CMSChoiceReport

Revision 1 as of 2011-02-08 15:26:02

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Ubuntu Translations Portal: CMS Choice

This report contains a brief analysis of the tools considered to build the Ubuntu Translations Portal.

When evaluating these, apart from the obvious fact that they should be Open Source, the main requirements they should satisfy for the Portal were the following:

  • Translations Portal Requirements

    • Do Not Reinvent The Weel - the Portal site should build upon an established Content Management System (CMS) and not from scratch.

    • Multilingual Support - the Portal should be able to provide multilingual content and be translatable by the Ubuntu community.

    • News and Documentation Support - the Portal should be able to host news and documentation content.

Summary

The following tools were evaluated. Of these, only Drupal and Wordpress were tested in staging sites (Translations Portal - Drupal) (Translations Portal - Wordpress), as it was seen early enough that Django CMS would require too much effort to set up and maintain and was discarded at that point.

  • Drupal - All-round, robust, best multilingual support

    • Smile :) Most complete solution, native multilingual support, good for hosting documentation, big and active community, already used on ubuntu.com

    • Sad :( News content not so good in terms of presentation of syndicated feeds, no Ubuntu Light theme available that satisfies the portal's needs.

  • Wordpress - Awesome, but not for multilingual sites

    • Smile :) Best option for a news site, most innovative platform, good internationalization support, big and active community, Ubuntu Light theme available.

    • Sad :( Less flexible for documentation, multilingual support only available with third party plugins, but not too well supported.

  • Django CMS - Most flexible, but too hard to maintain

    • Smile :) Most flexible solution, native multilingual support, can be integrated with Launchpad Translations, smaller community.

    • Sad :( Might probably require developer maintenance, theme would have to be designed from scratch.

After testing and consideration of the above points, the decision was to use Drupal as the CMS upon which to build the Ubuntu Translations Portal, as it was deemed as the best match for the original requirements, notably for multilingual support.