Competitive Analysis

Hey John/Dave,

Could you two get together and do a little competitve analysis on other CMS platforms (both commercial and free) so we can start scoping out the marketing site for the Tattoo release. If we're gonna get it out soon, we're gonna need a site. What do the "big boys" do?

Also, any other thoughts on where we should post the release other than the previously mentioned places?

Hey John/Dave,

Could you two get together and do a little competitve analysis on other CMS platforms (both commercial and free) so we can start scoping out the marketing site for the Tattoo release. If we're gonna get it out soon, we're gonna need a site. What do the "big boys" do?

Also, any other thoughts on where we should post the release other than the previously mentioned places?

Is the plan to announce it with this preview/test-release or the final 1.0 (or whatever)? Nifty marketing names are nice as long as they have meaning to real products, take a look at what Percussion does:
http://www.percussion.com/products/rhythmyx/index.htm
Feature data sheets, PDFS, are also very useful, and open-source projects can pull them off nicely (can't find their old PDF at the moment):
http://www.magnolia.info/en/community/about/features/content_admin.html

What did you have in mind Ryan, maybe a checklist of features for Tattoo versus other "popular" CMSs?

Honestly, I'm open to all suggestions. I just think we really need to understand what we're up against before battling it out for mindshare with them.

Well what we're up against at the moment would be other PHP CMSs, since currently Tattoo is not a static "baking" system, that is, it can't publish out files. This is a primary consideration for mid-tier sytems since it doesn't require a company to change their infrastructure. If they are publishing JSP pages, it is ok for them to use an ASP based Windows box that will template and push out these JSPs to their Tomcat servers, etc. But Tattoo is a "framework" in PHP so that has to be the goal for now. So the competition is Mambo primarily.

That Magnolia is very well done, and very well presented. If I were doing Java and JSP, I'd be very interested. And their screen shots are from a Mac system!

That Magnolia is very well done, and very well presented. If I were doing Java and JSP, I'd be very interested. And their screen shots are from a Mac system!

This response is the perfect reason for a system to offer publishing of pages. You would try that CMS if you were doing JSP, but since you're in a PHP environment, you can't or do not want to change. If Tattoo offered publishing, templating could be done (probably in something neutral like TAL or XSLT) so as to publish pages in whatever you want. But I'll save that for a feature request rant

Ummm...sorry, I have no idea what you are talking about. I'm just impressed with their site.

Sorry, I should have been a little clearer I guess. You said that the Magnolia stuff looks good and you'd be interested in it if you were doing JSP. So because it is a Java platform you can't use it. What I'm saying is that CMSs can be made to publish out pages, so that you could use any CMS you want and publish out pages in the language of your choice. Bricolage http://www.bricolage.cc is the only open source CMS I know of that offers publishing and it is always rated very highly be eweek: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1627959,00.asp
It's a complete nightmare to install and administer though.

Dave,

Have you tried the HTML export stuff? It's currently rudimentary, but it does build out a static version of the site as HTML files.

On a related note, here's some other "competitors" we might also consider in planning our marketing site:

http://www.symphony21.com/ (beta soon)

http://web.burza.hr/en/ (particularly, http://web.burza.hr/en/core.web/#content)

http://www.etomite.org/ (duh!)

http://www.mamboserver.com/

http://www.gaincms.com/ (in progress right now)

http://jetbox.streamedge.com/