Drupal vs. Macromedia Contribute, and arguments for OSS?

By denishaskin on 21 Nov 2003 at 22:23 UTC

(apologies if this isn't the right forum, and let me know where I should ask this... and this may be a little off-topic...)

I've been looking at Drupal and have been very interested in using it to create the 'next-generation' web site of an organization to which I belong.

The current site is very static and breathtakingly un-inspired (disclaimer: I have had very little to do with the current site because I've been focusing on investigating CMS systems like Drupal to use).

I am pretty excited about using something like Drupal and have started some prototyping, but my time is limited so I haven't made too much headway.

Meanwhile, the other member of our de-facto web committee is a relative web neophyte with lots of time on his hands, and a copy of Macromedia Dreamweaver to boot (we'll be nice and ignore the fact that he frequently posts broken content to the site that I often clean up). Now someone has mentioned Macromedia Contribute to him, and he's rushing off to start using that...

So here's my questions:
1) Does anyone have any experience with Contribute? Any comments on it, feature-wise, technology, or otherwise?
2) I am very interested in using open-source software and I actually feel that our organization sort of has an obligation to use it when possible. Also, since we're a (liberal) religious organization, clearly the money we might spend on Macromedia products would much better be spent on other things, and we *never* has money to spare. Has anyone dealt with this and have any effective arguments for convincing the powers-that-be to go in this direction?

Thanks for listening to my rant...

dwh

Comments

apples and oranges

(not verified) commented 24 November 2003 at 02:53

I purchased Contribute for coworkers to use in editing web pages they have charge of. Guess what - they are scared to death of it!

Contribute is simply a tool - it will not structure content, nor automatically generate navigation, allow sorting and sifting of content based on taxonomies, etc. In short, it is NOT a content management tool, it is simply an easier way to edit simple sites than Dreamweaver. I've only used v. 1.0 so this may no longer be true, but at that stage, there was no way for the user to see all pages in a site. To see a page, you have to browse to it. If you don't know the url, it may as well not exist. I had to make some index pages for people with links to the pages they were allowed to edit. Pretty pathetic. Drupal kicks it in the behind, as far as I am concerned. With Drupal, I've created a compendium of all elearning materials on the web server, searchable, sortable by any combination of 3 classification schemes, each of which means something distinct and important to my users. I can issue various levels of permissions to people, and add functionality as modules are updated.

Does that help answer your question?

Drupal is still a little "beta-ish", so my suggestion would be, in implementing it in an enterprise setting, I would be very conservative about what functions you enable. However this will change in coming weeks and months, and you will end up with a much stronger package than with Contribute. And most likely better looking sites as well.