Hi,
I would look no further than Tikiwiki. It has everything, forums, blogs, file and picture galleries, articles, calendars and much more. Check it out and www.tikiwiki.org. I find it incredibly powerful.
Manutius
manutius:
Yeah but what about crucialp 's comment on tikiwiki resource usage . What’s your experience and selling point to counteract that ?
crucialp - if possible, can you describe the website traffic levels when tikiwiki failed you ?
I have never used TikiWiki in a large grade production environment, but I do know that when you have several thousand users you will need to at least have a dual xeon server, as I know many people who have such setups. Each page takes 80-200 SQL queries, so you can imagine the load when you start getting a lot of users.
I do agree very much that TikiWiki is very powerful, in fact I am implementing it currently as an intranet site for the largest Airline in australia. 
Take a look at this Mambo VS Post-Nuke slashdotting Test. It’s not perfect but interesting
Hoho… this thread grew up pretty good… 
Anyway, i am using xoops for a few weeks now, tweaking it and it’s 7dana theme to look the way i want it and the way it should. It’s all rather easy to setup, tweak and administrate. I’d say that xoops is really as they say themselves the ideal community building tool for community’s that need to be more than just forums. And speaking of forums, it does have ability to integrate phpbb and even Invision Powerboard. But that is becoming less importan since the incoming new version of native newbb is (newbb 2) is gonna have even more features than phpbb and be even more faster than already pretty fast newbb 1.
Besides that, there are ALOT of useful modules and hacks. Whatever you need can be worked out actualy.
The bottom line is, i recommend xoops for comprehensive community sites/portals building. Other cms’s you’re mentioning like mambo or tikiwiki may be somewhat good for community’s, but generaly those are more like content oriented management systems than community management systems. Xoops is definitely ‘one’ of the best cms’s for community driven sites.
All that replied to my original questions in order to help, thank you!
:tup:
Daniel
You’re welcome. However, for me, I find have found that Mx System, and [url=http://www.mamboserver.com]Mambo are my choices. I have done a great deal of testing on Mx system, and as of now, I still prefer it, but Mambo is making great progress, and the more I fiddle with it, the more I’m liking it, but as of now, it’s still MX System.
this is an impressive thread on the issue. Just thought I would offer some opinion and an alternative.
I have used Mambo and ezPublish. Both are impressive. Mambo, I would like even more when it integrates the xhtml coding into the main line of the development.
I realize that php is sacred in this territority, and I admit that I was reluctant to focus efforts on a tool that was not php-based, I am a convert to the Zope/Plone CMS setup. It is awesome, powerful, feature rich, and integrated. Plus, the dev teams have a strong focus on Web standards, which is part of our needs.
So, Plone (www.plone.org) and Zope (www.zope.org) for more. Our site, listed below, is built on this setup also.
Cheers,
chris
Yes, the plone and the zope framework are impresive and do look very nice. The fact that they are not php based does not have to be a bad thing at all, in a contrary, that may prove to be even more stable and robust solution. And i like the fact of them focusing on standards since the code and design compliance of a site brings it a good advantage.
However, the downside of it is simply that php is more widely used and supported, it’s popularity therefore makes it the best and for many even the only choice. The LAMP hosting is common and it doesn’t supports zope, you’d have to install it, but to do it you have to be an admin of a server and that’s something many of us lack. Also, with plone specificaly, it lacks good forums and i don’t think that there is an phpbb integration, but that’s something relevant for community driven sites only.
Mambo and ezPublish indeed seem to be very good solutions for less-community driven sites i’d say, but then they may serve well in that teritory. This thread alone proves of mambo’s popularity and ezPublish enjoy’s a good overall reputation. My choice however was xoops, it may not be perfect, but then there’s no perfect, it seems to fit best for my needs.
Daniel
How about Drupal - anyone tried it ? Or have comments on it. It’s really grown up since I last looked at it - about 1 1/2 year ago. I think it would make a excellent Intranet. I’m thinking of using it.
