CMS choices for multitenant ecommerce application in Java

I need help choosing a CMS product to suit an e-commerce application with some complex unique features. I'm consideri开发者_Python百科ng using an existing CMS because I don't have the budget to build my own versions of:

• copy editor
• page layout tools
• site map editor (optional)

I'd considered Spring.MVC and JBoss Seam as framework alternatives and JSP/JSTL and Facelets/JSF as view technologies before realising the CMS may drive this choice.

Since there are six customers to start with I was very keen on a multi-tenant architecture with branding applied to each tenants pages.

I see two architectural alternatives:

• Build a bespoke multitenant site based directly on a web framework and "pull in" content via JCR.
• Deploy a multi-tenant CMS and somehow add the unique functions.

The "unique functions" are an interactive designer to build exactly the product you want. Once built the product is added to your cart and there is then the normal payment and account set-up functions to consider. All still within a multi-tenant situation.

I am quite happy for the content editing functions to sit in a separate web app it would be sufficient for me to operate this on behalf of the six customers, but ideally they would also have access. There is no need for this to be branded at all.

Any suggestions?

If you are planning to develop custom functional requirements on top a cms, then I would recommend liferay portal. It's an open source portal comes with built in cms. It also comes with shopping cart portlets and many more built in portlets and themes. It can provide you a multi tenancy solution with strong user/role based permissioning mechanism. It can integrate with active directory and you can configure single sign on solutions easily. You can develop custom requirements as JSR168 or JSR286 compliant portlets and deploy them to liferay portal. Also you will have options to extend/customise liferay functionalities via hooks and extension environment capabilities.

Take a look at dotCMS, an open source CMS built on top of Liferay. It is a flexible java solution that makes running multiple sites within a single instance easy.

Sites can share content, assets and templates, or not share anything depending on how you set them up.

Users can have access to manage one site or many sites - their views into the management tool are limited by their permissions (as you'd expect).

Again, I am biased, but this is exactly the problem that dotCMS was designed to solve.