Website Launch April 21, 2011

Microstran Website launched

So here we are

After much debate, spanning way too long a time I decided to expend the effort to finish a company website (consultants are always too busy with other peoples projects to do their own). Along the way I discovered this wonderful CMS product by Magnolia. I had recently taken on the job, as part of my commitment to a non-profit organization, to help them create a website they could maintain. No time like volunteer time for seizing the opportunity to re-canvas the CMS landscape.

I've used other CMS components in the past, most noteably Documentum... most were large and complex. I wanted something smaller, tighter and well architected. Say what you want about the CMS's done in PHP, I realize they're the most popular but I can't help it, I'm just not a fan of that scripting language... I guess it comes from having to inherit and sort out several very poorly constructed (read spagetti code) PHP sites... So I chose a number of CMS's and did a formal evaluation and narrowed it down to two that were done in Java. Magnolia and Alfresco. Alfresco just left me feeling like I'd have to commit a month to getting sufficient knowledge to actually make any use of it... after a week I gave up. Magnolia has been something of a pleasant surprise. The documentation is reasonable and fairly well organized. The system itself is very easy to install and tweak, at least on a superficial css color, sizes, positions sort of fashion and the templates seem reasonably well thought out. In addition, it's proven easy to deploy the authored portion to remote servers and manage things from here. Ultimately one of my most important criteria for selection was that my client (the non-profit) does not have computer support staff and had to be comfortable with the final authoring product that I installed. I feel confident that the people who will be maintaining that site will be able to do it easily with Magnolia's product.  

So that's my plug for Magnolia as thanks for their open source community version. Now that this is easy... maybe I'll be able to keep up with things.