

Zotonic...rethinks the CMS with Erlang - ksh2ycombinator
http://erlanginside.com/zotonic-destroys-wordpress-and-rethinks-the-cms-with-erlang-149
A talk at Erlang Factory with Marc Worrell, Lead Architect of Zotonic – a new Content Management System written entirely in Erlang!
======
jordanlev
Perhaps this "rethinks the CMS" from a performance perspective, but it
certainly doesn't rethink the CMS from the end-user point of view -- they
still need to manage content using an admin area that is different than the
front-end of the site (thus breaking their mental model of what the website is
and how it works).

If you want to see a CMS that rethinks the end-user interaction, take a look
at Concrete5 -- <http://www.concrete5.org/> (built in technically boring but
easy-to-deploy-on-cheap-hosts php), or Webvanta -- <http://www.webvanta.com/>
(closed source so not sure what it's built in).

I have found it much easier to train non-technical clients who don't already
have blogging/wordpress experience with Concrete5 than any other CMS I've used
in the past.

~~~
sandGorgon
this is something that I wish would change - not being completely tied to
MySQL. Concrete5 is tied to MySQL ...

Webvanta looks like Ruby (<http://www.webvanta.com/technology>), so should
work fine with PG

Not sure about Zotonic.

~~~
mzslater
fyi, Webvanta is built with Ruby on Rails, and a bunch of other stuff... It is
a designed as a SaaS system and uses a cluster of servers running various
things (nginx, clustered MySQL, and a few others). As noted above, there's
some more details on the technology we use at www.webvanta.com/technology.

------
leftnode
I love reading posts like this. As a long time PHPer, I've pretty much
exhausted my learning with the language. I rather enjoy it, and I'll probably
always develop in it, but this post makes me seriously want to consider
investigating Erlang.

I'm happy they've released it as Open Source
(<http://code.google.com/p/zotonic/downloads/list>) it looks like a great
project to get started with.

~~~
mhd
You might be interested in trying out Nitrogen[1] first. Zotonic builds on it,
but picks a lot of the tools for you, so you might be interested in the basic
approach first, especially if you're learning the language.

[1]: <http://nitrogenproject.com/>

~~~
bjnortier_hn
I would agree with that. If you want to learn Erlang, then I would also
recommend Nitrogen first. It's at a lower level, so you would probably be
exposed to more Erlang (as opposed to learning about Zotonic)

Or go even more basic...

~~~
mhd
More basic as in working straight from the Erlang REPl, sure. Web programming
is no way to learn a language, if you ask me. But I wouldn't go down much
further in the web stack if you're coming from a PHP background, as it's nice
to have something done quickly (And from my limited experiments with Nitrogen,
you soon get some pretty neat results).

------
k33n
I've been running this for a few months now and have been having a lot of fun
toying with it. The built in WebSocket stuff is really cool, and the template
language is easy.

------
roder
_To achieve this performance we made some rather big changes to Webmachine.
Basho will be looking into incorporating those changes into the mainstream
Webmachine code._

Having worked with Webmachine, I'm really excited to see these big changes -
does anyone know what they are?

~~~
acscherp
Altogether these optimizations make quite a big difference, removing over 1ms
from every request.

if you're interested you can clone zotonic's webmachine from deps/webmachine
in the zotonic hg repo.

we sent these changes to basho (justin sheehy) but up until now they never
took a look at it although they promised it. We're still hoping they include
the changes however.

~~~
Wok
Justin is just super busy. I understand that he didn't merge it yet, as our
delta is touching major parts of almost every file.

------
ajb
Neat ... bad name though. I keep reading it as Zoonotic - which is not
something they want to be associatied with
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoonotic>).

~~~
Wok
Actually Zotonic is called after isotonic. We also publish the CSS framework
Atatonic. Keeping our names similar.

Besides that, Erlang has some history to name projects after diseases. For
example Mnesia, the build-in database, which was called Amnesia before general
release.

