How To Choose An Open Source CMS

An anonymous reader writes "Content management specialist Seth Gottlieb has written an easy to understand how-to on selecting an open source CMS. Gottlieb is also responsible for the whitepaper 'Content Management Problems and Open Source Solutions' which summarizes 15 open source projects and distinguishes between open source CMS and proprietary software selection."

Etomite

[BuR4N]

We have been using Etomite for a while now and are very happy with it.

Good points so far:

- Simple to setup
- Easy to develop templates for, our template (http://www.intellipool.se/ [intellipool.se] took a work day to put together.
- The back end is easy to use and provides nice editing features directly in the browser.

Drawback:

- If you are looking for something that can do "everything" and be extended left and right, Etomite is not for you.

www.etomite.org

Structure

[mwvdlee]

The easiest way to quickly filter CMS's is by looking at the navigation structure. Do you want a "tree" structure (like most corporate websites) or do you want a "module" (like slashdot, nuke and other community sites).

There are other choices that can quickly filter CMS's, but many of the choices have alternatives or can be hacked around. Only rarely will you find a CMS that can handle both navigation structures.

Too Many

[dkuntze]

I think the OpenSource CMS market is getting too flooded... Do we really need another PHP/MySQL CMS? I know some people who are developing a commercial CMS product. I think they are crazy, since there are PLENTY of free CMS packages out there. If there is not need for a full blown enterprise CMS, why would you pay for a proprietary "non-free" application? How about a list of Open Source Enterprise Content Management systems? That would defintely be a shorter list.

Drupal gets my vote

[Anonymous Coward]

There are a lot of good CMS platforms out there, but I am going with Drupal [slashdot.org] - it is the one that the FOUNDER of the web uses (Tim Berners-Lee). It is MUCH more than a 'blogging' software - it has many great pluggins, and Google appears to think it is #1 - they donated $49,500 to drupal [communicateordie.com] - which is more than any other CMS got.

Re:CMSes are going the way of the dodo..

[saltydogdesign]

Sounds like you are describing a sort of crippled Dreamweaver, which is what all this CMS business was designed to escape. At the risk of causing all the anti-Ajax people to have an aneurism, I think that when CMS's start adopting Ajax techniques, their usability quotient will go up pretty sharply. To my mind this is the sort of application for which Ajax is made -- largely internal functions in which you have some control or at least knowledge of the hardware being used. Moreover, updates and changes can be made in one place, rather than maintaining 50 copies of an app.

Re:Hm, an OpenSource CMS?

[netkid91]

My favorite site in the world. They offer demos of almost every good F/OSS CMS there is. It's there that I played around with Drupal and fell in love it. This link is a great thing, and if you are looking for a CMS I'd suggest you check it out.

CMS Made Simple

[lemkepf]

I've been using CMS Made Simple [cmsmadesimple.org] for a while. It works very well and is very easy to use. My "not at all computer savy" clients love it and it's worked well for me too. Simple installation, simple page creation, simple menus, simple templating... yea, it's just simple. :)

PHPwcms is excellent

[rtilghman]

I went through this process at the beginning of last year. Downloaded, set-up, and tested multiple CMS products. I ended up going with PHPwcms given its simplicity and user friendly design, its amongthe best solutions out there for standard content sites. CMSMadeSimple was another similar and good solution.

That said what CMS you choose - open source or otherwise - is entirely predicated on the project. Got a community site? Take a look at Drupal or Mambo, maybe something smaller if it works. Need a small content site? Check out PHPwcms, CMS Made Simple, or LucidCMS. Someone else mentioned Etomite, but Etomite is quirky, visually unsophisticated (the admin tool looks a little garbagy), and lacks some of the flexibility provided by other tools.

PHPwcms' management of content as small objects that can be easily called or reused in secondary locations (allowing you to have a repository of "global" content was a huge argument in favor of it for my project. Its only major weakness is the lack of robust entitlement capabilities... its been on the books for a year, but no one has developed it further... you can only set-up an all Admins or vry weak content administrators (who can't edit content).

-rt

Re:Non open-source CMS no good ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Good commercial CMSs exist but I don't consider your product a good CMS...

It is slow and you can't have 10 editors working at the same time without melting the server...

Also the JSP is put inside the templates... Your templates can kill the server, wow!

Next product please !

Re:Best CMS

[TheRaven64]

I wrote my own simple CMS that generates static files. There is a script that takes a file and uses its filename (or an optional command line argument) as the title and the contents as an article body (it assumes valid HTML, but it would be relatively easy to pop an OpenDocument->XHTML converter in the loop). These articles are inserted into an SQLite DB (with some meta-data), and every hour a cron job runs and outputs static pages. It would be trivially easy to add another cron job that iterates over each file in a directory, adds it to the DB and deletes it, which would give you what you seem to want. If you like, I can give you a copy of the source - it's a bit scruffy in places and has some hard-coded paths that shouldn't be there - either send me an email or post an email address here if you're interested. Or write your own - mine's only about 200 lines of php / Bourne shell scripts...

Re:Good multilingual support?

[jenkin sear]

OpenCMS (http://www.opencms.org/ [opencms.org] does what you describe- xhtml is extra work, tho, if you want to use in-place editing (the div's they autogenerate aren't xhtml as far as I can tell).

Not only does it have multilingual support, the workplace is pretty well localized (english, german, japanese, etc)

It is a java application, so if you want all this in php, you'll need to look elsewhere.

Re:Hm, an OpenSource CMS?

[sankacoder]

Try Krang! krang.sourceforge.net Krang is an Open Source web-publisher / content-management system designed for large-scale magazine-style websites. It is a 100% Perl application using Apache/mod_perl and MySQL, as well as numerous CPAN modules. Its easily extensible for a perl programmer and incredibly flexible. Setup is relatively simple and straight forward.

Re:Go Native among the Users

[solprovider]

Keeping everything simple for the end user should be every developers' top priority.

The most critical feature for our choice of a CMS was the interface for the content editors. My customer is a small company. The content editor was basically a secretary with few technical skills. I could program anything, but the editing interface had to be simple to use. (The second critical feature was the price. Part of the reason we won the contract was the budget did not include any commercial software.)

We chose Apache Lenya. It comes with two editors: Kupu and BitFlux, and there are several others that integrate easily. We chose to standardize on Kupu because the interface looks like MSWord. (It also has a "View Source" button so I can fix whatever the editor breaks.) There were a few support calls in the first month, but a one page cheat sheet solved that. A new editor took over, and the only support call was for a copy of the cheat sheet.