Originally posted by Mark Badolato:
ooooof... Vignette?? You may want to inform your company that even if they got Vignette for free, they still got reamed.
I've used Vignette. I hate Vignette with a passion. The software is utter crap. Documented features do not work, stuff literally just stops working for no reason (I'm dead serious...as a programmer I've been saying for years "code doesn't just stop working". It absolutley does with Vignette....I've seen it happen 4 times).
I've actually had Vignette's DATE_FORMAT command break on me...working fine, then one day just break. Patches that are released never work correctly, and often break things previously working.
The documentation is piss-poor. I've even cut and paste stuff right from the documentation into a template and gotten syntax errors for it.
As you can tell, I hate it. Your company would be far better off using a content system like Mason, which is Open Source. Vignette is far more trouble than it is worth.
Glad I do not have to use it any more. The company I worked for made a huge mistake in purchasing it. They finally agreed when a coworker and myself built a duplicate version of the site, on our desktop, using php and showed the boss the MASSIVE (like order of magnitude) speed increase...
Well I do agree that it is overpriced and they do sell you on a lot of features. But the big picture is that you really need MINIMALLY a 3-person team: DBA, Lead Template Developer & a Sys Admin that doubles as a template developer.
But I find your PHP comments comical. I mean, puhlease, do you really think PHP/My SQL is scaleable for hundreds of thousands of users (forget millions for now)? Can you honestly say that (if you had the resources) 5 people could simultaneously design and code templates and put them through a QA/workflow? And how about designing a CMA that dozens of editors (around the world who have limited or no HTML experience) could upload content and again put through a workflow where cetain users had different privileges, e.g., upload content, edit, launch? And how about the caching ability? You can cache (more efficiently that PHP) "libraries" and components and different parts of pages, e.g., nav bar, regularly used images, etc.
And how about the ability to place the sme article in different areas of a site? For instance, a guitar feature could also apply as a bass feature and could also be related to a keyboard review since there's a matching category/keyword pair?
Or how about the ability ro launch a new site in a week's time (keeping a similar design/layout) and being able to use an article that was already in the CMS and be able to populate content at the click of a button?
Don't get me wrong--this stuff doesn't happen overnight. It takes weeks--our months to get in place. I've done my share of Vignette-bashing too...as always there's 2 sides to every story.
And BTW, our sister company started building a CMS off of Mason, but it was just as expensive to build/support for!!!
I'm really surprised you didn't mention the other standards that have taken off: XML and Java. That's where things have been going for a while now. And guess what? XML, Java (JSP) and ASP are now compatible with Vignette...how do you like them apples?
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