SE-friendly Open Source CMS

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

Does any of you know of any good Open Source CMS systems and how well they get indexed and how easy they are to optimize?

I know there are many Open Source CMS and dynamic web publishing systems but I have not good overview and not a clue wich ones might be less trublesome and wich ones that are easy to modify.

It would be great to get some tips on both NT (ASP and/or .NET) and Apache.

If you have some affiliation with the creaters of the software please be honest and say so :)

And remember, this thread is about Open Source CMS only

[Dodger]

You probably already know about OpenSourceCMS (http://test.opensourcecms.com/) then? This is a site that has over 60 CMS software that you can demo, and complete access to their Admin panels.

Spiderability is becoming a big issue amongst a lot of these groups, and from what I have seen is that they are coming up with the solutions in the forms of Mods. Each group is different, and has a variety of ways to handle it.

Some do a pretty good job out of the box to some extent. Drupal for one (I think they are one of the hands-down top choice now--that is what I hear anyway). I think you will find that just about everyone of the titles at OpenSourceCMS as you check into them, are pretty well established and have a very large user base of support programmers...so it will not be hard to come up with something that is workable.

Some are pretty wicked though, like forum software and e-commerce software. The forum software is it's own worst enemy if it becomes popular and gets to hopping -- the topics can be fleeting then disappear off the side of the earth. The links are not 'stable' or stationary for long periods of time. Plus there are usually three or four links to any given topic readily available and all with different query parameters in the Url string (main thread, last post, page 2, page 3, link rotation, etc.)

[rustybrick]

Thanks for your feedback. I am currently about to build a CMS for a client and I am not thinking that I should use an open source application. I will be running this on an Apache server and mod_rewrite is available. Any more recommendations?

[Dodger]

RB - if you want to do it from the ground up, you might want to consider some of the CMS framework projects that are going on. I am not sure if you are going to be doing this in Perl or PHP, but there are projects for both.

Here is a list of some that I found just by searching for it:

http://www.icewalkers.com/search.php?m=exact&w=k&q=cms

One that I have seen before in that list is EZPublish. Basicly, the frameworks just supply you with the classes or modules for CMS and you can use them to build the functionality yourself.

I also am not sure what you are building, more to the point ... licensing issues. But the list has a mix of GPL and commercial application licensing too.

You also might want to look at this thread concerning mod_rewrite issues:

http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/forum/showthread.php?t=110

[rustybrick]

Thanks. We are mostly a php shop, i will show this info to my guys.

thanks!

[Nick W]

Drupal CMS (http://drupal.org)

* Clean urls and url aliasing from the CP
* Many modules to play with and add to the system
* Simple to customize, good for a large community or a small shops home page
* Active, helpful community should you get stuck

Seriously, this is the best CMS I've worked with, ever. I now write modules for Drupal and have contributed some patches for the core system. So im affilated in some small way.

That thing is an SEO Dream....

Nick

[Dodger]

* Clean urls and url aliasing from the CP
* Many modules to play with and add to the system
* Simple to customize, good for a large community or a small shops home page
* Active, helpful community should you get stuck


I am looking very hard at Drupal. You are right about everything you mentioned. It is pretty slick, extemely and easily customizable.

Couple of questions though. The "clean urls" require mod_rewrite, that is no problem (sort of). But where is the "url aliasing" in the control panel ??? I can see the toggle for clean urls, but nothing for aliasing. I could find "legacy filtering", but that is something entirely different.

[Nick W]

It's a module, it ships with the core download though, so you already have it. Go to /admin/system/modules and enable 'path', then you'll find the 'url aliases' link on your admin navigation ;-)

Nick

[Dodger]

Thanks. I overlooked it....it is the one that says path - Enables users to create custom URLs.

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

I've been trying to get to the OpenSourceCMS site a few timers over the last days but I can't seem to get in. Does anyone know if the site is gone?

Drupal looks very neat indeed. I will take a much closer look at that! Thanks for the info so far

[bakedjake]

I use plone with much success.

