Lazyweb: help me pick a CMS
I’m trying to find a content-management system, mostly for running a limited-access discussion forum. I’ve already looked at Drupal, which is pretty nice, but I have not yet figured out how to make it fully support Japanese, which is a make-or-break feature.
I can get limited success writing Japanese in Drupal, but (in the best-case scenario so far) the characters wind up being escaped to numeric Unicode entities, which are not editable after being posted, and apparently are not searchable.
I also looked at the Slash engine, but A) the installation instructions assume you are root, assume you are more technically adept than I am, and are very sketchy all around, and B) has the same problems with Japanese.
I suspect the Japanese-handling problems in both Drupal and Slash could be fixed with some minor coding changes, but I don’t know where to start. Messing with the template charsets doesn’t do it.
Other desirable features:
Threaded message structure
Moderation/karma points a la Slashdot
Flexible permissions setup
Straightforward templating for admin
None of the other CMSs or web-BBSs I’ve looked at so far have forum threading,
[Later] Seems that I can almost get Japanese working right in Drupal (why do I think of towering drag-queens every time I say that?) after all: there was a configuration issue that was causing the Japanese to be escaped. I turned that off, and now everything is close to hunky-dory, except for one thing: searching on Japanese terms always returns no results.
[Still later] Turns out a Japanese drupal user has developed a patch. This helps some of the problems I was having (and was already groping towards solving). Still doesn’t enable Japanese searching, though.
Here’s one that’s been talked about recently:
http://www.opencms.org/
Here’s some lists of others:
http://www.la-grange.net/cms
http://www.opensourcecms.com/
Good luck! ;)
Thanks. I’ve been spending a lot of time perusing opensourcecms.com, but haven’t quite found the right thing yet.
Have you looked at the many variants of Blosxom, yet?
http://www.raelity.org/apps/blosxom/
Not in this context. I’m really looking for a multi-user discussion forum, and from what I understand, Blosxom is pretty much a straight blogging tool. Extensible, and with an active community, but not really designed for automated membership signups, threaded messaging, etc.
Bricolage? (http://bricolage.cc/)
Ah yes, you did say ‘forum’, didn’t you?
Hmmm…. In that case, have you tried any of the BBthingies? Phorum? Invision (http://www.invisionboard.com/)?
Looked at Invision. Simple, but lacks some of the features I’d like to see, like threading (unless I’m missing something). For that matter, my web host ( http://dr2.net ) has push-button installation of phpbb, which is roughly equivalent. Drupal really is an interesting system, if only I could get the search working.
Don’t know much about bricolage, and it’s not clear from the site whether it has any forum at all, but the setup seems a bit daunting, and I’m not sure if my host offers PostgreSQL at all.
Could you maybe use something, then use a Google API developed for Japanese (I would assume there is one since Google has a Japanese version of their site)?
Just for the search part, that is, of course.
Charles–
In theory, the answer is Maybe. Here’s the thing: most CMSs store their data in a MySQL database. Google is smart, but it can’t currently traverse databases–it only deals with standalone documents.
I’ve seen one Japanese forum app that stores each message as a standalone file, so that would be amenable to Googling (or to on-site search engines like Namazu).
The other potential downside to relying on Google is that you are rationed 1000 requests a day. I could ask people to type in their own Google keys every time they did a search, but you can see how that would grow tedious.