Sistem Pengurusan Maklumat 1

"Sistem Pengurusan Maklumat - CMS adalah satu sistem yang menyediakan banyak ciri-ciri, walaupun bagi pekerja yang bukan teknikal untuk membina, menukar, mengurus dan seterusnya menerbitkan pelbagai maklumat seperti teks, gambar, video, atau dokumen yang ditentukan oleh peraturan, proses dan urutan secara sentral untuk memastikan ianya lebih teliti dan terancang."

Untuk memahami dengan lebih lanjut, apakah itu CMS, kita perlulah mengimbas perkara ini:
a) apakah yang kita maksudkan dengan maklumat
b) apakah yang kita faham mengenai pengurusannya
c) apa yang kita maksudkan dengan sistem
Apakah itu maklumat?
Maklumat secara kasarnya, adalah maklumat digital. ia boleh terdiri dari teks, gambar, video, bunyian, dokemen, rekod dan sebainya - atau dalam erti kata lain sebarang maklumat yang ingin kita simpan dalam bentuk elektronik.

Apakah itu Pengurusan Maklumat?
Pengurusan Maklumat adalah merupakan pengurusan secara efektif pelbagai maklumat tersenarai di atas, dengan mengikut peraturan, proses dan rangka-kerja bagi memastikan simpanan maklumat elektronik diurus dengan baiknya.

Apakah itu Sistem CMS?
Sistem ini merupakan kaedah atau gabungan beberapa kelengkapan yang memudahkan pembinaan atau penyebaran maklumat yang lebih efektif .

Perbandingan Sistem Pengurusan Maklumat

Ada banyak cara bagaimana untuk menguruskan maklumat laman web anda, dari Web log enjin ringkas yang membolehkan penerbitan maklumat hinggalah ke sistem rangka-kerja aplikasi, di mana anda boleh membina sistem pngurusan maklumat anda sendiri. Oleh kerana terdapat banyak pilihan dalam perisian "open source", kadang kala, adalah amat sukar untuk membuat pilihan terbaik mengikut kehendak anda.

Bagaimanapun, kami telah tekad untuk memilih Drupal CMS berbanding yang lain, walaupun sebelum ini kami telah menggunakan CMS yang lain seperti Joomla. Kami mempunyai sebab-sebab yang meyakinkan bagi keputusan kami. Di samping pengalaman kami, di sini kami sertakan maklumat mengenai CMS yang lain termasuk Mambo, Typo3, Ruby on Rails, Movable Type, WordPress, and TextPattern.

Muka surat ini dipetik dari IBM Internet Technology Group "Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site". Anda digalakkan membaca siri review penuh dari laman web IBM. Kesimpulannya, Drupal adalah CMS yang terbaik dan kami yakin ia dapat memenuhi kehendak anda juga.



Drupal

"Drupal is software that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a great variety of content on a Web site. Tens of thousands of people and organizations have used Drupal to set up scores of different kinds of Web sites, including:

Community Web portals and discussion sites
Corporate Web sites/intranet portals
Personal Web sites
Aficionado sites
E-commerce applications
Resource directories

Drupal includes features to enable content management systems, blogs, collaborative authoring environments, forums, newsletters, picture galleries, file uploads and download, and much more. Drupal is open source software licensed under the GPL and is maintained and developed by a community of thousands of users and developers. Drupal is free to download and use." (Source: CMS Matrix)

Drupal is a relative youngster compared to other content management systems (CMSs). However, we got the impression the framework was well written, robust, very extensible, and seemed to have a thriving development community that was generating a lot of adoption and support.

As with other CMSs, the framework was very extensible. Many of the features we needed were provided as modules that could easily be snapped into the core functions of our Web site.

The framework and templating (theming) system are all written in PHP; there is no separate tag language to be learned. If you need to break out of the framework, it is very easy to do. (Of course, this isn't recommended, but it does offer ultimate flexibility.)

Session management is built into the core functions, which was more than other CMSs provided. This could help us pass some hurdles later on.

Drupal is known for scalability, or ease of growing a Web site from a small set of users to an enterprise level. The framework also has the ability to 'throttle' areas of the site that could cause potential problems during heavy traffic situations.