[Nick W]

Hi Jake!

Yeah, it looks great from (admited the little) what iv'e seen. Doesnt it kinda require you to own the server or have root though?

Nick

[bakedjake]

Hey Nick, long time no see. :)

That's correct. You will need administrative access to the server.

-- jake

[Dodger]

I've been trying to get to the OpenSourceCMS site a few timers over the last days but I can't seem to get in. Does anyone know if the site is gone?


Mikkel ... they just recently set up shop on a sub-domain at http://test.opensourcecms.com (http://). That is the link that I provided a few posts back. Have you been able to get thru to the root at http://www.opensourcecms.com/ ?

I check in there quite a bit and have not had any problems.

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

Maybe it's just from here - I haven't been able to get into either, but I'll give it try later. Just wanted to see if anyone else had the same problem ... They may just don't like me :eek:

[Dodger]

Try a direct line http://69.93.11.174 or http://69.93.11.174/test.

[Dodger]

Here is a site that compares features for many CMS, the CMS Matrix (http://www.cmsmatrix.org/).

It will allow you to select any number of systems and then display a matrix of features side-by-side. Systems include OpenSource and Commercial applications.

They have Drupal, EZPublish, Geeklog, Mambo, Movable Type, Plone, Rainbow, Xoops included in the list, but there are still quite a few that are missing like WordPress. Still it is pretty extensive and they seem to have just doubled the list in the past couple of weeks.

They have the one line item "URL Rewriting" which is what we all must be looking for as a Standard Option now, eh? :cool:

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

> They have the one line item "URL Rewriting" which is what we all must be looking for as a Standard Option now, eh?

URL-rewrite is one way to go, but as other members have said it's a "fix" and a better solution would be to make a better site arcitechure to begin with. If you do not you do not have to use URL-rewrite.

But you are right, in the sense, that most of these CMS are probably using some kind of URL-rewrite rather than using a more simple (public) arcitechture.

[Nick W]

>>using a more simple (public) arcitechture.

Can you clarify what you mean there Mikkel? I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to say...

Nick

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

You could, and some do, build a dynamic website with only one parameter - throughout the site. The one parameter and value would be a unique identifier that then is used to look up properties for that object. So, instead of having to parse multiple parameters in the URL you just assign a new object ID with new parameter settings. With just one parameter you do not have to URL'rewrite in order to get indexed.

Now, off course you still end up with the same old problem of having multiple URLs for the same content if, for example, one of the properties is a sort order of table content. But that can be hanlded quite easy by either not giving the engines tose links or by dynamically add META-robots NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW on all "duplicte " URLs.

[Nick W]

OK, i think im with you.

It's not the only way to do it though: When I build a CMS from scratch (not done so in a while but simple ones aint tough..) I never use URL-Rewrite.

You can pass parameters in the url without having to rewrite, you just do a little .htacess and php magic and this: example.com?id=4&section=mybottom becomes: example.com/mybottom/4

Easy peasey ;-)

Also, you'll notice in the .htaccess of my fav. CMS that they only rewrite a tiny bit of the url: q=/ This way, together with url aliasing and categories you make custom urls lie /my/dog/smells

Things have moved on in leaps and bounds since I discoverd psuedo urls and it's simpler than ever to have a clean CMS these days, you just gotta find em! hehe..

I really wish phpBB would get their act together with the whole url thing, that system would truly rock then, but for now you're just left hacking it and being a pest on the devel list ha!

Nick

[Dodger]

I really wish phpBB would get their act together with the whole url thing, that system would truly rock then, but for now you're just left hacking it and being a pest on the devel list ha!


They are working on 2.2 now. If you want to get a sneak peak at it, you can download 2.1 MS2 from their CVS site. It is not supposed to be used in a live environment, but you can still play around with it. Not sure if they have dealt with the Urls or not.

You are right though, it would really rock!

