A Content Management System or CMS is basically an interface that allows textual and visual content of a website to be managed with little or no need to understand HTML. At Voodoochilli we custom build our own Content Management Systems. We find that this gives us the most flexibility; however it has the major drawback of taking considerably more time to develop. Pre-made CMS’s are developed before hand and enable the easy editing of website content.
Over they years we have used a few of these when clients have already had systems in place. Below I have listed three open source CMS’s which I think you may find useful.
MODx
www.modxcms.com
Modx is an advanced CMS. You can pretty much do everything with it that you would want to. As with most CMS’s it has plenty of plugins and templates to help customise the look and functionality of the site it is powering. Modx is also quite suitable for large scale websites.
I personally found it difficult to find my way around, but you have to bear in mind I was working on an existing website post site launch.
I found a very positive, and more detailed review where by the author says “blows me away that I still even hear about Joomla and Mambo while something like this is on the open source market.”
TYPO3
www.typo3.com
Typo 3 is extremely advanced in terms of what it can do. In fact I would say that this is the main problem. Pre-made CMS’s need to be simple to use and I have to say I found this one a little difficult. I also had some problems installing the software, nothing I couldn’t sort out of course but this may have put some other people off. The only other reviews I could find of Typo3 were on Typo3 websites, needless to say it has a large following so it must be doing something right.
WordPress
www.wordpress.org
What Wordpress?! That’s blogging software isn’t it? Well yes it is but it can also easily be used as a full scale CMS. After all, blog sites are websites, and they do have content which is managed! With a few changes to a WordPress theme (template) such as taking out comments and moving the navigation around etc you can have a website which is extremely easy to manage. WordPress is definitely the best blogging solution out there, but it can be used for much more.
Conclusion
In an ideal world everyone would have a custom built CMS for their particular requirements. In reality this just isn’t possible for most people. If you can’t afford to pay a developer to build you one or don’t have the right skills to build one yourself, a custom built CMS should do for most cases. There is an endless list of open sources CMS’s out there. I have just listed some that I have personally used. I would like to hear other people experiences with some of the other CMS solutions.
You may include in your list Drupal, the rising star among CMS’s right now. Very flexible and ideal for community sites.
Yes, I have heard good things about Drupal. Cheers.
[...] 1. OpenWYSIWYG This is bar far the best free open source WYSIWYG in my opinion. Its easy to install, supported by all browsers and can easily be customised. This is the one I would recommend. It’s just perfect, I cant think of anything I would add except maybe a built in spell checker and an online file manager. All of these things can of course be cutom built for your web application if needed. OpenWYSIWYG, as the name suggests is complexly open source which is something I am in favour of. Other classic open source software can be found here. [...]
I recommend one I love - Nenest. You create forms to host almost all kinds of your data, texts, numbers, pictures, documents (WYSIWYG editor), attachments. Access control, social networking, templates, data validation, exporting/importing data all integrated.