After morning tea (complete with bad workflow design, eg, tea placed after the hot water, not before), Mark Pascall from 3months.com, presented on Delivering Web Content the Open Source Way. 3months is a Wellington-based web development and consulting firm.

“3months has been providing professional web development and consulting services for over 7 years. Combining our technical expertise, solid business domain experience, knowledge of latest industry trends and agile development process we offer end-to-end web solutions.“

Agenda:
– what is open source?
– what is a CMS?
– what’s so great about open source CMSs?
– what’s going on with open source CMSs in New Zealand?

What is Open Source Software?
Definitions from the Open Source Initiative:
(1) software that can be freely redistributed
(2) access to the source code
(3) derived works
(4) distribution of license
(5) no discrimination against persons, groups, fields of endeavours
(6) the license must not be specific to a product, must not restrict other sotware, and must be technology neutral

The aim is to bring more innovation into software development efforts, leveraging community ideas.

Whereas commercial software is building on the shoulders of giants (or ogres), open source is building on the shoulders of acrobats (community, more agility, greater reliability).

What is a CMS?
A content management system separates content from design, and the content from technology. The idea is to return management of content back to editorial and business people, rather than the IT technicians. There are a variety of commercial CMSs available:
– top tier (over $200K), eg, Vignette, Documentum, Interwoven
– middle tier (over $50K), eg, FatWire, SharePoint, PaperThin
– bottom tier

There are also a lot of open source CMSs available … Plone, eZ publish, Midgard, DotNetNuke, Drupal, and OpenCMS, and many more. The majority of open source CMSs are PHP based, which has good outcomes and bad ones. On the bad side, the PHP community is split in alignment with a specific product. When choosing an open source CMS, you need to ensure that the community supporting the initiative is sufficiently large to support ongoing development and refinement.

The out of box experience includes: templates (for content/design separation), WYSIWYG editing, a flexible content model, integrated search, metadata, workflow, roles/permissions, security model, version management, multi-lingual, a development framework (eg, “more than a CMS, for building CMS-enabled applications and add-ins for the CMS”), syndication / aggregation / integration, and e-commerce, among others. It’s a long list, and in Mark’s view, therefore worthy of consideration within organizational settings. There can also be a wide variety of add-ins.

Paul showed a video entitled Editing with Plone (.MOV, 50MB, 12 minutes).

Comparison on Plone and DotNetNuke
3months.com works with Plone, DotNetNuke and Drupal.

Comparisons:

• Business Model — Ownership: Plone (not-for-profit) vs. DotNetNuke (commercial)
• Business Model — Licensing: Plone (GPL) vs. DotNetNuke (BSD). Biggest implication: plug-ins for DotNetNuke cost more than for Plone.
• Business Model — Support: Plone (primarily community) vs. DotNetNuke (both free and commercial).
• Technical Model — Language: Plone (Python) vs. DotNetNuke (VB.NET)
• Technical Model — Application Server / Framework: Plone (Zope) vs. DotNetNuke (.net)
• Technical Model — Database: Plone (ZODB, other SQL) vs. DotNetNuke (SQL Server)
• Technical Model — Workflow: Plone (complex and sophisticated) vs. DotNetNuke (more simple)

Risks and Hidden Costs
There are some legal issues that need to be thought through; seek professional assistance. Eg, no warranty, possible IP infringement, release of proprietary code, loss of software rights, and more. As another source, see the Guidelines from the State Services Commission.

There are also some software risks, including bugs/flaws, security holes, malicious code, poor architecture, poor documentation, and more. The key thing to seek is a large development community that will pay attention to these things.

Development risks include limited developer availability / familiarity, poor understanding by or communication with the desiger, the product loses popularity, and consider maturity as well as the breadth of the developer community.

There are also some hidden costs. It’s more about total cost of ownership than initial / upfront licensing and development fees. Be careful on that one. Also be careful of commercial vendors offering apparently “much better” offerings. Other costs include retraining (eg, from Microsoft Office to Open Office), incompatibilities, uncertain release schedules, and upgrade pain.

Open Source in New Zealand
– There are open source awards within New Zealand (“and even the likes of Rod Drury are commenting on it”)
– There are some open source projects being run out of New Zealand

Questions
1. (David) We went down the Drupal path, and looking ahead, how will we be impacted by records management?
(Mark) Not entirely sure on the RM situation with Drupal. With PHP-based ones, there are more safer paths.

2. (Julian) Why is your company called 3months?
(Mark) Because we aim to deliver projects within 3 months; agility to delivering business value every 3 months is the intention.

Key Takeaways
1. Ensure that whatever you choose has a big and supportive developer community.
2. Any organization looking at a CMS should do due diligence on open source CMS platforms.