dotCMS Struggle

We've had a helluva struggle these past two weeks with dotCMS. For anyone that doesn't know what dotCMS is here is a nice little quote from there site.

dotCMS is an enterprise-level open source Java Web Content Management System (CMS). dotCMS delivers custom managed content to internet, intranet, mobile and other digital channels.

What they really mean is that dotCMS is still buggy. They have excellent support, but damn do we get attacked by a lot of random weird things occurring. I don't feel confident in their product and I really don't understand the file structure, deployment, or db schema. I'm not really a noob to CMSs - I've been working with Mambo, Joomla, WordPress, and custom ASP engines for over 6 years. It boggles my mind sometimes at the things dotCMS does - of course this could be my prejudice against Java. Don't even get me started.

• Incorrect Languages displaying on sites.

For instance, we had French Sidebars, English Headers, and Czech Body Containers all on the same page - talk about a headache.

• Host Changing its aliases

After 1 restart of tomcat, we had our Canadian site just drop its host header. We had to stop the host from running, and restart it which seemed to have fix our error.

• All forms Broken

This one was a PITA and by PITA I mean instant headache and massive feeling of impending doom. For whatever reason dotCMS now has 2 files called dotcms-marketing-properties or something to the like. Correction - dotmarketing-config.properties - that's where the massive headache started. For whatever reason captcha had been set to false one one file in the dotserver / dotcms / and then there is another in the web / inf / classes - dotmarketing-config.properties was the bane of me Thursday afternoon and Friday morning. 

• blog writing - what's that? Oh occasionally I do content development to help keep the SEO effort strong - forums, blogs, guest blogging, etc. Anything to keep the pages relevant so my head doesn't see the axe bearing down on me. I like my head attached for now
• homepage development finish - done -minus responsive / fluid features
• sub page design / development - not even started
• test bts my account in ie
• jquery map in ie8 - might be fixed
• ICP License with China Hosting
• China Hosting would be nice to have as well - suggestions welcome. I tried Blue Host, Host Gator (yuck), CD Networks, Rackspace, Sinohosting (still waiting for an answer), and of course GoDaddy (blahhhhh). No one seems to have a solution.

All on top of finding out - April is the due date for the new site. So I've started assembling it in dotCMS now from my HTML - I have to fix the images still and nothing is powered by velocity yet so here's to not killing all my time in the next few weeks.