6 ms·

For some context: October CMS, a popular PHP Content Management System (CMS), has switched from open source to a proprietary paid model [1]. Winter CMS is a for

For some context: October CMS, a popular PHP Content Management System (CMS), has switched from open source to a proprietary paid model [1]. Winter CMS is a fork of the October CMS codebase to continue development of the CMS as a open source project. The new pricing model for October CMS is cheap, but no longer open source: - $9 per project - $150 for unlimited projects For comparison, Craft CMS, a popular commercial CMS also written in PHP, charge $299 for a licence for a single project. [1] https://octobercms.com/blog/post/october-cms-moves-become-paid-platform https://octobercms.com/blog/post/october-cms-moves-become-pa...

shortformblog 5y ago
This characterization of Craft is incorrect. Single-user “solo” projects are free, which would make it less expensive than OctoberCMS. [1] Additionally, OctoberCMS charges $97 as an add-on for support for its projects, something that comes with the $299 pro charge for CraftCMS. It’s more agency projects that have that cost; additionally, Craft receives fees from paid plugins that have their own separate support infrastructure. I personally use Craft for my website and chose it over OctoberCMS, though I had given October a close look when I made the transition two and a half years ago. [1]: https://craftcms.com/pricing https://craftcms.com/pricing
floatingatoll 5y ago
[1] previously, though with no discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26859554 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26859554
- theluketowers 5y ago
  Also originally submitted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26939729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26939729
chalcolithic 5y ago
It boggles my mind that someone pays for a CMS. Given the abundance of free options what are they paying for?
- christoph 5y ago
  From experience most of the time it’s a smooth talking sales manager from a commercial CMS company going in and selling a dog to corporate IT with promises of security, scalability and “cost efficiency”. I’ve been on the delivery end of numerous contracts like this over the years. The early big red flag is when you as an organisation are asked to send multiple developers on £xk per day training courses out of your own pocket so they can become “certified”, with the promises of lucrative long term contracts. Ultimately this always ends badly in my experience.
- 1123581321 5y ago
  In the case of Craft, paying for a better starting point for the content model and editing experience we want to provide. It saves time, in other words.
- shoelessone 5y ago
  I'm assuming you're talking about CMS in this "space", which is to say likely used by small to medium sized companies. Others have spoken to that already. That said, just to make sure you're aware, some companies pay hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars (I don't know first hand about millions, but I know hundreds of thousands is easy and I'd easily guess million+ isn't unheard of) annually just in licensing for "enterprise" CMS.
  - chalcolithic 5y ago
    I can only assume that a lot of work by salespeople was performed in every single such case?
- bsder 5y ago
  Problems and support are somebody else's business. For example, I don't want to be IT support for my company's WordPress installation. I am willing to pay $100 per month so that I can tell the VP of Marketing "Please go talk to the nice people at <Wordpress Provider> about why the two buttons in that theme don't align to the same right margin. Tell them to send me an email if something needs analyzed on our side. KTHXBYE." I also don't want to have to navigate the blizzard of AWS required in order to implement something that won't fall over when 3 canaries and pigeon decide to bang on it--let alone if HN features it. I imagine that the CMS space is quite similar.
trinovantes 5y ago
What are some advantages of these CMS compared against other free CMS solutions like WordPress/Drupal?
- christoph 5y ago
  I’m not really answering your question here, but the best PHP CMS IMHO is Processwire, bar none, and I’ve used pretty much everything under the sun over the last 10+ years. Nothing else gets out the way and let’s you get on with the job in such an elegant way. I like their model as well, they essentially support their development through useful and elegant commercial plugins for things like caching, form builder, pro drafts, etc. The caching module is really worth every penny and then some. It’s got a beautifully simple API and templating system that really lets you tackle and manage projects how you want to tackle them. We’ve had production sites with thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of daily hits running off it for nearly a decade and had pretty much zero problems with it that I can remember. I’m confused why more people don’t use it. Sometimes I wonder if people like to make their lives difficult and use the latest shiny new thing just so they can use the latest shiny new thing. We’ve even utilised it in non traditional ways as well, due to its flexibility - for instance we developed a few games (UE4 and Unity) for clients where we set up and managed various game properties for objects, enemy behaviour, etc. that games could then easily pull in dynamically as JSON allowing a quick and easy way for non developers to play with underlying game variables while play testing with no real programming experience. The simple tree hierarchy system, supplemented with things like repeaters, standard fields and in built selector functionality really makes it easy for anybody to get a handle on it in under ten minutes and feel at ease. We’ve integrated it with horrendously bad client SSO systems with minimal effort as well, to speak of it’s somewhat fringe abilities. The community is great as well, no politics and very active. Disclosure: I’ve got no commercial interests in it, other than it’s made day to day life much easier and I’ll sing it’s praises at any opportunity.
  - cdubzzz 5y ago
    I had never heard of Processwire and it does look interesting. I have worked primarily in Drupal or just directly in either Symfony or Laravel. Drupal 8 has a pretty sophisticated cache API and reading through the ProCache module description it sounds pretty similar (except that it appears to lack cache tags?). Anyway, I certainly wouldn’t call Drupal or WordPress “the latest new thing” and in my experience at least Drupal does a solid job of getting out of your way as well.
tonyarkles 5y ago
Are you Luke? If so thanks for showing me that nifty British restaurant! We should grab a bite again once this whole pandemic thing is all over.
- theluketowers 5y ago
  Hey Tony! Not sure who vanilla-almond is, but I'm the Luke Towers that wrote the post and leads the Winter CMS project :) Definitely should grab a bite again, although unfortunately that restaurant has closed :( Hit me up on the HackRegina Slack some time!

