Choosing an Open Source CMS

Dee-Ann LeBlanc reviewed Choosing an Open Source CMS – Beginner’s Guide on CMSWire yesterday. The review summarizes:

Overall, the strength of this book is in its core purpose, choosing an open source CMS. While reorganization and refocus would make it stronger, it’s still quite useful as it is. If I had a friend who was confused on what to choose, this would be one resource I would point them to.

She talks about how we take a project oriented approach to get the reader started with CMS concepts, their requirements and going through all alternatives to make a choice. Dee-Ann is a senior writer and also critics the book on it’s organization. I think her suggestions are very useful and we could take up better organizing the book. I will try to cover some gaps via this blog as well.

Have you read the book? What do you think?

SilverStripe is an extremely promising CMS and is covered in the book. Here’s what the author had to say about the book.

Up to this point there has only been scattered resources on offer to help people choose a CMS. Mehta’s book remedies this problem by providing a solid starting point. Armed with a comprehensive set of the basics, readers can more confidently download, demo, and evaluate the software out there, and complete their decision-making process.

Read more…

The first review of the CMS book on Amazon gets only 2 stars! I am disappointed because I worked hard to write the book. Here’s what the reader said, and my response below that.

I bought this book for a significant discount directly from the publisher (PACKT) and immediately downloaded the PDF. It was unprotected and personalized with my name/address – but had many blank, missing or garbled pages. When I downloaded it again, it had the same problems, just different pages – but with 2 copies, I was able to red the entire book in a couple of hours.

The writing style is light and pleasant, but the content is superficial and disappointing. Maybe I was expecting too much (I’m trying to decide which CMSes to adopt), but I found very little useful advice I have not picked up already from casually browsing the Internet. I thought I was a beginner, but this book is targeted at someone without any knowledge of existing CMS options any any idea of how to start.

The one choice nugget I took away was a reference to a website affiliated with the author – www.opensourcecms.com – a collection of open source CMS demos that you can immediately use without the hassle of downloading and installing on your own server.

Sorry about the troubles with book download. I am letting Packt know about it.

I get your feedback that you found the content shallow. Target readers of this book are beginners to CMSs. The book is designed to help you choose a CMS to adopt. It does not give you ready answers, but it probes you and helps you find one that suits your needs. We have spent a large section of the book helping readers understand their real requirements. Once they are done with this, it’s really about trying different options and picking one that suits the most. There is certainly a lot of content available online that talks about CMS features. This book is not about CMS features. It’s about your needs, available options, guidelines on evaluation and putting all this to practical use.

So yes, if you are expecting comparative reviews of different CMSs, this book is not meant for that. There are many websites that do that. OpensourceCMS (not affiliated with me) is the best place to try them out.

Thank you for taking the time to go through the book despite download troubles.

I appreciate your feedback.

Thanks.
Nirav Mehta
http://www.cmsbook.info/