Stint with a CMS – Twiki, installations and problems

Alright,

I decided to play with a few CMS available on the net. And there are tons and tons of them, all free!

Requirements:

All I wanted was a good content management system,

- with Wiki support,

- along with a forum

- email based notifications

- integration with svn and bugzilla (if possible)

I should have added ‘Ease of install and configuration’ as my requirement. As many of the CMS packages available proved me otherwise.

First Choice: Twiki

Twiki was the first choice, but soon I realised its cumbersome installation and configuration. Tweaking twiki is a daunting task, Especially on a windows based system. Actually most of these CMS are made for Linux and hence installation and configuration is still based on .conf files, scripts, assumptions and more.

Fortunately there is a Windows Installer for Twiki 4.2 available on the net. And the installation of that is one-click, seamless install. It includes an inbuilt apache, perl etc. But this I stumbled upon accidentally, only after wasting my lot of time on WindowsInstallCookBook and  tons of garbage insturctions on how to install zillions of modules to just get twiki up and running! I say Why? Why do the end user has to follow tons and tons of instructions to just get the s/w running? I mean developers of twiki spent countless hours developing a good CMS system, but didn’t spend couple of hours maintaining some one-cick installater for the end users? sad.

Anyways, I was able to get twiki running (using the windows installer) however i stumbled upon another problem. Installation is one problem. Confguration of modules in Twiki requires another PHD. Its based on TWIKI_VARIABLES_TO_BE_SET=’Hell’ on a twiki page (instead of maintaining .conf files). This may sound to be a great idea from a developer point of view, but has a extreme learning curve from an end user point.

Finally trying hard to search in a extremely big bulky Twiki site, searching for modules, and how to make it working, i was more or less left on my own. A few modules (like forum in twiki) worked in one shot, simply by unzipping them into twiki directory. However a few gave me big time pain. Twiki originally based on a Linux system assumes a lot of stuff ( tools like svn etc are available on linux) but not on windows. Which means, I would have to download those tools, configure them and make sure the perl scripts from twiki are able to use those tools. Now there is no neat information available on the net which can help you do that in one shot.

Trac

Trac looked impressive. Had inbuilt support for forum and svn. However its installation is a night mare too.

Again it pointed me to a page of tons of confusing instructions on how to download stuff required to run trac: python, setuptools (some sort of python library used to setup trac), Pysqlite, Genshi and bleh!.

And the instructions are given in plain lucid form here.

1. Click “Start” > “Run…” (or press Win+R)
2. Type “cmd” and click “Ok” – this opens the Windows command console
3. Type “cd c:\Python24\Scripts”
4. easy_install blah_package.

Great! so easy. but somebody who spent hours in writing this information, could have created a single installation based script to do the same. isn’t it? Why force people who need a no-brainer solution go through hundreds of instruction..

I left trac evaluation in a hurry, couldn’t have possibly gone ahead with it.

Drupal and Joomla

Installation of  drupal was seamless!!!

This was the first time I could do it with minimal instructions.

Just Install XAMPP (which is apache + PHP +MySql and sendMail). Unzip the drupal directory under htdocs.

There you go, point your browser to http://localhost/drupalx.y/ and the installation is cool .

One catch!

Need to pre-create a database for drupal(just give any name) which can be done from http://localhost/xampp phpMyAdmin link. Also remember to copy user say: root and assign a password to it. again PhpMyAdmin> Priviledges.

Both user name, password and database name(given above) are asked as input during the drupal installation (http://localhost/drupalx.y/)

Great CMS systems, but I rejected them as they didn’t had wiki support.

Thank drupal and joomla, now Its easy to create a website of your own!

And Finally TikiWiki

- The installation was seamless (xampp, unzip into htdocs, point your browser to your installation http://localhost/tiki/ and there you go. Just remember to create a database and a user using http:/localhost/xampp phpMyAdmin link.

- The configuration was UI based, thank goodness.

- Documentation was comprehensive along with a Tikiwiki manual for Dummies smarties.

- There forum support was good as well.

All in all. I was up with TikiWiki in no time…

To my surprise, it looked more refined than Twiki, the UI was more intuitive, not cluttered. Finding and setting up information was easy.

Finally one last thing! The email notifications. This took me a lot of time.

Considering that al other previous installs had explicitly asked for SMTP settings, I was expecting similar. However it was only after a night out I realised that Tiki email notifications (for first time registrations for example) are dependent on php.ini.

Tiki relies on your xampp php.ini and sendmail/smtp.ini settings. It depends on mail() function inbuilt into PHP to work. Thus, if your settings in the above two files are correct, then tiki email notifications should work seamlessly. But first I had to be sure that my above configuration is right. For that I googled for a php email script.

Found one:

<?php
$to = “recipient@example.com”;
$subject = “Hi!”;
$body = “Hi,\n\nHow are you?”;
if (mail($to, $subject, $body)) {
echo(“<p>Message successfully sent!</p>”);
} else {
echo(“<p>Message delivery failed…</p>”);
}
?>

Copied it into htdocs and tried it using my browser. Showed ‘Message successfully sent’ but no mail

Had to tweak xampp/sendmail/smtp.ini to enable debug.log to figure out that the authentication was failing. Alright, that was fixed and voila the script worked and so did the Twiki Email notificaions.

Yahoo!