Last updated by kattekrab on Mon, 2012-02-06 01:58
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:
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:
- inline WYSIWYG editing of page content; you can view any page in either "Preview" or "Edit" mode, and while in edit mode, click on a piece of text and start changing it in the browser.
This is definitely a slick little feature.
- built-in image galleries that can be inserted via WYSIWYG. You can choose whether to display them inline or pop open in a lightbox when clicked.
- several design templates (themes) to choose from out of the box
- "matrix" integration, another product of theirs that handles asset management/central distribution of content.
- built-in movie embedding
- Microsoft Word-esque track changes feature to figure out who did what to a document.
- automatic updating of "core" + "modules" on a schedule, akin to Windows Update (costs money, though)
- Time machine-esque visual versioning of content
- workflow tools
- caching and statistics graphs about website performance.
- a contextual help system that can give you a set of documentation about the task you're trying to achieve
- asset dependency tracking to make sure you don't delete things that are linked to by other pages.
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
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
Thanks for posting the overview. I'm amazed at how advanced the in-line editing tech is getting.
http://www.webbfx.net/
Great work webchick
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
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
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
I had to use Squiz CMS for about a year and a half and found it to be utterly awful.