From what I recall it was also used on Deanspace.org.
I really like what you did with Xoops on http://www.libervis.com/ .
How many hours did you spend configuring it and modifying it before you were ‘satisfied’ ?
I tried installing xoops out straight from the core files and I realize it takes some configuring.
P.S. To everyone else - don’t forget the Drupal Question
Searching for a ‘community’ management system i looked at Drupal, but the dissapointing fact was that it has not integration of any phpbb or alike forum. Their forums are much different. When you look at the main forums page you see it the way they look in an usual forum, but when you post or read posts you get them as they were some kind of articles with comments. I don’t like that feeling.
Drupal has it’s taxonomy system by which it categorizes content instead of categorizing it by different components (e.g. modules) as other systems.
It sounds like there would be somewhat difficult to understand and to get used to such a concept. But as i’ve read, when you do, it becomes a powerful toon in your hands.
All in all, however, drupal is not in the category of ‘easy to use’ systems despite what some of them might say to you. I got that impression and reading about alot of CMS’s during my research to choose the right one, it is good, but simply ‘different’ and maybe somewhat harder to grasp than othes.
Xoops would be a great alternative to [URL=http://www.drupal.org]Drupal.
Daniel
excuse the partial repost
If anyone is interested here is a list of
of truly unique “i can’t believe that is Drupal” caliber sites. http://drupal.org/node/view/7443
Impressive
Heh… Thank you Marcel!
I didn’t really count the hours, and i worked on it a few nights at the same time working on more issues (yeah, i gotta organize myself better, and i will) ;).
Let’s see.
The installation was really easy, just following the instructions from the install file and then the instructions on the screen.
For configuration, you first need to install the modules you need. It is pretty easily done through the module preferences to which you come from the popup menu from system box on the upper right corner. To install other modules you may download from xoops.org sites, in most cases you just upload the whole module folder to the modules folder on the server and you’ll find it sitting and waiting for install in the modules configuration. So handling differend modules is rather easy and every module has it’s own preferences.
The important part for getting the site looks as you want it to look is to configure the appereance of blocks, you may do that in blocks configuration of system module. You can setup the blocks for every xoops page including the top page. The most time for that i spent setting up blocks for top page. After you do that, all other pages mimic the basic setting of top page so there is not much to do there then except if you want to add custom blocks with text or something. All in all, it’s not that much of a hassle.
The theme, which probably impresses you the most, i must humbly admit’ is ‘powered by’ 7dana-jane theme which is easily installed just by uploading it in themes folder and selecting in general preferences.
However, i wanted it to look at least a bit different than their original themes so i edited some colors, added the main logo, replaced those little pics for main and user menu’s to be closed and opening little folders when you hover with mouse over it, replaced original forum icons, brightened up color of the left columns, made title backgrounds in center column a bit ‘yellowish’ etc. etc.
All in all, it looks quite different than the original theme.
I’d say it’s not very hard to get it looking the way you want it, even if you need to modify some CSS and html codes it is simply copy-pasting some codes around
or changing values of numberse and color codes. I edited theme.html in the 7dana-jane theme folder and the CSS file inside the same folder to edit the look and feel to be the way i’d like it to be.
And there may be some little changes yet, the site is not officialy launched yet.
Am i bubbling, what’s with me, i am talking like crazy…
Anyway, hope it’s of help.
Daniel
LOL, I was drawn in by this post. I’ve been in the process of searching for the CMS of my dreams and, after reading here, I have it boiled down to 2 choices; XOOPS and TikiWiki.
I’m going to test both on my server and see which one I like the best. First, though, I’ll try XOOPS because it’s built into my CPanel on my Linux server. Then, I’ll try the other. I’m sure I’ll make a sound choice.
I was, before reading this forum, going to go with PHP Website, but it just doesn’t have all the features I want/ need.
Thanks everyone.
You’re welcome!
I am glad that post helped anyone.
Daniel
Summary
It would help me if we defined “forum-to-cms integration” here.
