Yesterday, Lisa Spangenberg posted
a comment on The Benefits of a Content Management System (CMS) making a
very good point that Mindfly Web Design Studio has not adequately
differentiated Boogaloo from several other applications.
Lisa specifically mentioned TextPattern,
Joomla, Drupal and
WordPress in her comment. I will try to address
each of the ones that I can as non-biased as possible.
I should start by giving a few disclaimers.
- I do not profess to be proficient with PHP and plan on happily retiring without ever becoming so
- My proficiency is in ASP.NET and MS SQL Server and amongst my
contemporaries, I am part of the minority that prefers to program in
VB.NET over C#.
- I have absolutely no experience with TextPattern and will limit my
comments to saying it looks cool and I now plan on
playing around with it a bit.
With those being stated, I'll start by answering Lisa's
final question, "What makes it better for the end-user than, say,
WordPress?" First with the web designers' favorite response ... Well,
that depends.
WordPress and to some extent Joomla and Drupal are setup for a layman
to download, install and click buttons to select a template and start
adding content. They look at the end user as the person entering the
content first and the designer second.
Boogaloo is intended to be a tool for a web designer. Out of the box,
Boogaloo provides a plethora of tools to rapidly get raw (not
formatted) content onto a page from almost any source the designer can
access. It is then up to the designer to apply visual styling and
any interactive effects to the raw content. The end user for Boogaloo
(initially) is the web designer.
In my previous post Boogaloo - Mindfly Web Design Studio's Open Source Debut, I tried to point this out when I wrote:
"Ironically, I do not think of what we produced as a traditional content
management system, rather I consider it to be more of a "site creation
framework"; Something more analogous to a server side JQuery if there were such a category. After all, a successful installation simply renders a blank page."
Only over the course of the website build does Boogaloo morph into a
CMS as content holders get filled with different controls - galleries,
articles, ads, maps, feeds etc. This may seem inside out compared to a
more traditional CMS approach, yet in practice you wind up with a very
intuitive administrative interface for the designers' customers which
gives them the ability to edit essentially every aspect of the the Boogaloo controled section of their website. I make this emphasis due to the fact that a typical website is quite often comprised of many different applications.
If a customer walked into the studio and said they wanted a blog, we
would definitely point them in the direction of BlogEngine.net or
WordPress. While Boogaloo does have quite a few blog technologies
built into it (a ping service handler, pingbacks, trackbacks and RSS),
WordPress would probably serve the client better as it is a blog first
and foremost and the right tool for the job.
If that same customer walked in and said I have several blogs, an
eCommerce store and wanted to connect everything together through a
single application I would choose Boogaloo. Referenced blogs post
would be read in via feeds, store items would be queried via API (or
direct database calls), etc.
Another BIG difference between any of the fore mentioned applications
and Boogaloo is that Boogaloo is completely written using
Microsoft's .NET framework and MS SQL Server and gets deployed to a web
server running IIS 6.0 or IIS 7.0 rather than a PHP application with a
MySQL back end generally hosted on an Apache web server. If you look
around, when compared to the number of PHP CMSs there are relatively
few counterparts (meant for small business and personal web sites)
written in ASP.NET. And out of the few that there are, even fewer give
the designer enough control over the HTML to semantically represent the
underlying content, create any layout and assert that the layout(s)
validates.
So I guess to directly answer Lisa, in a way it is like comparing apples to oranges. Boogaloo starts with a blank page and allows the web designer to almost immediately start adding raw content that can be easily styled without deconstructing anything. In the end the person responsible for maintaining the site can edit nearly everything through the various controls that have been added or through an extension. Boogaloo is a ASP.NET application which is engineered to encourage other developers to create custom controls and extensions in either VB.NET, C# or anything else for that matter that they can get to run in the App_Code folder compile on demand. Boogaloo is a site creation framework first with that becomes a CMS in the end.
