Re: [school-discuss] Metadot and MIT

[Cameron Miller <cdmiller@adams.edu>]

Haven't tried Metadot, mainly because I think mod_perl is a pain.  The 
project does appear to have lots of small and large users, middle school 
through large U's.

MySql is GPL licensed and freely available for download and use.  I find 
MySql every bit as good as Postgres for most uses, and a lot easier to 
set up and maintain than Postgres or Oracle.

A lot of the features you cite as not being available in Metadot 
apparently are, listed both at the cmsmatrix site and the Metadot 
feature page.

What is your suggestion for a CMS/portal doing all of the things you 
state Metadot lacks?

- cameron

Michael Dean wrote:
> if one wants to compare CMS/portals go to cmsmatrix.org.  I have some 
> problems with metadot, which I have looked at in detail for smaller 
> schools.  First, it is written in perl, which when it scales is very 
> slow.  Second, you need mysql or oracle to run it.  Fine for big 
> universities, who usually have Oracle, but if you want an open source 
> solution in your middleware as well as user applications not so fine.  
> Mysql also costs money, and is not a comparable (not as good) database 
> to either Oracle or postgresql.  second, it does not provide an audit 
> trail, no content approval, requires use of LDAP for authentication, 
> admin is not notified of problems, does not run under SSL, has no 
> commercial certification or documentation, no online help, does not 
> provide a structure for third party developer add-ins, no drag and drop 
> content, no undo, no advanced caching, no database replication, no 
> content staging, no affiliate tracking, no deployment as a package, no 
> way to trash old content, no web statistics, no web based translation 
> management, no workflow engine, no ftp support (even scp), is not WAI 
> compliant, no webdav support, not xhtml compliant, no cgi support, no 
> interface localization, not metadata support, is not multi-lingual, or 
> wiki aware.  no chat, no classifieds.  No contact management,  no data 
> entry, no database reports, no groupware, no guest book, no bug 
> reporting/help desk, no HTTP proxy, no surveys, no tests/quizzes.  The 
> keyword here is NO!
>
> One of schoolforge's affiliates was totally trashed last weekend by a 
> porn marketeer who placed 2500 links to porn sites in the comments 
> section of every artricle about school software.  This is why content 
> approval and moderation is so important in your software, especially in 
> grade schools.  Also, one would want to audit who does what on your 
> site, because trashing your site with porn in the US is a felony.
> Daniel Guermeur wrote:
>
> > Hello all,
> >
> > Just to announce that Metadot Portal Server software has a new 
> > university user: MIT.
> > Metadot is used by numerous schools and university including Berkeley, 
> > Pace and many orders for their intranet, extranet or organization 
> > websites. Metadot provides content management, collaboration and 
> > portal (like My Yahoo) functionality. The key differentiator is the 
> > extreme ease of use so that non technical users can manage the content 
> > without asking their busy IT person to help.
> >
> > See live sites at:
> > http://www.metadot.com/index.pl?id=2528
> >
> > Daniel
> > --
> > Daniel Guermeur - daniel@metadot.com
> > www.metadot.com - Be Part Of The Open Source Revolution