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Marlida CMS overview

November 14, 2009 by vito

I've just come through of interesting German CMS named Marlida http://www.marlida.com/ , one of my friends had a setup and he let me log in and make some quick tests.

I should mention here that I was just checking Marlida for my previous projects and now I was studying it a bit more carefully, and I've found much issues in it upon that.

Seems that many users were spotting these issues and many of them moved to other CMSes because of these, there is a number of forums with negative responses for Marlida.

Here is the brief list of issues:

1. Language constants are inserted directly to the code.

2. Complete absence of templates. HTML layout is made directly in the code.

3. Complete absence of external style sheets, all styles are inserted directly to the code.

4. Much validation and layout errors in HTML code.

5. Multiple re-entry of duplicated PHP code (they consider that developers doesn't know how to use functions).

6. All table fields aren't indexed which may lead to major performance losses if users and posts number will grow.

7. All SQL queries aren't optimized which may lead to major performance losses if users and posts number will grow.

8. There is no alignment in the PHP code (they consider it the poor coding style which is used by beginner programmers).

9. Marlida license is commercial, so it's code is protected from any modification or upgrade, so it is updated rarely,
while there are much other CMSes which are licensed with GPL(free license) and updated weekly or montly (or sometimes daily for contributed modules and critical vulnerabilities) therefore.

10. There is only around dozen of modules for Marlida while modules are counted in thousands for other popular CMSes.

11. Marlida community is weak and there is no community support for Marlida code like it is at drupal.org or joomla.org .

12. All data like passwords aren't encrypted in DB, so site is open for any SQL injections.

13. Admin-end isn't protected by .htpasswd by default (it is just mentioned that it should be done in documentation, and the system isn't checking that any way).

14. And much others.

These issues lead to major complexity of the inner structure therefore much time is needed if some significant modifications, adding a module or template is needed.

There are much other CMSes like Drupal, Joomla and Typolight which are much more flexible, modular and powerful, so seems that users are moving to other CMSes now.

However I wouldn't be so sure about it as every big CMS had its childish age sometimes and if Marlida developers would take care of these issues, it would become a serious competitor to big CMSes as it is still quick, relatively easy to install (if you know what you are doing certainly, it's a bit hard to install it without knowing some bit of PHP and SQL) and looks nice.