CMS on FreeBSD

[Scott I. Remick]

I'm thinking about setting up a FreeBSD-based CMS/intranet and wanted to
know what other people were doing.

I have a tiny bit of experience with PHP-Nuke because my webhost uses it.
Although I have no real complaints about it, I am not wedded to it.

PHP-Nuke is in ports and was recently upgraded to 6.9 after stagnating at
6.0 for a long time. This makes me concerned that if I invested in it, and
the need for an update came, I might be SOL for a while due to lack of a
maintainer. As it is right now, it is marked FORBIDDEN due to a
vulnerability with versions below 7.1.

Also, there seems to be a lot of hatred towards PHP-Nuke. I don't claim to
understand it, but I can accept they might know something I don't. I do
know that PHP is rather easy for me to work with, as I've tweaked many
pages on my hosted site. I am also not turned away by the fact that
PHP-Nuke depends on MySQL as I have used it with Bugzilla and it doesn't
scare me.

Looking at other options, there comes Postnuke. Seems a pretty-popular
close-relation to PHP-Nuke, however the version in ports seems 2+ years
old. So there is the maintainership issue again. And a lot of people hate
BOTH *Nukes, for perhaps good reasons I don't totally grasp, so there's
that too.

Diverging a bit, I noticed Drupal. Currently in ports but broken.

Most promising seems Plone, which is based upon Zope. But it seems to be
tremendously different from *nuke. The ports version is current and appears
to work, but poking around the Plone site I wasn't able to get a feel for
whether it truly can provide all the stuff I'm looking for. These are
things such as:

- Discussion forums
- 3rd-party themes (I'm not looking to develop my own themes... I'm looking
to get this up fast. Instead I'm looking for an established community of
Plone-theme creators who like to create custom themes available for
download, so I can pick one that appeals to me)
- Polls
- a variety of other modules/blocks (strength of the *nukes, but couldn't
find a similar following for Plone).

I'm also concerned about Plone using its own webserver. I feel very good
using Apache as I've a lot of experience with it, and I like the idea of
delegating components to groups with that strength. I also don't know
Python, but could try and learn if Plone was worth it.

This would be for an intranet site for about 100 employees. Looking to
replace the mass-mailed MS Word "newsletter", as well as provide a place to
centrally discuss topics without having to try and hold meetings (and
leaving things unaddressed because you're unable to pull a meeting
together), give people a "classifieds" board, etc.

What are other people doing for CMS on FreeBSD? Just how different is Plone
from the *Nukes? Are there fundamental differences I need to understand?
Can I do everything I want to with Plone without having to become a Python
expert, code my own modules, etc?