Packt Open Source Awards and some reflections on CMSes

Packt Publishing, a fairly known technical book publisher is organizing an Open Source Awards contest. Some of the categories are interesting like mobile toolkit and libraries, business applications (always tough for OSS software), Javascript libs and multimedia. It's funny to see the categories evolve over time. Back in my days, it used to be best Java Middleware framework, best database tool etc.

Votes start soon (sept 19th) and end oct 31st. Go cast your vote, it's always nice for an (open source) team to receive such a prize. And no I don't think any JBoss framework is contending.

One of the category is Open Source CMS. Two of the big contenders in this space are Drupal and Joomla!. I have been involved in setting up Joomla! for my friend and... wife. I've got to admit that if I had to do it again, I would use something like Jekyll or Awestruct (my current favorite in this category). The website targeted was fairly simple but very quickly she ran into limitations and badly generated HTML (at least not customizable enough from a CSS point of view). She is a marketing person, so if she has decided that the picture, menu, color, text need to be that way, it must be that way. Teaching her Markdown and a few extra HTML tag is trivial. Heck she even learnt how to hack some CSS sheets. The big limitation is of course the lack of ready to use templates. That's about the main issues for simple solutions like Jekyll or Awestruct.

Next time you deploy a CMS, consider a simpler HTML generator and see if it could fit your needs.

PS: My wife's website is at Innora.fr.