Mailbag: ocPortal
During the past couple months I've had a number of email exchanges from Chris and Allen regarding their PHP based CMS, ocPortal. Their company recently relaunched ocPortal under an open source license in hopes of growing their user base. Both gentleman are very enthusiastic about ocPortal and have a strong desire to see more community involvement with their CMS.
In one of those emails, Chris had something to say about ocPortal's move to open source.
I've been following you on Twitter for a while and it was good to see you commenting on my blog post recently. I'd like to see if we can work with you to get some more ocPortal coverage on CMS report - we've got a lot to say and offer, and everyone who comments on our product gives really glowing reviews. I really want to get our project out of the obscurity it's always suffered; it's always a downer to read about things other groups do if we've done it already and not had news of it leave our community. From my personal perspective I feel we should really be up with the most popular CMS's, as we are ahead of them in about every category except community size. We started out commercial but are now OSS - I think in our initial years people weren't motivated to advocate us much because of that.
In a few other emails from Chris, he also discussed some of the frustrations with getting open source ocPortal some attention while the IT media is often focused on the bigger open source projects. How does a small project compete against the bigger CMS projects such as Drupal, Joomla!, and Wordpress? I don't know the answer to that question, but I do know ocPortal deserves a chance.
In the coming months we'll focus on ocPortal for some of our stories. The next time our CMS Focus page gets a refresh, you can expect ocPortal to be in our Top 30 list. That also means you can expect a CMS or two that we're less enthusiastic about off the list.
About this CMS Enthusiast
Bryan Ruby is the owner and editor for CMS Report. He founded CMSReport.com in 2006 on the belief that information technologists, website owners, and web developers desired visiting sites where they could learn about content management systems without the sales pitch. Outside of his late night blogging hours, he is the Information Technology Officer for a field office in the federal government.
Comments
#1 Hi
Hi everyone,
I'm Chris, the lead developer for ocPortal. We'd love to see some CMS report readers' comments on ocPortal, as Bryan says we're really looking to work with people to get the system as good as it can be.
For those who haven't checked us out, we're a bit different from other CMS's. ocPortal is a lot bigger, with things like galleries and eCommerce built-in (you can uninstall them, but they come by default). We aspire to be like the Apple of the CMS world, providing great integration. A good example is our search engine - because we have everything built towards a single vision, the search engine works across everything- from forums, to galleries, to pages. With most CMS's things like galleries would be a 3rd-party addon, and things like search would be another 3rd-party addon, and chances are you need to be a programmer to make all the bits work smoothly together. We try and make everything fit well from the start. We're also big on flexibility, and try to make sure everything can be altered by non-programmers - one random example: we have ways of showing parts of page layouts only to different usergroups. This kind of thing is possible because everything is built in flexible layers, and you can do so much without having to touch any PHP code.
Another difference is we're a company (self-funded and passionate though) and pick up responsibility for making things work right. We don't just leave bugs in a bug tracker, and we don't forget about documentation.
I hope that didn't sound to much like an advert, as Bryan says we're passionate about what we do, and we feel our approach really gives our product some significant advantages. What really keeps me going is making it so non-programmers can do what usually programmers would have to. Sometimes people expect a lot, and struggle with some of our advanced features - but also I know that with every other CMS I've seen, being a programmer to solve the same things is a prerequisite.
p.s. Thanks for posting this Bryan :).