[Marcia]

I've never used one but have been looking around to do a personal type site. This one's open source and says it can do "fancy URLs" that are search engine friendly

http://www.nucleuscms.org/features.php

This is probably too elementary for others but might suit me, it looks very simple for simple needs - Perl and outputs html pages

http://chicodigital.com/webtool.html

[Dodger]

Nucleus is a blog essentially, similar to WordPress which is one of the more popular ones in this genre. I have not heard of the other one before, it does look pretty basic.

If you are looking for more than just a blog, I would try out Drupal which has other features for content management. It also has a pretty good backing with plugins or modifications to add to the functionality of it. It too has the equivalent of "fancy urls"

If you want to test drive any of these (including the Admin area), check out OpenSourceCMS (http://www.opensourcecms.com/). You will see that they have Nucleus and WordPress under the Blog area in the left panel, plus others like b2evolution, pLog and Serendipity. Up above that are the CMS Portals like Drupal, ezPublish, Geeklog and several others.

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

Most of what I find is PHP - either pure Linux/Unix or Appache for multiple platforms (including PhP on NT, if you want that) but it's very difficutl to find anything for ASP - and even more impossible: .NET that is good

I admit it: I am not very good with Unix and PHP - I am MS spoiled :)
Since I know I am not the only one around here that are much more familiar with VB, ASP and .NET than Unix it would be nice to find some more OpenSource (or source code available) solutions.

I am about to change my old Danish forums from UBB to a ASP solution. I chose to to use the Snitz forum because it was exactly as simple as I needed it, so it was easy to get a full understanding of the (undocumented, as allways!) code and get into the modifications.

http://forum.snitz.com/

One thing I like about this forum is that they managed to implement a 1-parameter strategy for all the pages you want indexed: Overviews, members and threads. So you don't need to have any URL-rewriting done to get indexed. Also, it turned out to be quite easy to make even serious changes to the system, functions, DB and templates. I even managed to make a small app that converts users, threads and posts from the old UBB forum to this one - something that just seemed close to impossible on some of the other forums I looked at for ASP.

[SEO-Richard]

I spent a lot of time checking out CMS. Drupal seemed the best, purely from what I've read about it. Unless I've got hold of the wrong end of the stick they are currently improving the user interface in the admin/control panel, which is not too user-friendly yet (you can try out these CMS at the link posted earlier)

One other advantage - if you've got Fantastico on your hosts control panel, it instals Drupal in an instant. Always good to have a time-saver.

One critical point with all CMS that I haven't seen addressed by any of them yet is the ability to have unique <TITLE> tags on every page.

Does anyone know if Drupal's managed to address this?

[Dodger]

One critical point with all CMS that I haven't seen addressed by any of them yet is the ability to have unique <TITLE> tags on every page.

Does anyone know if Drupal's managed to address this?

Hmmm....I know with other systems (such as phpBB, vBulletin) that it is as simple as setting up a variable for it and sliding it into the header template. I am sure that Drupal could be easily made to do this too. Nick W here is very familular with Drupal, so maybe he would know specifically what needs to be done.

Drupal is also getting a lot of high marks from quite a few folks. Glad to see more from you too.

[Nick W]

Drupal does have unique titles for each page. The only duplication of titles is when a category index (list of articles in a cat) goes into pagination, on subsequent pages the title is the same. (like from 10-20, then 20-30 etc etc...)

Hope I understood you right...?

Nick

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

Nick, I think it would be a good idea for Drupal to change the way titles are written for paging.

What I usually do, as a minimum, is add numbering the all paging pages, so titles are not entirely identical - something like: "Title - page 2"

Another thing you could do is assign an array of titles to all paging pages and templates so you use different target keywords for each of the paging pages to make them even more unique - and hopefully get a few more good rankings :)

[SEO-Richard]

Nick, I think you understood me :-)

Just to clarify, what I meant but didn't put across too well is the ability to make your own <Meta TITLE> tag on every page.