There is still an apparent learning curve to the "Drupal Way" of creating sites, but significantly less compared with other CMSs. The ability to use PHP to move freely between the business logic layer and the presentation layer (using the PHP template engine) was also very appealing.

We'd heard that the access control of Drupal can be more granular, but figured we could deal with that using the flexible extensibility. Drupal 4.7 has just been released with many enhancements to Version 4.6.



Mambo

"Mambo Open Source is one of the finest open source content management systems available today. The default installation of Mambo is easy to set up and easy to maintain. The setup utility uses a 4-step wizard interface that allows you to install the entire system without the need of advanced technical knowledge. Once installed, the system includes a variety of templates that you can choose from and a large number of functions that are ready to go. Content can be added, edited, and manipulated without having to know HTML, XML, or DHTML -- just enter your content using a friendly editor and click Publish. More advanced users are able to control the system to a level that suits their skills. The core files are written in PHP [Mambo is based on Linux™, Apache, MySQL, P for PHP, Perl and Python (LAMP)] and can be modified easily. The system is robust, proven, and backed by a large community of users and professional developers. (As of early 2006, Mambo is five years old!)" (Source: CMS Matrix)

At the time, Mambo was popular and seemed to offer a very easy install and an attractive, easy-to-use administration interface. Usually disregarded, the back end of a CMS becomes very important if you need it to work well for clients who need to administer the Web site after you hand it off.

The easy installation seemed to get us to a point where almost all the function we needed was available and ready to be themed. However, as with many CMSs, the templating is limited to a tag system that leaves you at the mercy of the quality of the markup that is substituted for the tags. This is fine if the markup is valid, semantically structured, and adequately sprinkled with CSS ID and class attributes to aid styling. If it isn't, then you can find yourself delving into the guts of the application to figure out how to correct the generated output.

Mambo also offered limited session management, although it was still more than other CMSs offer.

The development path seemed confusing, and the future of this solution was not certain to us. Mambo's development track is divided into several solutions. Miro is a commercial product and Joomla seems to be a new CMS spawned from Mambo. Mambo still exists and its current development path seems to be more stable.



Typo3

"TYPO3 is an enterprise-level open source content management system released under the GPL. It runs on more than 122,000 servers worldwide. The application has been translated into 43 languages and is actively being developed in a community of over 27,000 users in 60 countries. Some of its users include BASF, DaimlerChrysler, EDS, Konika-Minolta, Volkswagen, UNESCO, as well as numerous universities, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations." (Source: CMS Matrix )

Typo3 is big. Big application. Big community. Big adoption. Big list of extended features and contributions. The learning curve is big, too. There is no doubt that Typo3 could do all we required, but there seemed to be other issues in addition to complexity.

The markup generated by a lot of the core and contributed modules used structure from the mid to late '90s, with lots of table layouts, not much use of effectively placed CSS ID and class attributes, and sometimes invalid structure. We wanted to use current best practices to keep our development iterations flexible, so this wasn't going to help timely development. The templating system also seemed very complex compared to other solutions. The time invested in understanding how to theme the Web content outweighed the power of the templating system.

The administrative interface felt awkward and old, especially compared to Mambo. This was an important consideration, because we needed to hand off the eventual administration of the site.

If we'd had more time, Typo3 might have been an option. But, it seemed like it needed a rewrite to keep it fresh and competitive with other CMS that are emerging. It appears that the issue of using standards based xHTML and CSS is being addressed in the new version of Typo3.



Ruby on Rails

"Ruby is a pure object-oriented programming language with a super clean syntax that makes programming elegant and fun. Ruby successfully combines Smalltalk's conceptual elegance, Python's ease of use and learning, and Perl's pragmatism. Ruby originated in Japan in the early 1990s and has started to become popular worldwide in the past few years as more English language books and documentation have become available. Rails is an open source Ruby framework for developing database-backed Web applications. Rail's guiding principles: less software and convention over configuration. Less software means you write fewer lines of code to implement your application. Keeping your code small means faster development and fewer bugs, which makes your code easier to understand, maintain, and enhance. You will see how Rails cuts your code burden shortly.

