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Free and sometimes excellent CMS that you probably want to try.

Jun 29, 2009 Content management systems (CMS)  6 Comments

This article shows current trends in CMS development industry and probably can help someone to find the right CMS for any occasion. The purpose of this is not to describe all cons of pros of each product but provide general roadmap for those who trying to find a right CMS for the specific requirements.

Wordpress (www.Wordpress.org)

WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time. More simply, WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it. WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time. More simply, WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it. Wordpress began as a simple blogging system but has grown into one of the most powerful CMS’s on the Internet with lots of advantages, like easy installation and administration, huge community and plugins/themes repository. Wordpress is an easy-to-modify and easy-to-extend platform, developing a theme or extending functionality for it is a really simple task for qualified developer. Offers multiple blog support within a single installation with Wordpress MU.

Drupal (www.Drupal.org)

Drupal is an old-school application and has already deserved reputation as a solid CMS platform. The comunity behind it is quite big but development is not simple and more time consuming then for the most of new CMS. It is also known as a system that is more approachable by the tech-savvy developers than the ordinary user. Written in PHP.

Joomla (www.Joomla.org)

Joomla is the one of the most popular PHP-based open-source CMS currently available. End-user oriented, with lots of extensions available Joomla wins on many criteria. Unfortunatelly, Joomla has quite messy administration interface and cause lots of headache if needs to be extended with non-typical features. Lack of developers documentation only aggravate the situation. I would call it install-and-forget solution rather then install-and-extend, however for the most of clients it is exactly what they need.

MovableType (www.MovableType.com)

Feature packed, scalable solution available both as open-source and commercial packages. Has nice and well-organized administration interface, good application structure. It is easy to work with MovableType and easy to develop for MovableType but, unfortunatelly, it is much less popular that CMS above.

Textpattern (www.Textpattern.com)

Textpattern is a PHP-based open-source CMS that is popular with both bloggers and website owners. The system is flexible and can be used for a variety of purposes. Like other open-source CMS, Textpattern has a strong online community with plenty of resources available.

sNews (www.sNewsCMS.com)

sNews is a free, standards compliant, PHP and MySQL driven CMS. It’s easy to install, and easy to use via a simple web interface. sNews consists of only one core engine file, one independent template file and its accompanying CSS stylesheet file, plus an .htaccess file (require mod_rewrite) that makes all URLs search engine friendly. sNews is not geared towards the end-user but is suitable for developers with beginner-to-advanced PHP/MySQL skills.

MODx (www.MODxCMS.com)

MODx is an opensource, ajax-driven, PHP/MySQL based CMS with 2.0-style dashboard and a variety of functions from easy drag’n'drop to more advanced. Compared to the other CMS, MODx seems to be the one with most advanced functionality. Despite all that MODx didn’t get yet enough of people attention but it is definitely the one worth trying.

Nucleus CMS (www.nucleuscms.org)

Nucleus CMS is an open-source blog management software written in PHP, with a MySQL database. With a little tweaking (mainly to skins) it might be considered a lightweight content management system, although there is no way to upload file types other than graphic files to be displayed within the blog pages.
Nucleus uses a plugin system and the philosophy within the development community is that the extra functionality should be implemented as plugins as much as possible to keep base package light and uncluttered. Nucleus comes bundled with Fantastico and available via cPanel for many domains.

Pligg (www.pligg.com)

Pligg is an open source Content Management System (CMS) bundled with social networking features. Pligg creates websites where stories are created and voted on by members, not website editors. Pligg CMS is based on PHP and MySQL technologies.

Plone (www.plone.org)

A powerful, flexible Content Management solution that is easy to install, use and extend. Plone is perfect for web sites or intranets and offers superior security without sacrificing extensibility or ease of use. Plone is built on the Zope application server, which is written in Python. All information in Plone is stored in Zope’s built-in transactional object database.

Frog CMS (www.madebyfrog.com)

Frog CMS simplifies content management by offering an elegant user interface, flexible templating per page, simple user management and permissions, as well as the tools necessary for file management. Born as phpRadiant, Frog CMS is a PHP version of Radiant CMS, a well known Ruby on Rails application.
Frog requires PHP5, a MySQL database or SQLite 3 with PDO, and a web server (Apache with mod_rewrite is highly recommended). Frog CMS shows the most promise of any CMS that is currently in development. The community for Frog still rather small, but the project is developing quickly, while plugins are constantly being produced at high standards to fill the gaps in CMS.

Concrete5 CMS (www.concrete5.org)

This CMS does something very different from other systems in that it integrates the administration with the frontend seamlessly. The only other CMS that does this is LightCMS. Concrete5, however has the same advantages as Frog CMS and is much less complex than its counterpart. Written in PHP but require Python for some functions, database is MySQL.

Radiant (www.radiantcms.org)

A simple Content Management System powered by Ruby on Rails. The idea behind this CMS is in offering minimum functionality for developers and allowing them easily customize their own system (of course, it is only for those who knows what to do with RoR). Radiant is not a mainstream, do not be upset with a small number of book, related materials and extras.

Silverstripe (www.silverstripe.com)

A simplistic open-source CMS, developed with Sapphire PHP framework. Template driven and editor oriented, Silverstripe has a great potential, but now it has too small community and as the result, to few extras, so if you need something special and you are not real developer – better keep away for now.

