Byrne Tony Byrne

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Which CMS does The Real Story Group Use?

3-Mar-2010

Tags: Web Content Management, Marketplace at Large, Open Source, Drupal, eZ publish, Joomla!, TYPO3

I get that question a lot, especially since one of our main services is called "CMS Watch."

The answer is, we use an open-source platform called "Midgard." We picked it nearly ten years ago, and it has held up fairly well. The leisurely development pace of the Midgard project ultimately led us to drop official research coverage of it within our WCM evaluation stream, in lieu of more vibrant PHP-based systems like Typo3, eZ Publish, Drupal, Joomla!, and the like. But by the same token we've welcomed not having to suffer through multiple upgrades!

Midgard has remained popular mostly in the Baltic region. We are one of the few sites west of Hamburg to use it (another is playbill.com).

One of the things we like about Midgard actually makes it rather unsuitable for many simpler publishing scenarios: it is highly object-oriented. This allows us to run multiple sites off largely a single codebase -- at the cost of quite user-unfriendly administrative and authoring facilities.

Also, Midgard is very much a development platform, and we have had to create a fair amount of custom code, especially to handle structured content. In that regard, our CMS experience probably resemble yours. As an industry we remain very far from plug-and-play content management technology for all but the simplest of websites.

    Excerpt from the TYPO3 Evaluation

    Web Content Management Report looks at... Page Generation in TYPO3

    "Natively, the product does not always output clean, friendly HTML. In particular, you may need to remove table-based markup..."
    (p. 554)

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