* Caravel, a browser-based, customizable and extensible CMS
How would you like a content management system that is completely browser-based, WYSIWYG, multi-platform, easy-to-use, flexible, powerful, customizable, and extensible as well as being open source software and free?
If that sounds like something you could use then today’s subject, Caravel, could be the CMS of your dreams.
The Caravel site claims it can be hosted on any reasonable hardware “running Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, AIX, BeOS, or whatever you happen to like … We’ve tested on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux,” say the developers. However, clicking on the “Quick Installation Guide” link at this page brings up the guide dated June 10, 2005 which reads: “As of right now, Caravel only supports *nix platforms. There is no reason why Caravel would not run on other platforms, but no one has yet taken the time to figure out how to configure everything to do this.” Even so, just those three platforms are enough for most organizations.
Anyway, to run Caravel you will need OpenLDAP 2.2.24 or later, Apache 1.3 or later, PHP 4.3.8 or later – Caravel’s authors note that: “php 5 support is experimental”, Pear:XML_HTMLSax 2.1.2 or later, and Pear:DB.
Optional but Caravel’s “highly suggested software” include PostgreSQL 7.4 or later, BerkeleyDB 4.3 or later as the back end for OpenLDAP, and the Curl file transfer program, and the JPEG and PNG image manipulation libraries.
That’s it for the server side. The client side just requires a current version Web browser.
Caravel provides a huge set of tools for Web site content building and management, including search tools, an RSS viewer, a hit counter, an e-mail feedback module, and even a clock. See the profile of Caravel at CMSmatrix.org.
Caravel was apparently designed for large, non-profit organizations and can be scaled to thousands of sites. In line with these goals, a Caravel co-op exists to drive development through a board structure.
Membership cost for an organization start at $250 per annum without voting rights to a full voting board membership at $10,000 per annum. As the membership page notes: “Any development desired by the co-ops not covered by membership fees can be spread across co-op members. One hundred members even paying a market rate for development ($100/hr.) have a member cost of $1/hour. Even a small number of co-op members will derive significant benefit from spreading development costs.”
I’m intrigued by this co-op approach for open source software. While there’s the obvious problem of the co-op not addressing the individual, specialized needs of some organizations the system will provide, in theory, well engineered solutions to common problems. This is an approach that could become central to large-scale open source application layer projects.
If you’re looking for powerful CMS Caravel should be on your list of potential solutions.
