CMS Option: Zikula

[Simon Birtwistle]

As the representative of Zikula on this list I wanted to follow up the discussion I had with Eric yesterday.

>From what I could see, the area to focus on is the content publishing workflow, and to that end I've been evaluating some content management modules for Zikula.  I've narrowed it down to a couple of options, both of which have revisions control and may suit you to a greater or lesser degree.  If neither option suits we could either modify and existing module or create something new.

The first 'PageMaster' allows the creation of custom document types.  These can contain any number of fields (e.g. you could add a multi select box for applicable versions or a document upload box for a PDF version, in addition to title and content fields etc).  It's also possible to insert images and documents inline from a number of the media management modules mentioned later.  There is also full revisions control.

The second module is 'Content'.  This module allows you to construct pages with various components according to pre defined templates.  Components can be blocks of text, images, headings, tables of contents, slideshows or a whole host of other things.  Adding more component types is also easy, and all pages have a full revisions control and a translations interface for adding multilingual versions of pages.

Both these modules come with a choice of visual editors - we have one module that provides a choice of Xinha, TinyMCE, FCKeditor, openWYSIWYG and NicEdit - you can use different editors in different modules if you wish.


On the media management side, there's MediaAttach, which provides upload and storage capability for all sorts of different media types, many with preview functionality.  These can then be embedded into content using the Xinha visual editor.  There's also CoDoc, which allows you to upload a document to a category, and then upload new revisions of it.  Like the two content modules, revisions are tracked by username and date/time, and there's locking functionality for when someone is working on a particular document.  There's no easy way to embed CoDoc items into other content though.  Lastly, there's Relay, which is a port of a file management script written in javascript.  Nice and simple way to manage files in a given directory without resorting to FTP.  There are also a selection of gallery modules for displaying screenshots if that might be useful.


I'm in the process of setting up a demo site over at Zikula which you'll be able to use to test these modules out if you feel that's helpful - just let me know.



Simon