Sava ColdFusion Open Source CMS

Blue River Interactive Group has released a ColdFusion Open Source Content Management System (CMS) called Sava. This CMS could be a good free alternative to expensive proprietary systems like Paper-Thin and Hot Banana.

So far I have only downloaded their quick express demo which seems impressive featuring a great backend interface. It seems to allow multiple websites management, and generation of friendly URLS.

It looks very extensible from a ColdFusion perspective, but I will let you know more on the installation and setup as I play. In the mean time its worth taking a look yourself.

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Sep07

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  1. Anthony Hixon, Jr.'s Gravatar # Posted By Anthony Hixon, Jr.
    08/09/08 03:13

    This looks amazing! I still have my marketing folks using Contribute to edit my CF site and we're looking to redo the site soon so this might be just the thing. We are a non-profit community-based hospital as well so the price tag fits in the budget nicely. ;) I just wonder how much I can customize the code and how tied to their templates I have to be.

    I think I'll grab the express version and play with it as well.

  1. Glyn's Gravatar # Posted By Glyn
    08/09/08 15:47

    We are in exactly the same boat. We have always recommended Contribute to our clients as it complements our templates in DW. However recently our clients have needed an online system and the reason why i have been looking around.

    I can tell you that today I successfully integrated it with an existing site, customising the template was pretty easy, the client just needs to enter his new content as before it was not database driven!

    Problems/issue i have had so far...
    1) A few issues with the setup mainly because I needed to enable CreateObject(java) on a shared hosting environment.

    2) Too much white space. It seems to generate a LOT of white space, but with time i know i can reduce this considerably.

    3) It seems you can create lots of goodies via the admin but i found it easier to do it at code level so far.

  1. John Farrar's Gravatar # Posted By John Farrar
    08/09/08 17:14

    I sure would love to see what features people find most useful in a CMS, and most wanted.

  1. Glyn's Gravatar # Posted By Glyn
    08/09/08 19:01

    From my own perspective any CMS has to allow me to easily build upon it. One of the reasons I am not a fan of CMS systems and Frameworks is because I find them in one way or another restrictive. The same is true for this CMS but its something I can work around.

    My customers would tell you it's about being easy to use. Joomla is a popular CMS systems because of how easy it is to use, not because its builds particularly good websites.

    Keys things for me have to be...
    easy of use for clients
    modular in design (so I can just add things)
    the capability to create multi tier menus (which lacks in most CMS systems)
    a good form builder
    MOST important to me: creation of real pages (not database driven or SES pages)

  1. Sam Nicholson's Gravatar # Posted By Sam Nicholson
    30/09/08 22:48

    I have used Sava and (from what I remember) I think that it is a good simple CMS for small, light-weight sites but I don't know how it would perform on a larger site which gets a lot of traffic.

  1. Glyn's Gravatar # Posted By Glyn
    01/10/08 12:20

    That is my reservations also. I did have major performance issues when I first run Sava on a shared hosting environment. I found this performance issue was because of a bug in the class loader of Java 6. Sava stated that at the moment in time it's not recommended for shared hosting environment until Sun fix the issue.

    However on my dedicated hosting Sava was very fast loading, I don't yet have a live site up and running, but the site I am working on now with Sava gets around 15GB per week so it will be interesting to see if i have any issues.

    I have seen some nice example of it in use e.g. http://www.biteclub.com/bc/index.cfm but again i am not sure use of its traffic.

    Does any have any experiences of Sava running on a large site?

  1. Sam Nicholson's Gravatar # Posted By Sam Nicholson
    01/10/08 12:34

    I think that with a good use of caching and maybe handling your subsites as separate Sava sites it would probably work reasonably well on a site with high traffic

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