CMS Made Simple (www.cmsmadesimple.org)

A very nice CMS if you need to build a small to medium website. Same as Silverstripe and some other young systems, CMS Made Simple may be interested for the developers, if you are not, be ready to hire someone to make from it something that you need.

Symphony CMS (www.symphony-cms.com)

Symphony is an open source content management system written in PHP (requires LibXML module, with the XSLT extension enabled) designed to let developers program exclusively in the XSLT templating language. The philosophy behind Symphony is that nothing should be sacrificed for flexibility – developers should have full control over their website’s markup, URLs and data structures.

e107 (www.e107.org)

e107 is a content management system written in PHP and using the popular open source MySQL database system for content storage. It’s completely free, totally customisable and in constant development. Sorry, but it looks like old and ugly phpNuke, sorry for all lovers of this but I really can’t look on it.

Jaws (www.jaws-project.com)

Jaws is a Framework and Content Management System for building dynamic web sites. It aims to be User Friendly giving ease of use and lots of ways to customize web sites, but at the same time is Developer Friendly, it offers a simple and powerful framework to hack your own modules. OK, summarizing that, these jaws are too small to scare someone, it is done by developers and for developers, probably someone needs it.
btw: they say that administration interface is beautiful – do not believe in it.

TYPO3 (www.typo3.com)

TYPO3 is a enterprise-class solution that can handle large and complex websites. It offers the full gambit of advanced features like multilingual sites, and working with almost any database out there. It also has a broad base of extensions and developers that can add to its functionality. The system is highly configurable and could work for a variety of applications, especially bigger, more complex websites. It doesn’t seem to be in active phase now, considering the last update was released in March 2007 and last news on website dated fall of 2008. TYPO3 is quite complex to start working with it. Overall, the system seems to be outdated in many parameters and could have some new attention.

TYPOlight (www.typolight.org)

Despite its name, TYPOlight is not a stripped down version of TYPO3 but a different product that works similarly to TYPO3 when handling content. TYPOlight is everything we like about TYPO3 with more modern interface, easier templating, and less overloaded with functions (in positive meaning). It is intended to handle small to medium websites that use varying kinds of content and still leaves a lot of “layout decisions” up to the editor.

Umbraco (www.umbraco.org)

Be ready, it is .NET solution. For the first time on the Microsoft platform a free user and developer friendly cms that makes it quick and easy to create websites – or a breeze to build complex web applications. umbraco got award-winning integration capabilities and supports your ASP.NET User and Custom Controls out of the box. I just hope that they rewritten it completely at least once since 2000, else I wouldn’t be happy working with it (those who remember ASP.NET 1.1. understand). In any case, if you are .NET lover, do you have many options?

dotCMS (www.dotcms.org)

dotCMS is Java-based, open-source content management system. dotCMS has been built using the category-leading technologies that guide J2EE development. The Velocity + Struts + DWR front end makes dotCMS easy to extend. The Hibernate ORM gives great data access abstraction and allows to support MySQL (5.0+), PostgreSQL (8.0+), Oracle (9+) and Microsoft SQL Server (2000+) databases. Spring application framework makes it easy to support and maintain by qualified developer.

b2evolution (www.b2evolution.net)

Decent, open-source PHP-based CMS, with a focus on blogging. Performs the same way as many of well known platform does, has functional core, but not many extensions as there is rather small community behind. One of the key feature is a multiple blogs support within a single installation.

dotClear (www.dotclear.org)

Dotclear is an open-source web publishing software created in 2002 by Olivier Meunier. A one man’s project at first, Dotclear soon gathered a team comprising different personalities with various backgrounds. The project’s purpose is to provide a user-friendly tool allowing anyone to publish on the web, regardless of their technical skills. Dotclear is a free software primarily designed for its users and regularly improved by their contributions.
Dotclear has supporting website – dotaddict.org – but, unfortunatelly, on the moment when this article written, it was completely in French.

PivotX (www.pivotx.net)

Another CMS for blogging, announced key features are multiple blogs support with a single installation and flat file databases support. I would add that it uses Smarty template engine that is quite popular among PHP developers.

BrowserCMS (www.browsercms.org)

BrowserCMS is a general purpose, open source Web Content Management System (CMS), written in Ruby on Rails. It is designed to support three distinct groups of people:
1. Non-technical web editors who want a humane system to manage their site, without needing to understand what HTML or even Rails is.
2. Designers who want to create large and elegantly designed websites with no artificial constraints by the CMS.
3. Developers who want to add a CMS into their Rails projects, or create CMS driven websites for their clients.

Habari (www.habariproject.org)

And final one in this post is Habari, an open source blog engine written in PHP and currently supporting MySQL, SQLite, and PostgreSQL for the database backend. The name Habari is taken from the Swahili greeting habari, which means “(what’s the) news”. Habari founded by developers who did escape from Wordpress poject, so it may have a good feature if those people will not run away from each other.
Key features of it are not outstanding but deserve attention:
1. Modular, object-oriented core for easy extensibility, as well as robust software structure
2. Supports multiple database backends (MySQL, SQLite, PostgreSQL)
3. Uses prepared statements throughout to protect against SQL injection attacks
4. Media silos to directly access various ways of media storage, like Flickr, Viddler, or the server’s filesystem
5. Multiple sites on one installation