Squiz CMS

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Description

Squiz CMS is "a revolutionary open source content management system with a highly usable interface which makes it easy to create, publish and maintain engaging websites."

Here is a demo video:

Only local images are allowed.

Below follows a detailed breakdown of the main features, as well as what Drupal equivalents exist for replicating functionality.

Features

The main features they emphasize are:

Drupal equivalents

Inline editing

The recently-released Aloha module integrates the Aloha editor in-line editor for Drupal 7. It focuses on nodes at the moment, but the release of this module has sparked lots of activity in its issue queue. You can see a demo of this functionality at http://inlineedit.venturacottage.com/

See also Why Inline Editing In Drupal Is Hard.

Image galleries

This functionality can largely be built using a combination of Views, Image fields, Lightbox, and so on. AFAIK we lack a really good "one-click download" kind of image gallery that combines all of this stuff into one. Could easily be a Feature, though.

Automatic updates

Drupal 7 supports manual updates of contributed modules and themes through the user interface. Core upgrades are not yet supported in core. Work is ongoing on this issue for Drupal 8 at http://drupal.org/node/606592.

Drush, however, does support upgrading both core and contributed projects, and could be automated through shell scripts. It's possible a nice UI wrapper around this
functionality could exist in contrib.

Workflow

Traditionally done with the Workflow module in D6 and below, a couple of sophisticated workflow management tools for Drupal 7 are available like Maestro and Workbench.

Other information

Company: Squiz Web Enterprise Management
License: GPL
Language: PHP
Download: http://cms.squizsuite.net/download/ (360MB virtual machine that requires VMWare (!) to run :P -- So I put the code in dropbox instead ;) http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160/Competitive%20Analsys/squiz.tar.gz)
Online Demo: N/A

Further details

Squiz also produce MySource Matrix
Source available: http://public-cvs.squiz.net
Easy Edit Suite: http://matrix.squizsuite.net/features/ees
Squiz bug tracker: http://bugs.matrix.squiz.net

Comments

Nice overview

fenstrat's picture

Thanks webchick, that's a nice overview of Squiz CMS.

http://cms.squizsuite.net/ has more including some great marketing material. Squiz, an Australian based company, has a very big presence in the Government and Tertiary sectors in Aus. They are well established and continue to win big contracts. Interesting that friend of mine who works for Squiz pointed me to this post, so it seems they closely monitor other CMS's.

Their new Squiz CMS (formerly Squiz Mini) is slick and coherent piece of gear. As I understand it they're investing in it with a goal to position it as a successor to their well established Matrix platform.

Is the new CMS Feature Reviews group an initiative of the Acquia's Office of the CTO? Looking forward to other write ups.

Nice

wfx's picture

Thanks for posting the overview. I'm amazed at how advanced the in-line editing tech is getting.

Great work webchick

kattekrab's picture

This is fantastic. Great to see this review of squizCMS

As Fenstrat noted, Squiz is big in Australia. Yesterday I heard 1 in 3 Australian Universities are using Squiz.

Donna Benjamin
Former Board Member Drupal Association (2012-2018)
@kattekrab

This is Awesome

BrilliantMkting's picture

I'm so glad you are looking into this,

Thought I've never used it before.. Squiz was one of the CMS I "discovered" and was looking to switch to, when I was a TOTAL beginner and didn't understand how to build anything in Drupal..

(I'm really glad I stuck with Drupal though!)

This sort of toe-to-toe features comparison of other CMSs can only help to make us better!

"One-Click" Image Galleries

BrilliantMkting's picture

After trying out nearly a dozen image gallery modules (and most of them have not been ported to D7 yet), the best and easiest one I've found is Galleria

Although it can't be embedded in body content by a Wysiwyg (as far as I know), it uses only a single multi-value image field and is extremely easy to set up.

Perhaps it could use some more attention to make that possible? As well as a few free themes. Perhaps a "Gallery input filter" of some sort??

I see embedded galleries like that on so many Top-1000 web sites these days, especially news sites, It would be really awesome if Drupal could do that too!

P.S. Great to see an alpha version of the Aloha editor as well! I've been waiting a long time for that.. :)

I had to use Squiz CMS for

thomasmurphy's picture

I had to use Squiz CMS for about a year and a half and found it to be utterly awful.