FW: [cobalt-developers] RaQ replacements

["Matthew Nuzum" <cobalt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hey guys, I thought I'd finally chime into this thread.  I've wanted to
several times but the timing just hasn't been right.  Well...

Some of you know that for nearly the last two-and-a-half years, I've been
writing a commercial content management system.  It's very slick (IMHO ;-)
and has much of the same functionality as the cobalt raq servers.  We've
been using the ASP model where we host the servers and do all the
management; but one of our bigger customers has strongly urged us to release
an ISP/Enterprise edition that can be installed and managed by others.

Well, next week we'll be rolling out our first version of this package.
It's not exactly a beta, in that it's been in active use for almost 2 years,
but it is the first release of this nature. We're referring to it as a "beta
release" because the admin interfaces will likely need tweaking.

If anyone is interested in trying it out, I'd love to get your assistance.
Here is a brief list of features:
 * It's built on open source software, Linux (redhat 7.3), Apache, PHP,
PostgreSQL, Cyrus IMAP, Postfix and ProFTPd
* All users are managed through RDBMS, no system accounts for users at all.
* The site "look and feel" is managed using standard html editor tools such
as Dreamweaver, Front Page or vi.
* The site content is managed through a standard web browser such as IE 5,
Mozilla 1.0 or Netscape 6.
* It's easy to design beautiful sites that can be managed by an extreme
novice.
* It has some cool features such as easy to manage contact forms, staff
directories, photo galleries, shopping carts, e-learning and plenty more.
* Scalable.  You can have several web servers feeding off the same CMS so
you can do load balancing and etc.

If you're an ISP that primarily focuses on designing websites and hosting
them, this will be an awesome package for you as it's been built from the
ground up to cater to non-technical users who want to focus on design and
content, not code. If you're an organization in charge of managing a large
web site or a series of websites you can use roll based access controls to
delegate responsibility to others in your organization.

One feature that it does not have built in is the ability to host DNS.
Additionally, a feature that is planned but not yet implemented is the
ability to host standard html based websites like you do on the cobalt.
Currently everything resides in the CMS.  I'm sorry to say that it's not
exactly designed to run on a RAQ anymore (although it started out that way).
If you want to run it on a raq, you can't use the CMS's built in e-mail
support and you need to dedicate an IP address to the CMS.

If you'd like to see some examples, here's a few:
 * http://artracing.followers.net is a site about to go live at its own url
in the next day or two.  (they're still working on the content)

 * http://www.vitanovis.com is a large website that distributes content
management capabilities to dozens of users across the world.  (also, their
Polish site hosted in the CMS shows international support
http://www.vitanovis.pl - all major character sets are supported) 

 * http://www.tuscanimports.com (has lots of photo galleries in the products
area)

 * http://www.tabledesigns.com (has tons of sub-level pages)

 * http://bridesbythebeach.followers.net (another newly created site, this
contains a shopping cart and also will go live this week)

 * The main followers.net site shows some additional examples.

I'm the lead developer, not a marketing person, so if you're interested and
don't want all the marketing jargon, contact me directly,
(matt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx) or have your marketing people contact our marketing
people (info@xxxxxxxxxxxxx).

--
Matthew Nuzum
www.bearfruit.org
cobalt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx