Contribute vs. CityDesk vs. OpenACS

Having used all three products, I think it's a good time for posting my current impressions. I have been using them for:

• Contribute 2 weeks.
• CityDesk about 18 months.
• OpenACS Toolkit about 3 years.

It must be remembered that all three products are really targeted to 3 different levels of users. Contribute is targeted to content providers that are only adding static text to web pages. In a private/personal web site with static pages this works very well. Contribute requires very little knowledge of HTML and provides a clean WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interface. Buttons for adding tables and horizontal rules are clear and understandable for what they are, additionally Contribute allows for dragging and dropping a Word or Excel file into a web page. In the corporate environment the templates created by the designers in Dreamweaver can be used by Contribute to add the text based content. This is easy and prevents the content providers from changing or altering the corporate templates.

CityDesk also provides a WYSIWYG interface for adding content. CityDesk has more power under the hood than Contribute, allowing for the creation of entire web sites, templates, and the use of cityscript to add dynamic functionality. Citydesk has been used successfully with .php, jave, .asp, and just about any scripting languages you want to use. The one drawback to CityDesk that I can see is that all elements of a CityDesk site are stored in a Microsoft Jet database. CityDesk is a true web publishing system. This metaphore is carried out from pages being referred to as "articles" with the optional attributes of Headline, Author, File Date, Never Publish Before, Never Publish After, Keywords, Audience, and Template for each article/page that is created. Additioanlly you can assign a teaser, sidebar, about the author, and 2 additional extra text items to each article. Once the site or article is the way you want it, you "publish" the site to the web server.

OpenACS offers a total open-source solution for building Community based web services. Where the Arsdigita ACS required Oracle for the backend, OpenACS is ACS ported to Postgresql while maintaining support for Oracle. OpenACS is the most powerful of the three tools and is best used by organizations where the developer is actively involved in content management and web site maintenance. Of the three, OpenACS offers the greatest flexibility for the mobile content provider. Included are many features found in other CMS applications/frameworks but OpenACS is going much farther than the compitition with new concepts on the board and in development. OpenACS is being modified to support targeted industry groups. Currently MIT/Sloan School of Business is using a modified version of OpenACS called dotLRN. This project spawned another project which is currently in development called dotWRK. This will be enhanced for the corporate workforce with an emphasis on Project Management. I'll be writing more about OpenACS in coming weeks...

I like all three products. I'm using Contribute for building small, rapidly changing static web sites. One example of this is my "Intranet Server Project". I need to build this site quickly, no scripting needed, content is totally static, and I do all the work from one location.

I'm using CityDesk at my day job to provide easy content management with integration to .php and MySQL for a commenting system on the "articles" and "blog" entries. I'm also using php with CityDesk to manage e-mail notifications of new articles and changing content. Again all content is added from one location.

I'm using OpenACS for my home system. I need to know basic HTML for page layout, in fact I am using many HTML tags in this entry for formatting. The power of OpenACS is in the UI (user interface), while still crude, I can add content from any browser on any computer. While you could compare OpenACS with one of the many *nuke.php applications or Plone, or any of the other "Content Management Systems" and find it lacking, I keep coming back to OpenACS for the active developer community, instant and friendly support, and constantly improving system. The majority of this site is running under OpenACS.

So in conclusion, all tools are good. All are imperfect, all have a place in my toolkit.