Convention over configuration means an end to verbose XML configuration files -- there aren't any in Rails! Instead of configuration files, a Rails application uses a few simple programming conventions that allow it to figure out everything through reflection and discovery. Your application code and your running database already contain everything that Rails needs to know!" (Source: Rolling with Ruby on Rails)

Typical content management systems allow authenticated users to create content forming pages as part of a Web site. Ruby On Rails (ROR), however, does not provide this out of the box. It provides a Web application framework. Using ROR, you can build a custom CMS from scratch.

At the time of our project, there was a huge buzz around ROR, mainly promoted by 37Signals and its impressive array of real online ROR applications such as Base Camp.

We liked the way the bindings to the database through the framework lived up to the hype. These did help speed up those repetitive parts of development that hook to your database table columns.

At the time of our investigation, the framework was somewhat blog centric. Stability was an issue, but we recognized its potential for use on future projects.

Creating a custom CMS has its appeal. For example, with a custom solution we could have created a themable administrative interface. But, given our time restrictions, we needed a CMS framework to build on.



Blog engines

We considered using an existing publishing system that principally supported the creation of blogs. We've previously used such systems to support content for non-blog Web sites by redefining the way categories and data are used. These types of solutions are not aligned to compete with the likes of Drupal, Mambo, and Typo3. For example, session management as provided by Drupal and Typo3 is not typically supported. However, they do provide a very simple and quick way of creating a simple CMS.

Given that these solutions are blog centric, here are some alternatives:



Movable Type

"Movable Type is a powerful and customizable publishing platform allowing users to create attractive, expressive Weblogs within a personal publishing system that is infinitely customizable and versatile. Running as server-based software, Movable Type has been adopted by individuals and corporations who are drawn to its depth of features, open architecture, and robust library of third-party plug-ins designed to extend the system's functionality. Building from the current base of hundreds of plug-ins created by dedicated developers around the world, an entirely new class of applications can be built on top of the familiar and tested Movable Type system." (Source: CMS Matrix)

One of the more popular blog publishing systems at the time, this Perl implementation has a large community of contributors and a good support structure. The immediate roadblock was the creation of a charging structure by the makers, Six Apart, to support the development of its product. Because we were trying to create an open source solution, this nipped the idea of using Movable Type in the bud.



WordPress

"WordPress is a state-of-the-art, semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, Web standards, and usability. What a mouthful. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time. More simply, WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it. WordPress' default capabilities can be increased many fold (and new functions can be easily added) through its easy-to-use, plug-in architecture." (Source: CMS Matrix)

WordPress was growing in stature at the time of our project. Similar to Drupal, the wiki-style documentation system supporting this solution is useful. The core code is clean and easy to extend, and the user interface is very easy to use.

The templating system is a typical tag-based system, which compared well with other blog publishing platforms. The generated output from the system supported current best practices, and made the development of content layout and accessibility much easier.

One shortfall of WordPress is its lack of caching capabilities, which we thought would limit scalability.



TextPattern

"A free, flexible, elegant, easy-to-use content management system for all kinds of Web sites, even Weblogs. When it comes to publishing on the Internet, beginners and experts alike are met with a bothersome paradox: word processors and graphics applications allow anyone to do a pretty good job of managing text and images on a personal computer, but to make these available to the worldwide Web -- a seemingly similar environment of documents and destinations -- ease of use vanishes behind sudden requirements for multilingual programming skills, proficiency in computer-based graphic design, and, ultimately, the patience of a saint. Those who soldier on anyway may find themselves further held back by the Web's purported inflexibility with written language, with its reluctance to cope with all but the plainest of text, or by the unpredictable results brought about by using WYSIWYG Web editors. TextPattern is a Web application designed to help overcome these and other hurdles to publishing online, and to simplify the production of well-structured, standards-compliant Web pages." (Source: CMS Matrix)

Like WordPress, TextPattern looked like another well-crafted blog publishing system. It has a clean administrative interface and seems easy to use. However, it lacks a lot of the features we were looking for, including session control and caching.