which content management system?

I am looking for a content management system with the following features:

- "offline" CMS
- Windows based
- uploads pure html (nothing server side to depend on)
- easy cross-linking of articles
- categorize articles via topics.
- categorize same article in multiple categories.
- multiple authors.
- multiple authors not connected via LAN (perhaps there exist ways outside of the content management system to do accomplish this.)
- must be able to handle thousands of articles
- relatively cheap, under $300, as this is a low scale operation.

I have already begun to use CityDesk, as you can see here: www.sawtoothdistortion.com. However, I am worried about slowdown when it gets too big (see posts further down.)

I have heard about Movable Type, but I'm not sure about it as I have not used it. It appears to be built more for pure blogging than for writing interconnected articles.

Any recommendations?

What do you mean by this?? If you install PHP and MySQL on your home machine, you can run the CMS on your own system. If you mean that you wish to use a CMS on an intranet, this is possible granted that you have a server with PHP (or Perl) and MySQL.


Good luck...it seems like most of the good and free CMS' are Unix based. I am sure there are some out there that are Windows based...perhaps using .NET or ASP.


Call me naive, but I do not believe this is possible. Even the simplest of CMS' (a Wiki...if that even counts) relies on at least Perl. The point of a CMS is to create a dynamic site. HTML can't do that. JavaScript may be able to do this since it is dynamic and not server-side, but I am not too familiar with it.


I have yet to see one that requires all users to be on the same LAN :-)


This would be very inefficient using text files (what even a simple Perl script would require). You would need MySQL or some other database.


For unix, most if not all of them are free. For Windows you can probably find one for free.

*Shrugs* honestly, I think you will find that you will need PHP/Perl and a database for best results.

Good luck! :-)

What I want is CityDesk with the ability to have authors not connected by LAN. Since CityDesk is Windows-based, it requires all the authors have access to the CityDesk main file.

Check out this flash movie demo of CityDesk. It quickly shows you what CityDesk is all about.

By offline CMS, I mean a Windows based CMS that does not require me to be hooked to the Internet. You would be able to compose articles in your CMS, 'offline', and then upload them when you are done. Similar to composing an email offline, then connecting to the Internet and sending it when you are done. This is what CityDesk is.


CityDesk outputs pure HTML.


CityDesk requires all users to be on the same LAN. This is my only problem with it.

I am open to new suggestions though. If you watch the CityDesk movie you can basically see exactly what I want. Can your Unix based CMS's match that simiplicity?

Thanks for your suggestions.

Ah, I see. So it is basically Windows software. When I think of CMS I think of server side. But I guess this would indeed count! haha

I first experienced CMS with Windows-based software and you with Unix-based software, so I understand!

Have you watced the CityDesk demo? It is very cool. Do any Unix-based CMS's work similar to that?

CityDesk does look very cool! Smart idea for the people that made it.

I am sure there is something like it for Unix, but haven't really looked 'cause when I think of CMS I think of a PHP/Perl/MySQL driven system as a serverside application, rather than a client application.

Smart idea from smart people. Joel Spolsky made it. His articles (see link) are very helpful and insightful.

The last company I worked for that had something like this spent over a year with it in development with a team of 11 people and had thousands of Stored Procedures. It basically ended up as a word type editor. You threw in your article, and then hit update and it uploaded the pages....however. How can you not have anything in a database? You should really have an online database to ease the facilitation of creating automatically generated hyperlinks etc etc.

All of these content management systems have their own databases, somehow, so what do you mean when you say this?

Do you know of any CMS's that you would recommend? Thanks.

Well if you have your list of articles in a database for example on the webserver you can automatically generate a page that has the links to each article on it etc. You could do that without a database using php commands but I can't think of any reason not to store details on each article in the database and have the articles themselves as static pages.

I can recommend some CMS systems but none that come in under $300 sorry.

Oh, I see what you are saying now. I could have a database like that, all on my own, without even using a CMS.

That would be a great feature to add to any CMS. An export feature that lists off all the articles in various ways.

Hi,
i know a offline Windows based CMS, with your specifications - but - you need PHP-Extension on the Server (is this a prob?)
- multiple authors possible but no "exclusive" read/write rights
- it cost about $ 600
- at this time it's only availible in german language;-(

You can find more Infos under http://www.phYdra.net ofr http://www.SolutionOnDemand.com

Thanks for the suggestion, but I'll have to wait for the English version. Just looking at http://www.phydra.net/ gets me lost!