Help finding a Content Management System

Grep

I'm looking for a decent content management system for a small project i'm working on for - i just need somthing simple that will allow the users to login and update the contents of several pages, news, tour dates and the like but i'm having real trouble finding somthing that isn't a portal system and i don't really have enough time to build one myself (too many projects on at the mo) Anyone have any ideas?

jos

Wordpress can create static pages and has several user levels with different permissions (posting, editing etc)

fernando

I've found that there are no CMS scripts which have what I want in them. Generally speaking you can theme your head off, and you still end up with postnuke. I agree with jos completely, WordPress is such a simply script to manipulate that it's ideal for using as the basis of a site. the learning curve is somewhat daunting at first, but the clarity of the work, and the excess of documentation in the wiki, as well as the community at large make it very, very easy to learn what you need to learn. A thoughtful approach to categories, archive, pages, menus, and theme and you could use WordPress in almost any backend manner you liked. This may also be true of other blog type scrips... I don't know.

Kosmo

Wordpress is a great platform, but if you have the time to learn, textpattern will be the answer to all of your questions, it had double the features of wordpress and it is as easy to configure as it is. There are very few full fledged CMS that I would recommend more than I would TXP.

Minisweeper

except the new lussumo cms, ofcourse.

nateomedia

I used Wordpress to build a CMS for a company I was working for and it wasn't too tough. Well, I had to learn a lot of PHP to get it to do what I wanted, but I had the whole thing done in a little over a month. I had to use a lot of hacks though. I bypassed a lot of the built in functions and wrote my own because instead of returning a value, the function went ahead and "echo"ed the result -- very frustrating if you wanted to manipulate it first. So I started making my own calls to the database instead. It was a toss-up to go with Wordpress and Textpattern. The documentation and community are very strong with Wordpress, but I believe the documentation for Textpattern is improving. I am tempted to try it.

jos

because instead of returning a value, the function went ahead and "echo"ed the result

Some functions accept parameters that return the value. Eg wp_list_pages has such a parameter 'echo'.

Grep

This sites one of those favors we contractors tend to get asked to do when we're not working and I was hoping to find something that I can get up and running in an evening! I had a good look at word press and once I have some time to wrap my head around it I’ll use it. But I have found something that seems to do the trick http://cutephp.com/ little thing called cutenews which integrates nicely with the existing site (just adds an include), does multiple users and RSS so I’m happy for the time being and don't have to rebuild the site completely which is what was worrying me so much!

jesusphreak

Drupal is great and it can be used for something as small as a blog and something as big as a large community site.

There aren't as many themes as something like Wordpress, and there is a lot more to learn with it, but it is a very well-designed CMS.

Grep

How does wordpress compare with movable type?

jos

Let's say that license-wise movable type isn't competition. :-) http://www.asymptomatic.net/blogbreakdown.htm

wlvrn

Expression Engine

Best of all that I've tried... and that's a lot.

Kosmo

I'm writing my own CMS/Intranet tool since every single CMS I have used have same thing in common. Menu/navigation/interface design and usability is horrible. Why can't there be actually a CMS or Blog Engine that actually aims for accessibility and interface design than just the same old content management tools that are exactly the same in every frikkin engine there is. I want easy to use menu generator with subcategories that I can place separately to somewhere. CMS engineers are idiots if they think that content shouldn't be placed in categories and sub categories under something.

jesusphreak

Actually, Kosmo is kind of on to something here.

As easy as it is to pick up Ruby on Rails and to do stuff with it (and other good frameworks), there really isn't any reason to not just custom-write your own software.

A lot of CMSs try to do everything and fail miserably at most. A lot of them are missing features for certain projects or have extra bloat for certain projects. In creating your own, you can get exactly what you want.

3stripe

there's a cms comparison matrix at http://www.cmsmatrix.org/ which might help. personally i like wordpress, but haven't tried much else. others that have caught my eye recently: http://www.typo3.com/ http://modxcms.com/ http://www.joomla.org/ http://www.pmachine.com/ (not open source) http://railfrog.com/ (ruby on rails cms, only an idea at this stage though it seems)

Kosmo

Typo3 is good if you want the most unnecessarily hard to use CMS with way too much bloat, I mean 4meg empty database? Come on!

Modx seems nice, initially I was scared away by it's flashy interface and it looked like Etomite (which I didn't like.)

Joomla = Mambo = Sucks IMO, it does everything the hard way and it doesn't let you fully control your tamplate, most extensions use tables for layout.

pMachine, the pMachine Pro is a blogging engine, blogging = WP or TXP, there is no winner. But Emotion Engine (PS2 graphics chip was also called Emotion Engine) seems neat and if I had the money, I'd buy it to check it out.

RailFrog actually seems cool, everything that has come from RoR direction these days seems to be top notch, maybe it is that it just is so easy to use that they can write good programs OR maybe the RoR programmers are all just so damn good. And that RailFrog has good goals is just a plus.

I have to add that the current plague of bad CMS engines comes mostly from the Blogging frenzy, people don't seem to be interested in full CMS' anymore and programmers looking for new project usually take the easy way out and go for blogging option. I give them this tho, blogging has advanced the way we control articles, but they just made crap out of everything else.

MrNase

What about Symphony, http://www.symphony21.com/ ?? :-)

Kosmo

Symphony looks like a bomb, but somehow it didn't register all my clicks, is this me or the script?

MrNase

It _is_ a bomb ;) The demo doesn't allow editing or deleting content :-( Iam having problems right now, too.

jacmgr

These are my likes for CMS from easy to difficult: http://www.cmsimple.dk/ http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/ Then mambo and joomla If you can spend 50 bucks a year and after you set it up, relatively novice users will be maintaining it then I like http://www.flexcms.com since it has most opf the basic features.