The kitchen dotSINK revisited

I was very pleasantly surprised to get a response to the last post from Will Ezell, chief technology officer of dotCMS, who writes:

In dotCMS, content does not live on the web tree, though that is not to say that it cannot be organized hierarchically. You can build custom taxonomies in dotCMS and apply them to specific content structures. Access to these taxonomies can be permission based. Meaning, you can have news content and apply a custom “department” taxonomy/category to it. You can then search/pull news based on that taxonomy and permission specific users to only have access to “their” categories, e.g. “biology news”. When building templates, you can specify to pull a list of news of a certain category.

Custom taxonomies can be applied across content types – events, news, staff, and used to relate and pull collections of content together.

I’m biased, but I’d say take another look. dotCMS is broad, but as you say, it is ready to go.

Forgive me for using Vignette as a point of reference, but it’s what our end users are used to. I’d prefer a more explicit hierarchical organization in the content repository, sort of like the file system metaphor that V7 uses for projects and subprojects. But I’d love to find a way to make dotCMS work for us.

Time permitting I’ll definitely give dotCMS another look-see.

Everything but the kitchen dotSINK

Task-based workflow. Events calendar. CRM module. E-mail newsletter. Templating. Document management. Class enrollment system. Integration with Liferay portal. Commercial support. Hosting options. Easy content reuse. Excellent documentation. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud support. Is there anything that dotCMS doesn’t have?

Sad to say, the answer seems to be “categorization and organization in the content repository.”

Once again I found much to like about dotCMS. Of all the contenders it was the closest to being ready to use OOTB, with a rich feature set as the foundation for future customization and extension. But with 10,000+ pieces of content to import and wrangle, that one minor shortcoming knocked it out of the running.