasted component)
2. We can check in an out when the Java applet decides it wants to download a file. Dependant on client Java version/
3. Workflows have never worked / are so buggy that we recommend site administrators don't use them.
4. Seems to work. Though if you delete something you delete ALL versions of it.
5. A complex system of inheritance means that invariably no site inherits from any master templates.
In essence we're using a CMS to manage 150 static sites. Yay.
Any whoo, Documentum is currently having a hissy fit with Oracle and is deleting renditions at random. ooh look another sites 'about page' has disappeared.
Thanks for your experience,
Thanks for your experience, Cooperaj. Output of static files could be an asset, I don't know, I'd have to think about that. A quick survey shows that CMS's which do that, are a minority, or am I wrong here?
Anyway, I don't think that static output is the main or even typical difference between $90.000 CMS's and $0 CMS's. I'm still looking for examples of what is the difference.
Ludo
Yes. Unfortunately OSS CMS's
Yes. Unfortunately OSS CMS's that render to static files are few and far between. You should take a look at http://typo3.com/ and http://www.bricolage.cc/ which I believe render to static files, if thats what you require.
Thanks
Adam
Static file output is not
Static file output is not what I require: I require a fast, reliable CMS :-) I couldn't care less what it outputs, as long as I can get to it fast and reliably. Static, dynamic, fluid or kryptonite, it doesn't matter.
Typo3 is still on my shortlist. I never heard of Bricolage, but it looks a bit "smallish" to be a serious contender. Could be wrong there, I dunno.
From what I read here, megabucks don't buy quality. That's Good to know!! My employer (15,000 staff) is considering to select a CMS, and all options are still open. Experience teaches that "they" are a bit hesitant to decide for an opensource solution, and that "they" feel inclined to make a deal with "a well-known big company" (the excuse usually being: support), but I'm actually happy to find out that a $ 100.000 "solution" can be a huge pain in the b*tt.
Would there be anyone out here with positive experiences with top-priced CMS's? I'm still open to suggestions, and I'm mainly looking for functionality in these systems which is definitely Not there in Drupal and which would be (practically) impossible to add to it.
Ludo
vendor lock-in
Top price doesn't equal top quality in software land. I've finally managed to coax the organisation (local government, 200 ppl) I work for away from their horrendous closed source CMS and we'll be implementing Drupal over the next year or so.
We've paid 60k euro a year for something that simply doesn't work. Spectacularly doesn't work. I mean, it doesn't even handle special characters (ë etc) correctly and for the past 4 years it's been down to sheer luck whether an image you've inserted earlier will show up in the editor when you edit the page at a later time. They haven't been able to fix that in the past 4 years. We we seem to constantly have about 50 pressing issues outstanding and we're lucky if any of them get fixed within a year of logging them. And the last big update to our website (core functionality: product synchronization, customer login, payment options) was supposed to have been delivered November 2005... we're still waiting...
What you pay for when you buy closed source applications is vendor lock-in. You spend a big bucket of money on an application and because you spend so much money on something by a 'reputable' company, you think you will be getting your money's worth. That's simply not the case in my experience. And because you've already spend all this time and money on it, you (or your management) will be very hesitant to kick it out the door again. Things MUST improve if we spend another 50k on it, muzzendit?
And whatever the state of your software (CMS in this case), you can't kick the developer out and hire someone else, because it's their code, they own the damn thing, you don't.
What you buy when you invest in OSS is ownership (within the terms of GPL) of the system, the code, that runs your business. You can hire another (or additional) developers if the one you're working with now doesn't or can't deliver and (depending your contracts with these developers) you will have control over the resulting code.
This isn't a magic bullet though... be smart, set up your own CVS > dev > test > production development platform and insist on meticulous documentation. Insist on doing things the proper way: don't fork!, work with the community, give back and sponsor when you can. And still many things can and will go wrong! But this time you will have more options to get out of the hole instead of the sole option of digging deeper and deeper.
I'm not wearing my pink shades when I think about our own project of implementing Drupal. It's going to be hard, but it's going to be a whole lot better than just forking the money over, teetering on the brink of hope and despair for months... years and eventually being disappointed anyway.
All of which is not to say that there may not be commercial applications that Just Work (TM), but right now I can't think of even just one that hasn't in the long run caused me serious headaches.
Analogy that won't hold up if you consider it too closely: would you rather rent a house, paying for something you will never own and where you can barely hang a painting because that involves YOUR nail and a RENTED wall, or would you buy a house, put time and money in to fix things up and enjoy the result, knowing that if you ever want to rip out that wall to enlarge the kitchen, you can?
Thanks for your reply,
Thanks for your reply, Muffinboy. It turns out that positive experiences with commercial CMS's are rather rare. I'm still looking forward to anything in that direction, mainly information with regard to functionality in commercial CMS's which is not available in Drupal (at least not without major programming).
Ludo
Missing the point
This thread is probably dead, but...
A CMS is a tool usually used by a web developer to build a product for a client. Drupal is not typical -- it's often used by people who are not web developers to avoid hiring a web developer. Lots of Drupal features like CCK/FieldsAPI and Views are geared towards making Drupal flexible without requiring the site developer know SQL or PHP or HTML/CSS. So, of course, people who are expecting these sorts of features are disappointed when they use a commercial CMS.
Open Source Vendor Lock-in
While you can suffer vendor lock-in with commercial CMS, some clients feel the same way when dealing with customized open source CMSs. As such, the above point when working with open source CMSs to work with the community to work changes or extensions back into the community are very important to the end client and open source CMS promotion.
Over the past 5 years, companies hesitating to pay for work to be done on open source CMSs has dramatically decreased. Now it's rare to be writing a proprietary component for our preferred open source CMS choice, TYPO3.
http://www.acqal.com/typo3-cms-typo3-website-migration.html
--
Michael Cannon
CEO, Acqal Corporation -- Official TYPO3 Agency for Support, Training and Website Migration
Taiwan +886 9 8329 0956 US +1 (404) 963-8850 x103 Fax +1 (866) 275-7385
Read more at Acqal.com/blog
$15,000 is cheap
Even $90k isn't wild.
Drupal requires a significant portion of a web administrator's time. Someone like that is probably going to make $50k/yr, so paying $15k for the software that person uses isn't insane. Assuming it saves some time over Drupal, it's possible it's cheaper than unsupported free software.
Community support can be great, but it also costs a lot of time. For many companies it's cheaper to pay tens of thousands than to have someone spend hundreds of hours on mailing lists and in chat rooms.
What?
^People are missing the point.
I think the average Joe will have trouble understanding the intricacies of CCK, Views, Panels and Pages. SQL & PHP are not even similar to CSS & HTML, the latter being a bare requirement for any one to manage the most basic web space, the former being something any Drupal user would benefit from having more than passing acquaintance with. I think the point was missed by the chap making the statement.
Drupal is deep, It's attempts to be all things to all people and a lot of users are probably guilty of adding a few too many gizmos to the core making the whole thing a little bloated and confusing.
All in I think it does a good job, but if you are wanting to extend it with complex plugins it maybe you've outgrown the platform and need to invest some Kerching! I know I am in this situation right now.
Back on topic, Interesting to read peoples views on closed source. I was actually looking for an alternative lightweight, flexible CMS (Yeah Right!), possibly a commercial one but have just been convinced by you guys to not bother!
So, Thanks
Chris