PCWeek did a shoot-out of various CMS packages about six months ago. They created a "scoresheet" that might be useful. Unfortunately, Vignette stood by their policy of not allowing their software to reviewed, so it includes several other CMS packages. --Paul Patrick Phalen wrote:
[Shalabh Chaturvedi, on Wed, 08 Mar 2000]
:: I see a number of articles/sites about 'app servers' which don't mention Zope :: but mention others (including some mickey mouse servers I've never heard of). :: Eg: http://serverwatch.internet.com/appservers.html :: Why? Maybe Zope isn't talked about at all outside some circles? :: :: Altavista shows about 1058 pages linking to zope.org (compare php.net:12,000 ; :: apache.org:60,000). Why? :: :: If nobody does anything, this will take time to change. If we want this to :: change faster, all of us have to actively market Zope. This involves talking :: about in appropriate newsgrousps, putting up zope webpages, :: making Zope easier to learn and use, adding flashy features etc. :: All this can make a whole lot of difference.
Yesterday, I was asked, by a client, to put together a side-by-side comparison of Zope and Vignette for presentation to their IT managers. I did a lot of searching on the Web, but found only the one article from this list last October, which was written by someone with no experience with either of the two!
Frequently, people have asked for this sort of data on this list, but I've never seen a coherent answer. It's a FAQ.
Digital Creations might be able to help here, since they have direct experience with clients who have started with Vignette and switched to Zope. It would probably be "impolitic" for DC to author a public article taking Vignette to task, but certainly they could help an independent author with facts. If that article could then be published in DevShed or Web Development, or another visible place, it would give us all something to point to. Search engines would index it. The word would spread.
Vignette is often characterized as the "industrial strength" CMS, so it would seem a good target for a comparison, especially due to its high cost.