CMS on FreeBSD

[Steven N. Fettig]

Scott I. Remick wrote:

>I'm thinking about setting up a FreeBSD-based CMS/intranet and wanted to
>know what other people were doing.
>
>I have a tiny bit of experience with PHP-Nuke because my webhost uses it.
>Although I have no real complaints about it, I am not wedded to it.
>
><snip>
>Most promising seems Plone, which is based upon Zope. But it seems to be
>tremendously different from *nuke. The ports version is current and appears
>to work, but poking around the Plone site I wasn't able to get a feel for
>whether it truly can provide all the stuff I'm looking for. These are
>things such as:
>
>- Discussion forums
>- 3rd-party themes (I'm not looking to develop my own themes... I'm looking
>to get this up fast. Instead I'm looking for an established community of
>Plone-theme creators who like to create custom themes available for
>download, so I can pick one that appeals to me)
>- Polls
>- a variety of other modules/blocks (strength of the *nukes, but couldn't
>find a similar following for Plone).
>
><snip>
>
Although a little late, I thought you might want to consider MovableType 
(movabletype.org).  I originally built my own CMS using a bunch of asp 
and a MS Access mdb database - unfortunately, that really wedded me to a 
MS server and MS software - plus, adding articles/posts was an absolute 
pain.  This was also before CSS came en vogue and site upgrades were 
horribly complicated.  I then found *nuke and was happy for a while 
until I had a lot of problems with security and php hacks enabling 
others to 0wn my website... oh how I hated that message.  I did like the 
*nuke style, though, because there were so many plugins that I could do 
pretty much anything that I wanted. 
Then my philosophy on web design changed and I became a minimalist... 
*nuke was out.  A friend of mine finally convinced me to give 
MovableType a try about two years ago and I've been hooked since.  There 
are a lot of plugins available - although, I really don't use any, as I 
simply apply my CSS theme to different things that I wanted to *plug in* 
to my website.  So, I can't say how well some of the things you are 
looking for are supported.  I can say, though, that the code is 
extremely well written and I have never worried about or had anyone hack 
the site.  I'm sure anything is possible, but it is the most reliable 
and secure CMS I have run to date - and it is *really* simple to set up.

Steve Fettig