shortformblog 5y ago

This characterization of Craft is incorrect. Single-user “solo” projects are free, which would make it less expensive than OctoberCMS. [1] Additionally, OctoberCMS charges $97 as an add-on for support for its projects, something that comes with the $299 pro charge for CraftCMS. It’s more agency projects that have that cost; additionally, Craft receives fees from paid plugins that have their own separate support infrastructure. I personally use Craft for my website and chose it over OctoberCMS, though I had given October a close look when I made the transition two and a half years ago. [1]: https://craftcms.com/pricing https://craftcms.com/pricing

floatingatoll 5y ago

[1] previously, though with no discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26859554 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26859554

theluketowers 5y ago
Also originally submitted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26939729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26939729

chalcolithic 5y ago

It boggles my mind that someone pays for a CMS. Given the abundance of free options what are they paying for?

christoph 5y ago
From experience most of the time it’s a smooth talking sales manager from a commercial CMS company going in and selling a dog to corporate IT with promises of security, scalability and “cost efficiency”. I’ve been on the delivery end of numerous contracts like this over the years. The early big red flag is when you as an organisation are asked to send multiple developers on £xk per day training courses out of your own pocket so they can become “certified”, with the promises of lucrative long term contracts. Ultimately this always ends badly in my experience.
1123581321 5y ago
In the case of Craft, paying for a better starting point for the content model and editing experience we want to provide. It saves time, in other words.
shoelessone 5y ago
I'm assuming you're talking about CMS in this "space", which is to say likely used by small to medium sized companies. Others have spoken to that already. That said, just to make sure you're aware, some companies pay hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars (I don't know first hand about millions, but I know hundreds of thousands is easy and I'd easily guess million+ isn't unheard of) annually just in licensing for "enterprise" CMS.
- chalcolithic 5y ago
  I can only assume that a lot of work by salespeople was performed in every single such case?
bsder 5y ago
Problems and support are somebody else's business. For example, I don't want to be IT support for my company's WordPress installation. I am willing to pay $100 per month so that I can tell the VP of Marketing "Please go talk to the nice people at <Wordpress Provider> about why the two buttons in that theme don't align to the same right margin. Tell them to send me an email if something needs analyzed on our side. KTHXBYE." I also don't want to have to navigate the blizzard of AWS required in order to implement something that won't fall over when 3 canaries and pigeon decide to bang on it--let alone if HN features it. I imagine that the CMS space is quite similar.

trinovantes 5y ago

What are some advantages of these CMS compared against other free CMS solutions like WordPress/Drupal?

christoph 5y ago
I’m not really answering your question here, but the best PHP CMS IMHO is Processwire, bar none, and I’ve used pretty much everything under the sun over the last 10+ years. Nothing else gets out the way and let’s you get on with the job in such an elegant way. I like their model as well, they essentially support their development through useful and elegant commercial plugins for things like caching, form builder, pro drafts, etc. The caching module is really worth every penny and then some. It’s got a beautifully simple API and templating system that really lets you tackle and manage projects how you want to tackle them. We’ve had production sites with thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of daily hits running off it for nearly a decade and had pretty much zero problems with it that I can remember. I’m confused why more people don’t use it. Sometimes I wonder if people like to make their lives difficult and use the latest shiny new thing just so they can use the latest shiny new thing. We’ve even utilised it in non traditional ways as well, due to its flexibility - for instance we developed a few games (UE4 and Unity) for clients where we set up and managed various game properties for objects, enemy behaviour, etc. that games could then easily pull in dynamically as JSON allowing a quick and easy way for non developers to play with underlying game variables while play testing with no real programming experience. The simple tree hierarchy system, supplemented with things like repeaters, standard fields and in built selector functionality really makes it easy for anybody to get a handle on it in under ten minutes and feel at ease. We’ve integrated it with horrendously bad client SSO systems with minimal effort as well, to speak of it’s somewhat fringe abilities. The community is great as well, no politics and very active. Disclosure: I’ve got no commercial interests in it, other than it’s made day to day life much easier and I’ll sing it’s praises at any opportunity.
- cdubzzz 5y ago
  I had never heard of Processwire and it does look interesting. I have worked primarily in Drupal or just directly in either Symfony or Laravel. Drupal 8 has a pretty sophisticated cache API and reading through the ProCache module description it sounds pretty similar (except that it appears to lack cache tags?). Anyway, I certainly wouldn’t call Drupal or WordPress “the latest new thing” and in my experience at least Drupal does a solid job of getting out of your way as well.

tonyarkles 5y ago

Are you Luke? If so thanks for showing me that nifty British restaurant! We should grab a bite again once this whole pandemic thing is all over.

theluketowers 5y ago
Hey Tony! Not sure who vanilla-almond is, but I'm the Luke Towers that wrote the post and leads the Winter CMS project :) Definitely should grab a bite again, although unfortunately that restaurant has closed :( Hit me up on the HackRegina Slack some time!