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Research Paper
Beyond Code: Content Management and the Open Source Development Portal (Position Paper) by T. J. Halloran William L. Scherlis and Justin R. Erenkrantz.
Content Management System (CMS) is central interface that allows to manage web site contents. These systems provide manual or automated procedures to manage workflow in a collaborative environment. Main advantage of CMS is avoid the hand coding. In content management system user not required to create a qualify source code they can add the contents to the system directly through a web browser. Using CMS multiple users can work together in environment to develop a single website or a web based system.
Open source project collaboration web portals are the developers of most open source software. Widely used open source collaboration tools have evolved Concurrent Versions System (CVS - client server free software revision control system). CVS (Concurrent Versions System) specifically developed for source code control, has really only provided an expedient stop-gap solution for CMS functionality. Use of a Content Management System (CMS) be-yond simply storing the web site’s contents alongside the project’s code within CVS is rare. However open source systems are not essentially alike, therefore developing a Content Management System with compatible for all systems will not be successful.
According to the research paper on Beyond code; Content Management And The Open Source Development Portal, here the historical side of the investment.
With 15 team, between Camegie Mellon University and the university of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, was discovered first development portal, that’s how to developed 160KSLOC of Java Software. They furtherance the open source tool and found them adequate – expect in one area, web content management. Within the one year they changed from managing content in RCS, to using CVS by expanding with some CGI/ PYTHON publishing script and finally to a side based on the plone CMS.
The second portal was established most recently, which supports connect within the High Dependability Computing program (HDCP) on an aggressive software development using the Real- Time specification for a NASA project.
As the experience of the open source community, here are some in formally surveyed several open source portals, abstracted from research paper.
SourceForge.net SourceForge.net is perhaps the best known-open source web portal in the world. Several successful and well-known open source projects are hosted on SourceForge.net (e.g., Python, JBoss, MySQL) but, due to no barrier to entry except use of an open source license, lots of “dead” projects “haunt” this site as well. SourceForge.net provides each project a directory in which to place its web content.
Mozilla.org Mozilla.org is the web portal for the development of the Mozilla web browser. The Mozilla.org web site has used and is still using CVS for management of site content not managed within other tools such as Bugzilla. An approach to general project documentation and web site content management has been un- der debate within the Mozilla project for a long time.
PHP The web portal for the development of PHP, a server- side cross-platform HTML embedded scripting language, allows a series of user contributed notes to be attached to the official documentation pages about the PHP system.
Apache Software Foundation The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is a highly decentralized community of developers supporting 17 major projects (many with sub-projects) , including the well-known HTTP Server and Jakarta projects.
In this research paper they identified what information are managed by an open source portal and explain about five notional content databases and typical tools support to databases, before explaining what role would a CMS fill in an open source development portal. Those are,
• Source Code : The project’s source code/versions/ logs (CVS).
• Bugs/Issues : Project defect/enhancement reports (Bugzilla, GNATS).
• Discussion : Mailing list/newsgroup archives (Mailman, Google Groups).
• Testing : Nightly build/regression results (Tinderbox, Mailman).
• Documentation : Documentation, process/workflow, marketing, community/developer information (CVS).
Then research paper highlight that the filled gap is in the Documentation database area therefore CMS can provide the most immediate utility to an open source portal. Other four database/content areas have had specialized tools evolve to support them. The researchers in the paper ambitious that CMS than CVS alone provides a better overall portal solution and will provide long-term benefits in the following areas,
• Information/context awareness : Restore awareness in project activity after having been offline.
• Process support : Implementation work flow without burden to the developer.
• Individual process support : Individual developers awareness in synchronizing tasks with other developers.
• Use of models: Use of models: Open source engineering practices focus around code.
The researchers notion that CMS is broad and inclusive. It has range from large high-end enterprise systems to low-end systems. At the low-end, Wiki allows web page visitors to directly edit page content within their web browser. There are more than 70 active open source Wiki projects. The various Wiki alternatives support varying degrees of CMS functionality. They find outs some requirement, based on their experienced which is considered to help ensure successful adoption of any CMS as part of an open source development portal, such as, Fit-in with established portal tools: CMS role is not to replace the project’s mailing lists or to do away with bug/issue tracking tools. In addition, the CMS must allow incremental transition from existing practice on the portal.
Facilitate contributions: The CMS should allow a project to lower the barrier to entry for someone wanting to contribute. Some examples include allowing web page editing directly within a browser (e.g., Wiki or Mozilla’s Doctor) even in a limited and controlled manner (e.g., PHP’s user contributed notes).
Support workflow: The CMS should add an infrastructure for workflow within an open source portal. This capability could be used to facilitate further integration between the portals notional databases/content types.
Facilitate content organization and models: The CMS should assist users with document/content organization.
Archiving and metrics: The CMS should remember all committed, as well as rejected, changes to the site. CMS use of the same system used to control source code would help to simplify site maintenance (e.g., CVS, Subversion).