CMS & frameworks evaluated

Welcome to cms-frameworks.evaluated.org.uk

A quick guide

The nav bar above takes you to standing pages that summarise what I’m doing and where I have got to. Most of the links on the right are to external resources I have found useful. To see my own blogs posts related to the choice of a cms, use the drop-down at the top of the sidebar.

A bit of background

I am a UK-based editor and publisher. I am building this site to log my progress towards a choice of content management system (cms), or application development framework, or both. I’m doing it publicly rather than privately in the hope that I might get useful comments on my findings.

I’m in the market for CMS software for several purposes:

• to use in my own publishing business as the basis of a magazine site
• to use in one or two specialised data-publishing offshoots of that site
• to use in another enterprise that will offer cheap-to-build and easy-to-maintain websites to small businesses in the UK.

There are scores, possibly hundreds, of free or cheap CM systems out there. Most are built in PHP, the most accessible server-side scripting language, and rely on a MySQL database - but some are based on Ruby, or Python, or ASP.NET, or JSP. Choosing systems to use is not easy: every system has its strong supporters, and its critics. Even the underlying technologies have their strong supporters and critics. Cool, calm assessments of the different options are rare. (Somehow, the internet seems to encourage assessments that are more extreme than cool and calm.)

I’m  doing two things here. First, I’m assembling, sifting and weighing the available evidence from other people’s experience of the systems, to narrow down the field. That part, in particular, is likely to be a bit messy. Secondly, I’ll be reporting what I find when I try out the systems I like the sound of. I’ll be attempting to assess the power, flexibility, reliability and ease of use of the systems I try.

This site of course is built using a CMS - of a kind. I have picked WordPress, which is perhaps the most widely used system for operating a blog. WordPress has been developed to the point where it is now capable of running quite elaborate sites, and must now be considered a CMS even if it wasn’t one at the start. For reasons that are explained elsewhere, it is extremely unlikely to be the system I adopt for my “serious” sites, but it works well enough for this kind of application. It seemed the obvious choice to get a site up quickly - interestingly, a conclusion also reached by this late 2007 feature from Macuser.

Chris Gill
Norton St Philip, near Bath, UK