What is the Difference between 'SPACE': Cloud platform & 'OpenSource platforms'?
By Robert D. - Web Consultant. Expert Wordpress and Joomla Developer
Question | Competition | Earthgrid SPACE Content Management System |
| What does it cost? | "Free" with hosting which costs $65-$125 per year, depending on features | Prices start as low as $36/mo or $360/year |
| Can non-technical users edit sites created with the system? | YES, but with some limitations (Articles are easy to edit in place, but menus & other features are hard to find) | YES, just go to your website, login, find any item you want to edit and open it. |
| Can non-technical users customize sites? | YES, by choosing from a variety of ready-made templates. Some templates are free, others are available for a fee from third party vendors. | YES, by choosing from ready-made templates and using what to customize (choices are background images, colors, fonts) from a drop-down menu. |
| Can professionals with more training customize sites at a deeper level? | Yes, but it's hard to get to the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and other controls. The common complaint about these systems is that the tools provided feel “wooden” or stiff; they don’t always do what you want without a lot of wrestling. You must Save and exit to Preview mode to see what you’ve really accomplished. | YES, the advanced tools allow you to control every aspect of every template and even make your own templates, down to the finest level of detail. |
| Are the tools available to the professional easy to work with? | The controls tend to be scattered around the site. These are sometimes available in the CPanel and other ones must be downloaded by FTP, edited and replaced on the site. You have to know CSS to work with them. Some structures are written in PHP and some features must be accessed within the PHP documents. | The Advanced Editing Tools give the professional (or brave amateur) access to the Style and Layout of the site Template with only minimal knowledge of CSS or Javascript required. It’s usually possible to see the results of your editing in real time. If you want to add custom code (HTML, Javascript, CSS, etc.) it can be put into Snippets and embedded wherever it is needed. |
| After a long time away from a site is it easy to reacquaint with it? | NO. I've had to go back after a few years and edit sites I originally built myself, and I find the underlying structure and editing tools frustrating and illogical. Articles and sidebars are sometimes hard to find, and the overall structure is unnecessarily complex and roundabout. | YES, since you can access the various components and modules directly for editing, and global changes to the styling can be done in Layout and Styles. The more customization that’s been done the easier it is to find and edit. |
| What is the basic building block of the system? | The Article is the basic unit, then Menus, Pages, and Extensions. Pages are just Menu items that hold articles and other things. Articles, Menus and Extensions are accessed and edited separately in Libraries or lists. | Content Objects are the basic Earthgrid unit. Build as many as you want, add them to menus or hide them from the public. Articles and features can be copied or moved to other pages or to the same page. Pages can be easily duplicated. |
| Can the whole site be "edited in place"? | NO, only articles can be edited in place by a non-technical editor; menus, page order, and page structure can only be edited by logging into the control panel as an administrator and accessing the separate Libraries. | YES, articles and all other features live right on the pages where you find them and can be edited IN PLACE. |
| Can items from the menu be easily deleted, hidden, or moved? | YES, to change the Menu order you move pages around to where you want them in a list. (Unfortunately, this is tedious as you can only bump them one position up or down at a time, there’s no Drag’n’Drop) . Hiding the menu item hides the page. | YES, quite easily, as Menu items can point to any existing page or a new page, and items can be moved around just by dragging them. All items can be hidden or or made visible to visitors, separately from the page itself. |
| Can a menu item's name be changed? | YES, but only by finding the right menu in a list of Menus, accessing the menu you want, then opening the menu item. Also, changing the Name of the item changes the Title of the page. | YES, just open the menu item in place and change it. The page retains its original title. This is helpful if the full title is too long to be practical in the navigation bar. |
| Can the page a menu item points to be changed? | NO, because every page is a Menu item. Pages don’t exist until added to a Menu. While making your menu you must decide whether the page attached to it will hold an article or a list of blog entries, etc. You can change the type of page, what article or sidebar appears on it, and move the page to where you want it to appear in the menu. | YES, each menu item can be linked to anything within or outside the site. The pages with their particular contents exist independently. If the pages aren’t in the menu you can still get to them by using “Manage Pages” from the CONTROL PANEL menu. Once in the "Manage Pages" area, you can duplicate pages , reassign Layouts, and Publish selected or all pages with one click. |
