CMS

Blogs

b2evolution
Nucleus
WordPress

Classifieds

Noahs Classifieds

Content Management

Drupal
Geeklog
Joomla 1.5

Need defined

HTML can only say that the span of text "ID586172" is something that should be positioned near "Acme Gizmo" and "$199", etc. There is no way to say "this is a catalog" or even to establish that "Acme Gizmo" is a kind of title or that "$199" is a price. There is also no way to express that these pieces of information are bound together in describing a discrete item, distinct from other items perhaps listed on the page.

Semantic Web

The semantic web comprises the standards and tools of XML, XML Schema, RDF, RDF Schema and OWL that are organized in the Semantic Web Stack. The OWL Web Ontology Language Overview describes the function and relationship of each of these components of the semantic web:

How to create a web site for small businesses or family groups.

I wanted to evaluate the best software for creating some web sites:

1. A web site for social networking with my family (Blogs, Photo Gallerys)
2. A wiki for documenting knowledge
3. Small business web site using open source software on Apache and Linux. (still under way)

Capture the process on my own wiki

Since I wanted to use the wiki to capture all the tips and tricks I learned through this process I started my evaluating and installing wiki software. I have made my wiki available to the public with all my notes.

Build Family Web Site

Next, I evaluated Content Management Software (CMS) for hosting web sites. I wanted a social networking website (my example blog) that would allow some content to be available only to authenticated users (for example: our friends for the family site). I also wanted support for a photo gallery (here is mine), videos and other documents. Finally I wanted to tie these all together with an integrated framework. Here is the first version of my family site (sorry but some of the content requires authentication)

As I started to expose my users to the web sites I learned the importance of easy of use and simplifying things.

First layout your site pages, here is a good example for a orpahnige site.

Here are some instructions for setting up drupal software.

Drupal was easy to download and install but harder to learn and extend.  Once I started adding modules and learning what they could do I became very impressed and overwelmed.
Here are all my notes on learning and installing Drupal 5
For all but the very simple sites Drupal is my recommendation.

I liked Wordpress, it was easy to install and to add some prebuilt themes, there were a few mambots and extensions I liked as well. It is very easy to use for a one author many readers type site. But setting up groups of users with their own pages is very hard because it is not designed for it. Also, I was frustrated by the lack of integration of extensions with each other.

One of the first features to add is a rich text editor.  But I am getting ahead of myself first you need to know where to find modules.  There is a great site that includes reviews of all the modules called DrupalModules.com.

This is how

First I search high and low for the top open source CMS products. My evaluation started focusing on Wordpress, Xoops, and Joomla. I was impressed but felt that the underlying desing of these products was not flexible enough for what I wanted. I decided a key part that was missing from all of these packages was the social networking features I wanted. I learned how to find pluggins and install them, but they were more for single publisher model not for a many to many publishing model.