From 2005 until early 2009 toxA was developing its own Web Content Management System (WCMS) and has recently abandoned its efforts to get a final release with updated page editors and suspended the development of toxA.CMS.
Nevertheless our website needs a face lift and so we are looking for a new WCMS providing easy customization and content management including all our requirements considered quite basic, such as internationalization and localization support and a flexible composition of pages using quite different types of content. These features must be available using a clean and easy-to-learn GUI as well as providing high performance on page retrieval.
PHPWCMS is well-known here for its performance and for featuring complex page composition, but it was lacking native support for different locales and is hardly working with fully modularized templates. In addition it’s lack of a proper plugin system proofs PHPWCMS to be a hack. That’s why we were interested in some other option using PHPWCMS as a fallback. And so we started to evaluate papayaCMS.
papayaCMS is an Open Source WCMS available for free download.It’s featuring multi-user editing, content auditing and publishing with version control, static boxes, page templates, PDF output, plugins and more. All these features recommend papayaCMS to perfectly match workflow requirements of larger companies.
Installation
Though it’s including a driver for supporting SQLite, too, several attempts to install its tables and default data in a SQLite database failed always resulting in a corrupted database hardly to recover. The included driver isn’t working with PDO and thus doesn’t properly support SQLite3. Because of these two issues MySQLi was used instead and installation succeeded without any further hassle.
The Backend
The backend of papayaCMS is anything but clean and easy-to-learn. While it’s possible to succeed in a few hours for an IT professional, I’d never expect an assistant to get familiar with it in a month of intensive training. In most situations there are up to 3 different menus one is required to work with. They aren’t visually linked to each other and sometimes it takes a while to find the proper item e.g. to add content to a page.
In a vanilla installation of papayaCMS the workflow of creating and publishing a page with content is anything but simple and straight-forward. I can’t believe people on papayaCMS homepage saying it’s sooo easy to do what has taken hours without papayaCMS before. This is either a lie or it’s due to those people being totally new to website hosting, web design and content management. Add a page, provide a title and save, switch to view list, select a view to be applied on page, switch to content editor, fill in all content and save, switch again to publish page, provide required message for version history (which is nonsense in personal and small-business setups) and click to publish page. Read this and keep in mind that every comma in previous sentence marks a whole page request taking it’s time to succeed. While doing this the backend is kept full of options and information. Though this might be good for midsize and large companies running a full division for web site editing you won’t need all that stuff in the example above or in day-to-day use. The GUI is terribly awful and according to this papayaCMS is very similar to Typo3. Some options are little intuitive such as recovering an accidently trashed page by saving it’s properties panel again. Embedding images requires uploading them on a different view first requiring several clicks. After that it’s available for instant selection in a page’s content editor.
Custom Design Integration
Well, next there is indeed something good to say about this WCMS: it’s (somewhat) consequently using XML for internal data representation and XSLT for producing all kinds of output including HTML web pages. I’m still not that familiar with XSLT but with the help of some online tutorials it took about 30 minutes to learn reading templates included with papayaCMS, though it’s a huge amount of xsl files. However, with XSL implementing your own custom design is anything but as easy as in other WCMS. Typos in XSL sometimes aren’t immediately reported and one would have to switch from Preview to Protocol and back again just to see what’s going on. Keep your XML/XSLT IDE ready to finally get rid of this task.
As a side note I’d like to add here that on finally rendering page output some parts of page’s content is’t available for XSL transformation anymore. The so called “boxes” – independent content to be plugged-in into pages – have been transformed separately then and the internal data representation as been replaced by its HTML unfortunately wrapped in CDATA. This limits opportunities of having late custom transformations on structural data provided for boxes. And it requires a more in-depth understanding of the XSL files and their relational structure. The website isn’t instantly providing good reference manuals or similar making thing even harder. There is no option to dream of a custom design integration as fast as with PHPWCMS or similar systems taking less than two hours.
Content Management
Pages in papayaCMS always seem to be associated with a single view such as “Text with Image” or “Contact Form” which is different from most smaller WCMS. In PHPWCMS for example, there are pages consisting of articles each consisting of content elements in turn. This enables an editor to compose complex pages. I didn’t find an easy way to combine a text with image, an embedded flash movie player and a gallery on a single page.
Showdown
After two days of evaluating papayaCMS we finally stopped investing more time in this software. Trying to add another page containing a contact form using the related view type resulted in a page not obeying the recently implemented page design perfectly supported by “regular pages” containing a “text with image” view. As this was taking my last piece of interest in this CMS I stuffed the whole set of files in my bitbucket and started to look for a WCMS again.
One might ask: Why didn’t you look for support forums? I tried for sure, but it’s hard to separate posts on papayaCMS from posts on papayas on websites managed by a CMS. By the way I got curious about some found posts regarding developers’ strong efforts to release papayaCMS version 5 dated back in very early 2007. The website is happily promoting this release now in very late 2009. How good is it supported by the community?
