Open Source CMS with support for segmentation?

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Permalink Reply by Richard Sedley on March 26, 2009 at 12:08pm

Hi Chico

I'm afraid I don't have an exact solution for you yet (I've asked a few people I know and haven't heard back from all of them yet.)

But this is the best answer I've had so far (it's from one of our tech leads so is a bit techie):

To be honest, I’ve not looked in detail at any of the current crop of open source CMS packages, but this shouldn’t be a difficult requirement. I wouldn’t be too confident that they’d necessarily do it “out of the box” but it should be a simple customisation.

The best fit would be a CMS that supports templates which contain server side code, and that allows for more than one content placeholder per published page. It should then be fairly simple to put some code into the template that says “if CookieX equals ‘value’ then display only placehoder Y”. For a CMS that supports only one content placeholder per page, you could probably achieve the same thing if the content editors could be trusted to enter only valid XHTML, and to follow some basic rules about setting IDs onelements to mark which ones should be shown for a certain cookie value. You’d then need a bit more server-side code to filter out anythat didn’t have the right ID.
In fact, in a pinch, you could do it with a CMS supporting neither of these features, by using Javascript to control visibility client-side. (But the pages would be larger as all the content would be sent down)

I'll get back to you with a product if I can identify one.

Richard

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Permalink Reply by Richard Sedley on March 26, 2009 at 12:27pm

Just had another reply:

If they have Linux servers/ hosting have a look at Joomla

If they have windows have a look at Dotnetnuke (as long as they have a MS SQL server licensing)

Both have decent ecosystems of free and “pay for” modules and strong community support.

It might be worth checking out Drupal which has a lot of extra modules to extend (http://drupal.org/project/modules)

Sorry I'm sure you'd thought of these before hand as they are pretty well known CMSs.

R

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