Quantum Forest

This has been a long hiatus without posting in the blog. My excuse? I was evaluating a number of CMS to provide members of the IUFRO unit 2.04.02 (Breeding theory and progeny testing) with a way of communicating, including web page, newsletter, forum, calendar of events, etc. As the coordinator of the group, I am really keen on having people interacting, but the IUFRO site is, to put it mildly, close to useless.

I tested Drupal, E107, Mambo / Joomla and Plone. The first four are written in PHP and require PHP+MySQL, while the latter is written in Python. Although I prefer Python as a language, the idea of getting special hosting for Plone, because of especific server requirements is a bit of a turn off. I first had a quick drive test of lots of CMS at the Open Source CMS site, which is a great resource. After that I installed and configured Drupal, E107 and Mambo in my test system, where they are still working together without any conflicts. CMS Matrix provides a fairly detailed comparison between all the systems.

In principle the simplest interface seemed to be Mambo’s (plenty of eye candy), followed by E107. Initially I struggled with Drupal’s interface, but after a while I got the hang of it. On terms of functionality, all systems seem to provide most of the features I need: basic user management, forum, event coordination and easy posting. However, after a while I found that Mambo/Joomla are a bit of an overkill, bringing too many things by default. Putting together a magazine-like interface in E107 implied creating folders by hand (one per issue) and posting in those folders (a bit too primitive for my taste). Going back to Drupal, I started exploring all the contributed modules and I think I can get everything that I need from there.

I am now slowly putting together the IUFRO Breeding theory and progeny testing site, which should be operational by January 2006. The configuration of Drupal will be explained in my next post.