fabulous Sava
I've waited a long time for Sava. That isn't to say I was looking for Sava in particular, but rather for a stable, user- and development-friendly content management system for the Adobe ColdFusion environment. We do most of our website development in CF, and until Sava haven't had found what we would call the ideal CMS.
Sava was created by Blue River, who decided early in 2008 to release it under a free, open source license. It was released at Version 5.0, and its polished edges show that this is indeed a very mature product.
Perhaps Sava's most attractive feature is that it is easy to use. There's nothing I hate more than powerful software that's rendered useless by a steep learning curve or clumsy interface. I'd honestly pick usability over ease of development any day, because if a client can't use it we've wasted our time building it. Of the four Sava sites we have launched so far, not one has had anything but praise for the ease in which content can updated.
For all the CF developers out there, Sava has given us a dream of a foundation to build upon (and, based upon recent announcements, there is much more to come). The range of base functionality is extensive, and rather than bell-and-whistle extensions they've so far concentrated on making the basics well-rounded and solid. The administrative back-end is built using FuseBox, but the application is structured so that Model-Glue, ColdBox or any other single page view methodology (including baked-at-home or ad hoc) can slip easily into place.
I'll be talking a lot more about Sava in the coming months, including the wide range of plugins we plan to build for it, so for now suffice it to say that ColdFusion community has found itself a golden child.
To see for yourself, visit the Sava website.