What all the CMS that I've come across appeared to do (I do say appeared, I did my research as much as I could but I might not have understood it right) is to use the H1 or similar in a page (the main text at the top of the page) as the default <meta title> tag

For Google, at least, this isn't sophisticated enough for my purposes, and it surprised me that none of the CMS appeared concerned about it, focussing instead on mods for making the urls readable by the SEs.

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

> it surprised me that none of the CMS appeared concerned about it, focussing instead on mods for making the urls readable by the SEs.

I don't see any reason for having unique TITLEs if the URL's are not readable by search engines. If pages do not get indexed unique titles won't help you much :)

Having said that, I have always found it quite easy to manually add unique titles to all pages - if thats what you want. It's usually just an extra content field that you program the templates to show as TITLE. I haven only found one system (a .NET forum) where it turned out to be very difficult (in that case we actually ended up having to make an extra DB call to get the Titles - BUT, we got it to work, even in this case).

[Martin Poulsen]

Have any of you looked at Typo3 CMS? I've been using Typo3 for about a year now and love it! Setting up Typo3 correctly, your site will be fully visible for search engines.

You can make URL's like:

http://typo3.com/Screenshots.1238.0.html

or:

http://typo3.org/documentation/videos/

It's up to you.

With a bit experience it's also possible to generate (X)HTML that comply with the XHTML 1.0 Transitional standard.

http://cmsinfo.org writes:

"TYPO3 is a small to medium enterprise class Content Management Framework. It is currently hosted on more than 36,000 servers worldwide (counted by IP address), close to 10,000 developers have registered to use resources on TYPO3.org, the community hub. More than 500 agencies are offering TYPO3-related services, with more than 1300 websites listed as references. The TYPO3 content management interface has been translated into 37 languages."

[DianeV]

Thanks, Martin, that looks like a good one. I'll have to spend some time with it.

[Dodger]

I have noticed that Typo3 in on the list at the CMS Matrix (http://www.cmsmatrix.org/). The CMS Matrix allows you to compare features of many CMS side-by-side by checkmarking the ones you want to know about.

[rogerd]

Mambo can produce URLs without query strings, although they may contain an occasional comma. There's a third-party hack for sale which will create URLs by connecting title words with underscores, so you get pages like this_page_discusses_cats.htm.

MovableType (not open source) produces static .htm pages so no rewriting or other finagling is needed.

Typo3 is interesting, but has a reputation for a daunting learning curve.

[ferdy]

I would like to inform you that there is a portal for open source community www.WebOpenSource.com

It has software reviews for:
- Portal systems or content management system (CMS)
- Web blog
- Forum
- E-commerce
- Groupware
- E-learning
- Image galleries
- Wiki and more

I hope the above information is useful. Thanks :)

Ferdy

[Marcia]

Thanks ferdy, and thanks for bumping this.

I need to make mention of the fact that I installed Drupal to try out last summer and uninstalled it because of SessionIDs. All this time later - it's been gone many, many months - I put up some static pages about a week ago and those SessionIDs are now still causing a problem even though the application is long gone.

[rogerd]

I'm testing both WordPress & Mambo... the former is blog software, but also claims to effectively manage static content pages in addition to categorized blog entries. Thanks for the heads-up on Drupal, Marcia.

[mcanerin]

One idea I've been bouncing around has been for the SMA to "Certify" certain CMS systems as SE friendly, assuming they meet certain criteria and those criteria are check and verified by the SMA.

Even if we decide not to do that, I think that a list of criteria for a SE friendly CMS would be a handy list for forum members to have.

Here is my personal list:

* SE Friendly URLs
* SE Friendly URLs are a default, not an "add on" or "module".
* Ability to customize (both manually and automatically via fields) Titles and other header data (ie metatags)
* Custom Titles and Headers are default (or easy and obvious to use)
* Supports ALT tags for images (particularly linked ones) and they are easy to use
* Ability to place AdWords on the page easily

You will note that most of these features are not only SE friendly, but are also "SEO friendly" as well - in short, SE friendly is NOT an afterthought, hack, add-on, or module. It's easy to use and "out of the box" IMO.

