On Tue, 09 May 2006 17:57:16 +0100, Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> I have taken a look at some commercial CMS packages and I was not only
> appalled by the lack of features covered by some of them, but also the
> poor looks, the lack of templates (often contributed by online
> communities), and the ridiculous pricing. "How and why does anyone pay for
> that junk?", is what I always shout inside my head. "It must be budget
> sprees", I answer.
While I agree with you that many of those products are junk, sometimes they
do something specific that a given customer needs, and open source doesn't
provide. Other times, they already have an investment in a system, such as
Oracle, and Oracle's CMS's are designed to work with their other apps.
Another reason is that, for example in the case of government or education,
the organization puts out an RFP, and then it's up to vendors to come to
the organization and showcase their wares. Few open source projects will
do that. If you're lucky, a vendor using an open source project might, but
more often than not these are dominated by the big players. If you don't
play, you can't win.
You might argue that they could just implment it themselves, but few
organizations have the internation talent or resources to do that. They're
usually over-allocated for other things.
Another problem is that few of the open source CMS's are database agnostic.
Usually they use Mysql, and only Mysql. Many companies have expertise
already in some other database and would like to use that instead.
Finally, almost *ALL* open source CMS's are of the runtime variety. This
is like the various nukes or plone or mambo. This is just not the kind of
environment many organizations want. They want a publish system, where
they build their websites on a different server, then push them out to the
production server. That one requirement alone cancels out over 95% of the
open source CMS's.
CMS in general is not a simple subject, and matching a CMS to an
organization can take many months of research. There are so many factors
to consider that it's as basically like building a house.
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