ion Content Management System Files

ION-CMS. java open source content management, ver. 0.8.1_06

2003/07/23

First of all: Thank you for your interest on ION-CMS. You'll experience a modern designed, framework based java open source content management system. ION-CMS is running out of the box, you won't need any software to run the system that you haven't already on your system as a java interested user. This means: The Jakarta Tomcat 4.1.24 servlet engine is integrated as Light Edition. This edition needs a installed java sdk, if you haven't got this already you may download it at http://java.sun.com/j2se/ (latest stable release is 1.4.2). You find detailed information on running tomcat in the Running.txt inside the tomcat folder of the archive.

For the start of the ION-CMS all you'll have to do is extracting the archive and running the start.sh (Unix) or start.bat (Windows). After a few moments you should be able to see the webapps under:

http://localhost:9001/backoffice : Generate content
http://localhost:9001/admin-ion  : For development tests and low level admin tasks
http://localhost:9001/           : For the content management maintained site

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Personal Roadmap for current development:

Reason for my affords on ION-CMS-Development are, that I was pretty impressed by this accurately designed application. It integrates many best-practice open source frameworks and because of this comes itself as a lightweight but fully featured content management system. But I also found some drawbacks: The community was very quite (This is improving right now), the project was pretty much based on the french language and documentation isn't a strength of the project. 

Documentation: 
The application is nearly self explanatory, because it comes with a fully featured database driven demo website (sonepar). Anyway it is necessary to create documentation for developers as well as for users. The ion-cms.org domain is registered for coming affords in documenting the application and providing service for its community. The domain currently redirects to the projects homepage on SourceForge, that will be relaunched soon and then won't be any longer a static export of a ION-CMS powered site, but be dynamically maintained on an ION-CMS-Server. Hopefully this will help to keep the site more up-to-date.

Localization: 
This release is the first that comes nearly completely localized. To let this happen was possible by the affords of Joachim Friedrich. He localized the JSPs of the backoffice and ion low level admin webapps with ResourceBundles. These two webapps are now available in English, French and German language, plus localizations to other languages will be easy to achieve. Please contribute if you are localizing for your native language!!! 

Upcoming Development:
Since I (Jan Prill) am kind of newbie myself to the ION-CMS I'm not fully integrated in the core development team by now. Because of that it is naturally possible, that the core development team will use Joachims and mine contributions in another way by redesigning something. Anyway I'm sure, that our joined affords will lead to one of the leading java open source content management systems. Let's push things forward! My personal short term roadmap will be:

ver. 0.8.1 - 0.8.2 : Fix bugs that may be caused by the localization and localize some things that are deeper in the system (localization is work in progress)

ver. 0.8.3 - 0.8.4 : Integrate latest versions of the used frameworks (e. g. update Jakarta Struts 1.0 to 1.1 release) and provide the possibility to deploy the application on a already available servlet engine.

Regards
Jan Prill