[b]I would like automatic cross-references between CMS articles and forum topic-threads.
Can anyone recommend solutions?[/b] I briefly looked at Daniel’s site, and it doesn’t seem to do this, although I didn’t look long. Daniel’s site seems to be more about hosting a community and less about managing content articles/objects/documents (which I need for some of my CMS applications/uses…but not all).
More references in details below.
[u]Details[/u]
It seems as if most here are happy with single-sign-on between a forum (my preference would be phpBB) and a CMS as well as some forum-content displays/blocks in the CMS presentation.
This does not suffice for me. I want CMS-article-object cross references with forum threads and vice versa. Maybe this is what some here mean (at least in part) when they say “CMS-to-forum integration”…but I at least want to clarify this point…and see what CMS-forum combinations might provide this (any pointers/suggestions/references?).
i.e., I want any CMS reader to be able to immediately be able to start (or follow-up an existing) comment area/discussion that is linked to a topic-thread in the forum server/software. Furthermore, if the reader visits the forums area they can see a list of topic-threads that are back-linked to their respecting CMS articles/objects (for those topic-threads that are related to CMS articles…not all them need be and most of the probably will not).
I would want this done automatically, i.e., I don’t admins/moderators/users to have to manually insert a forum thread link into a CMS article discussions area nor should they have to manually insert a CMS article link in a topic-thread.
It looks like the Mamboserver-phpbb combo might do this…marginally (or so it looks at http://opensourcecms.com ). http://devshed.com seems to do this just a little better, and I asked them what tools/processes they use to do this at this link (and also have a helpdesk ticket going, which I can not reference here because it’s a private link):
http://forums.devshed.com/t180619/s.html
Anybody have any other references?
-Matt
I spoke/wrote too soon. The first article I looked at on Daniel’s site had what looked like a clean presentation/integration with a forum thread, and a significant thread at that:
http://www.libervis.com/modules/wfsection/dossier-3.html
However, I’m poking around the forums (separate form the aforementioned article) and I can not see the article-specific topic-discussion-thread in there (the forums).
I also ran a search on “Here is a quote by Richard Stallman that may be of importance”, some text that Daniel posted in the article discussion-thread, and the search did not find anything.
Thoughts? Help? Pointers for this rookie/newbie?
Something else I found interesting: There’s a “Forum” button at the top of the aforementioned article which appears to go to an entire Forum, and not just a topic-thread…which seems pretty cool…in that one could possibly associate multiple topic-threads to one article?
However, I’m concerned about the manual/tedious nature to set this up. On at least some of my server applications (for different organizations), there will probably be many article/objects and many topic-threads that may or may not need to correlate with each other, and admins/moderators like me will not want to manually have to “correlate” them all the time. I want the users and/or automated system to manage this.
Just a friendly reminder…I want a Forum visitor to see the back-link references to the Articles, so that they might have a proper discussion context where appropriate for certain topic-threads. It seems to me that a link from the Articles to the Forums is easy; an aesthetic/obvious link in the other direction seems more difficult.
And of course I want this all automated. I’m not asking for much, am I??
-Matt
Hi guys,
This was a VERY informative thread, thanks!
After reading all the comments and doing some research, I narrowed down to Mambo, Xoops, and TikiWiki.
In the end, I decided that Mambo is the right tool for me (hopefully I made the right decision).
Mambo seems to be very powerful, is easy on the CPU, allows to easily customize the interface, and their modules architecture give you endless options for expansion.
Their control panel options look powerful and easy to use.
Also, I am pretty new at working with PHP/MySQL and I heard that Mambo is easy for newbies to understand and modify.
And most people that have Mambo seem very happy with it (according to several reviews I’ve found).
Another product that I didn’t hear mentioned in this thread is InLink 2. It seems very powerful and they have a “more power than any competing product, guaranteed” slogan. But since it is not free and I didn’t find many people talking about it, I skipped it. You may want to check it out though.