My agenda

I’ve been playing with CM systems for years, and already have sites under development using several PHP systems that seem to me to merit serious consideration:

  • Joomla: one of the big names in open source CMS, the result of a fork from Mambo - regarded as very versatile, but quite complex and not super-well engineered; joint second, with CMSMS and behind Drupal, of Best PHP Based Open Source CMS award in the Packt awards 2008. The main site where I plan to play with this is www.sitesmiths.co.uk
  • CMS Made Simple: as the name suggests, majors on simplicity; joint second, with Joomla and behind Drupal, of Best PHP Based Open Source CMS award in the Packt awards 2008; also second Most Promising Open Source CMS; the lead developer has announced that he is now developing a framework, called Silk, that v2 will be based on.
  • MODx: Most Promising Open Source CMS in the Packt awards 2007; calls itself a content management framework rather than just a CMS
  • Typolight: second Most Promising Open Source CMS in the Packt awards 2007, alongside dotCMS (which is Java-based, and therefore not on my agenda)
  • SilverStripe: Most Promising Open Source CMS in the Packt awards 2008; produced and supported by an eponymous firm of web developers in New Zealand; they have also released the development framework called Sapphire that underlies the CMS

plus one site using that is ASP.NET-based

  • DotNetNuke.

To varying degrees I aim to evaluate all of these systems, and some others. On the list at present:

  • ExpressionEngine: a commercial product, although there is a slightly crippled free version; gets very good reviews from those who use it, and has the benefit of the good support that goes with a commercial product; I have bought a personal licence, and have installed it on one of my development sites, www.wheretoskiandsnowboard.com
  • Textpattern: people seem to talk about this as a rival to EE, so I’m taking a look; I have installed it at my basic business site, www.editors.co.uk.
  • Drupal, which is difficult to ignore – though I suspect I may cross this one off my list without actually playing with it, simply on the grounds of complexity
  • Symphony: relatively new and innovative (powered by XML and XSLT); it seems to be  lacking documentation, but has some strong support; but it may be a tad immature for my purposes - v2 has just been released, and the developers are now focusing on a completely rewritten v3. But … I am sufficiently intrigued by this system to have installed it at one of the sites I want to develop, www.snowfile.com.
  • MySource Matrix Open Source CMS: a heavy-duty, commercially supported OS system that requires, unusually, a PostgreSQL rather than MySQL database; see separate posts about this.

Late news: although in 2009 I settled on ExpressionEngine as the basis of my skiing information site, I have recently started playing with yet another CMS – Concrete5. I am using it on another site related to this one, evaluating online accounting systems.