Otherwise, I would say that technically FrontPage 98 (a coding hell - FP2000+ aren't bad, but FP98 and previous were pure evil) is SE friendly because you could always switch to code view and click 4 options and then manually make changes, as long as you were an expert, or you could even use notepad after the fact to "fix it".

IMO, if you need to "fix it" "patch it" "alter the .htaccess manually" or anything else like that it's NOT SE FRIENDLY - it's just hackable. And anything hackable can be basically anything, including SE UN-friendly, if you make a mistake.

My opinion, as usual,

Ian

[projectphp]

Most of what I find is PHP - either pure Linux/Unix or Appache for multiple platforms (including PhP on NT, if you want that) but it's very difficutl to find anything for ASP - and even more impossible: .NET that is good
When using anything MS realted, finding open source products is hard. Which makes sense IMHO. Heck, I have found it almost impossible to even find an open source ASP mailing list manager. Somthing simple that only lets you view the list and update! In PHP, I was spoiled for choice.

The USP of *NIX is open source and community. Unfortunatelt, if you are an MS programmer, you are pretty much stuck building your own. On the bright side, though, you can always then onsell whatever you do ;)

Oh, and for those intersted, http://www.cmsmatrix.org/matrix?wid=2&func=compare&listingId=1050&listingId=1023&listingId=1074 is a comparison of Drupal, mambo and Typo3.

[Marcia]

Roger, with the latest build of WordPress (1.5) you can create individual "pages" that are independent of the structure of the blog posts and archiving. They reside on their own URL that you specify and use the same template. So it's a simplistic version of a CMS - and with totally search engine friendly pages.

I haven't even begun to scratch the surface of what can be done, there are loads of plugins of every kind and with the growth in popularity more and more people out there are creating them.

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

Ian, I don't think it's realistic to approve any CMS. First of all, the ability of getting indexed is only half of what you need in a CMS - you also need facilities to make the pages rank - and yes, I've seen CMS that can indeed get indexed but are virtually impossible to rank for anything.

When I do "Indexing Barrier Removal" projects I work from a list of known barriers, that I have compiled over the years. It's a a very long list - and it grows all the time. Almost every time I analyse a new CMS (or any dynamic website) I find a new "creative" ways to block engines.

No matter how long or detailed you make the list, Ian, there will allways be one more thing that can block engines :)

[mcanerin]

No matter how long or detailed you make the list, Ian, there will allways be one more thing that can block engines

I don't think CMS systems should be written off as hopeless as that statement implies. Nor do I think that a professional SEO should need to be called in for every single project that uses a CMS.

It might be good for business, admittedly (a good portion of my income comes from consulting to people who "rolled their own" CMS, and ended up rolling right off a cliff) but I think that history teaches us that to hope things will stay broken just so a group of people can continue to make money off of fixing them isn't going to happen, no matter how profitable it may be in the short term :)

For example, when I'm (and I assume, you) are done fixing a clients CMS, it actually works and ranks. This provides a basic template for functionality. It might not be perfect, but since nothing is perfect, functional and effective will suffice. You get enough of these and you will end up with a set of rules and requirements for a good, SE friendly CMS, IMO.

Ian

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

You get enough of these and you will end up with a set of rules and requirements for a good, SE friendly CMS, IMO.

All I can say is that it's certainly not my experience. There is no "set of rules" that works for all and any CMS

[rogerd]

with the latest build of WordPress (1.5) you can create individual "pages"

That's the appealing concept of Wordpress as a simple CMS. You can name the pages, and you can also create a pseudo-hiearchy by making one page the "parent" of other pages. It seems offer a nice blend of blog and non-blog content. I'd say it's good for a smaller site owner looking to be able to add news items or similar in the blog while maintaining some "static" content, too.