Zotonic: A Modern CMS Written in Erlang | Hacker News Reader

Zotonic: A Modern CMS Written in Erlang

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37 pointsssclafani9 comments

One thing that's put me off Zotonic in the past is a lack of a "here are some sites built with Zotonic" list that I could find[1]. So I set out to try and find some:

- http://erlangcamp.com/

- http://verafin.com/

- http://www.timbenniks.nl/

(I get the impression none of those 3 are doing anything very sophisticated on the backend, but they are all nice and fast.)

Plus some blogs using the standard Zotonic layout, or similar:

- http://blog.astekk.se/

- http://www.garbett.org/

- http://michaelconnors.net/

[1] The lack of such a list isn't a bad thing about Zotonic per se, but it's a nice comforting thing to see what's possible when you're considering using it against the established CMSes or rolling your own with Django/Pinax or similar. My heart wants to use Erlang cos it's great fun to code in, but my head wants to know I won't end up recreating the wheel.

There are some comments about experiences using Zotonic in some of the previous HN submissions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2265765

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1534804

I've been closely following zotonic for more than a year and I can say that it's progress has been amazing since version 0.3.

There's a very active list where the creators are always helping out new participants.

There's also a FLOSS cookbook in the works.

It's very unique in the sense that instead of reinventing the wheel, it uses mostly off-the-shelf erlang libraries for it's core (webmachine, a forked version of nitrogen, mochiweb, erlydtl) and also because of the data model (for those who don't know Zotonic uses a EAV[1] model on top of postgresql[2]).

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity-attribute-value_model [2]http://zotonic.com/documentation/670/data-model

I have done EAV on top of MySQL, and it is either complex and scales poorly or you have unsearchable blobs. It looks like they are doing the blob route.

    other properties are serialized in a binary blob

EAV on top of SQL is re-inventing the wheel. Likely they would be much better of with MongoDB or some other DB that actually has some amount of support for EAV.

The reason that Wordpress and Drupal took off like wildfire is that PHP is basically a lowest-common-denominator language. Many PHP developers couldn't handle Erlang. Perhaps there's a use-case for this, but I'd much rather see a compelling CMS written in server-side Javascript.

I think the majority of PHP developers could handle Erlang. The core language is small, the syntax maybe at times quirky but it is quite clear, the documentation is good and the community is welcoming. There is perhaps some extra effort in starting a project but with rebar I don't think it's any more onerous than the hoop-jumping involved in using a PHP framework.

If there are any PHP developers reading this who have tried and failed to pickup Erlang I'd be interested to know what got in your way.

I think the question is why would they want to try Erlang. There isn't any compelling reason for them to, when most of what they(and most web developers) do is write CRUD apps.

I'm inclined to agree. Perhaps as expectations raise over time as to what a CRUD app should be capable of this situation will change.

Has anyone used Zotonic for their sales site?

I've been doing the merry go round with Django CMS's for a while now, and while feincms is great, there are a few aspects of my setup I'm not happy with (blog, mainly).

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