| Can sidebars be edited easily? | YES and NO, Sidebars and other features are Extensions. Extensions may contain smaller sub-menus or short pieces of text that look like articles but are accessible only in the list of Extensions. They cannot be opened or edited from the page where they actually live; you have to know whether an item is an Extension or an article, and it an Extension, look for it by title. An Extension can appear on any page, but only the Extension itself contains the list of which pages it appears on. If you are very careful how you title everything you will be able to search the lists for the item you want to edit. But the title may be redundant, and if you choose to hide it, you will have a very hard time locating it when you come back a year later to edit it. | YES, all text and menus can all be edited in place. The template you choose has slots that are one, two or three columns wide. Where you place your text, picture, video or gallery determines how it appears, as a sidebar or main content. You can switch between templates for different layouts or add custom template pages laid out however you want, with slots for shared content (shows on all pages) or auxillary content (unique to each page). |
| Can you navigate the site while in EDIT mode? | NO, you must Save, leave the Editor and Preview the page in another window. | YES, all navigation (menus, buttons, links) work like normal yet everything can be opened for editing in place. |
| Open Source or Proprietary, and what is the difference? | Open Source, which means that a loose collective of volunteers and professionals have cobbled together a piece of software that must be uploaded to a server. Periodically the collective will issue updates that must also be uploaded to the servers where the system runs. | Proprietary, which means that the same engineers that created the software continue to maintain it and are constantly improving and adding features. Subscription fees paid by users fund the continuity of the software. |
| How are upgrades handled? | Depends on the hosting company; some will run the upgrades for you, others leave it up to the owners of the sites to find and upload the latest upgrades. | The creators of the system and tools upgrade them unobtrusively, without user intervention. |
| How often do upgrades come out? | Upgrades are available now and then as they become necessary (when hackers find a security hole, volunteer programmers try to patch it and distribute the patch). It’s useful to sign up for a newsletter that posts security updates so you know when a patch is critical. | Earthgrid engineers are always looking for ways to improve the system and keep it secure. New features and improvements to older features are constantly being tested and moved into general use. You are always using the best and most recent version. |
| Are sites built in this system easily hacked? | YES, because the underlying code is available to be edited by anybody, and the architecture is porous. There are multiple vulnerabilities already known, and more are discovered every month. Note: I've had all my Joomla! sites hijacked at once by Turkish street-kid hackers - this is true, not science fiction! Once uploaded and installed, the Upgrade stopped the hacking, but all content had to be restored from backups. Harrowing and time-consuming. | NO. In five years none of our hundreds of sites have been hacked. The original architecture of the system was designed with security as the highest priority. |
| Will these sites go down for any reasons other than hacking? | YES. If your site lives on just one server, when that server goes down, your site goes down. Sometimes hosting companies move your site to a different server or change your password without notice, making it hard to get to, but it remains visible. It may go down for routine maintenance for a few hours on a Sunday morning periodically. When a site’s hosting expires, the site will be removed until the contract is paid or renewed. It can be restored upon bringing the account up to date, IF it is still within a few weeks of the expiration date. After a certain period, the site becomes unrecoverable. | NO. The contents of your site are stored redundantly across five data centers (each containing dozens of dedicated servers) thousands of miles apart. If one goes down, the others can still deliver your content. The advanced tools go off-line for a few hours, early on a Sunday morning, about once every three months for routine maintenance and upgrades. The sites themselves are always available if the account is kept current. If a subscription runs out and is not renewed, the site gets hidden, but all contents are still available as soon as the subscription is renewed. |
| Can hacking be prevented? | Yes, hacking can be avoided if all security patches and upgrades are installed promptly. | YES, see above. |
| Will upgrading the software change the way the site works? | YES. Sometimes an upgrade that closes a security hole will alter the behavior of a customization or make it “fall apart,” until a new work-around is found. | NO. All upgrades must allow "legacy" features to continue working as they did previously, even as new features are added. |