Searching a suitable CMS system is a painful thing

How do you select a CMS for your website?

[nomatter]

I tried quite a lot of CMS systems (mainly open sources) in last few years. I found it's quite paintful for me to choose a suitable CMS system.

Let me give a scenario. You have some idea to create a website and at the very beginning you find one CMS fits your site and you choose it. But after serveral months your website get expanded and a new task or option needs to be added, suddenly you found the CMS you chose actually doesn't have such features. Then you are trying to hack it or to search another one. But those tasks cost lots of time and energy.

I know the above work flow is not a professional way. As a webmaster, how do you select a suitable CMS for your website?

[RobinL]

We use a completely homebrew system but I've helped other organizations and publications pick their CMS. One of my biggest points of advice is make sure that you buy software and you don't lease it. A lot of companies have proprietary CMS' that you pay a monthly fee to use, so you never really actually own it. Not owning your CMS is like not owning your website! I would strongly recommend buying something that you own the rights to so if you modify it, or want to end your relationship with the original vendor you still OWN your site. I'd recommend using an open source solution and hiring a developer to customize it to your needs, that's probably the most affordable.

[FTFlash]

Or you could build your own CMS out of good 'ol PHP.

[Filipe]

Building your own, one that's scalable and usable between all your projects, is a godsend. Because you know the ins-and-outs, you can customize it to any project you're working on.

I know it's great to be able to hand my CMS over to content writers and it's a breeze for them to populate my sites.

[chance1376]

There are a couple CMSs that have modules that allow you to create an input for user data then display it in a templated format. This might not seem like much but with the package I use there are some smarty plug-ins that give extra functionality and I pretty much have a custom built module with out knowing much php.

I know that doesn't cover all task that you might want to add but gives your site(s) allot more ability with little effort.

[wmuser]

At best you should make a custom CMS but you can start from open source one like TYPO3

[carminejg3]

what type of content are you looking to manage? articles, links, other....

once you know what you need you can find some pretty nice systems out there.