Which CMS do you use?

And Why!

[zulufox]

I have read everything I can about different CMSs, from xoops, to mambo, to typo3, to ezpublish, to phpnuke, postnuke etc.. etc..

I have test many versions, found their flaws and benefits.

My questions is simple:

Which CMS do you use, and why?

[henry0]

I use my own :)

Let’s speak about Mambo for example
It looks fine and works great
However how many clicks an user is required to perform before posting or viewing an article

Both of those are more on the multiple users site with a CMS as an added value

I think we have been wrongly naming since a long time that type of sites: CMS
In my opinion a site cannot be a CMS; it offers a CMS

By the way did you look at TIKIWIKI at source forge?
Great project community

Regards

Henry

[shinyblue]

I use my own as well, custom for each project. Simple ones that suit the purpose at hand.

I've looked at a bunch as well but when it comes down to it they usually make things *harder* unless you have a ton of content that you can match to the way they are structured. It always takes me forever to get it the way I want with the "modules" only to discover down the road that the functionality I want just doesn't exist in a module and it would take me a while to learn how to create a module.

The one I tested more extensively was Mambo cause I'd heard some good reviews, but I found that the HTML code was interspersed with the PHP code in such a way that to really customize it you had to edit all these different files in different places. It looked like way more work than to write my own simple editing system for the pages I wanted to edit (or my clients).

But I'd love to hear other's responses if they've found a good one!

My considerations on CMS's are
1) Whether they have good SEO features, IE you can set the title tag on each page, page titles are in h1 tags, and the URLs are SE-friendly
2) Whether they filled your code with a bunch of <font> tags or whether they used stylesheets for that. I don't need to CSS everything, tables are fine, but <font> is definitely something that belongs in a stylesheet.
3) Whether it's easy to customize. Both visually and in terms of writing new components.
4) Easy to use - it shouldn't be more complex than coding pages by hand, that's just silly.

Now, *I* couldn't find a CMS I was happy with. But I'm pretty picky.

[petertdavis]

I've got my own too, there were just none available that met my needs. Most of them try to do too much, and don't do any of it well.

[cyberair]

I was hoping to hear something positive about Mambo. That's what I am thinking about using for a really large site I am creating.

Anyone had any experiences with Mambo?

[iblaine]

Homegrown. My requirements are always changing and I do not want to get stuck with something that will limit possibilities.

[zulufox]

I've had a ton of experience with Mambo. (over a year).

Overall I'd rate it a 8.2 out of 10.

Goods:

1. Installation is cake...
2. Getting it up and running is easy...
3. Converting Mambo to fit your needs is easy...
4. Really active community, every module you can dream of.
5. Actively being improved and developed by a dedicated dev team
6. Awesome SEO, very awesome URLs (with a $50 script)
7. Fast!
8. Streamlined coding, can handle a slashdot.
6. Mambo 5.0 (see below)

Bad:

1. Only 2 levels of content organization sections->categories->articles. This is REALLY stupid/annoying because it means I have to fit my site's organization around my CMS's abilities...
2. Article index is butt ugly
3. Developement team (while dedicated) is SLOW.. snail's pace slow...
4. No real big companies supporting/developing the script (like typo3)

Car Comparison...If mambo was a car...

Mambo is like a ford focus. Small, zippie, friendly, simple, robust, customizable. It does some things quite well, but dont expect to much from it.

While:

Typo3 is like a Semi-Truck. Huge, Bulky, Huge learning curve to drive, massive capacity if you have the time and ability.

Mambo 5:

The reason I stick with mambo instead of moving to drupal or typo3 is Mambo 5. Mambo 5.0 being developed (slowly) by the mambo devs, it is all XML based and its features will pretty much make it outclass any other CMS. But right now it is just vaporware.. and could be for some time.

[Bio4ce]

I'm very new to CMS. I've always loved the idea, but never found anything that was very user friendly. One thing that I have found that I really like is some of the blogging CMS, typepad in particular. I just wish they could expand it beyond the blogging aspect and also allow installs on your own server.

[outrun]

I use Mambo a fair bit but I heavily edited it to make it search engine friendly to allow the url to contain the title and to look static the built in SEF doesnt cut it, you can buy SEF advance for a price but I managed to get the same affect on my own, as for the title of the page there are many hacks out there. I choose Mambo because there are many templates I can choose and modify easily. And i like idea of Mambo 5.0 where each page can have there own individual template.

regards,
Mark

[zulufox]

Anyone tried midgard cms?

[maccas]

A very hacked phpbb does the job for me. You wouldn't even know it was phpbb. The main reason I chose phpbb over the already mentioned is the ability to have whatever words I like in the page title and only in the page title, the same with meta keywords and meta description. SE friendly URL's. It is also extremely fast once stipped down to the barebones.

[henry0]

Maccas,
Interesting concept
you should consider publishing you hack!
regards

Henry

[trillianjedi]

Now, *I* couldn't find a CMS I was happy with. But I'm pretty picky.

They can *all* be made to do exactly what you want them to do (assuming they're open-source) if you're prepared to get your feet wet with code.

Pick one that you like in terms of speed, platform and the front end control, and edit from there.

I'm currently using a heavily modified and SEO'd version of PostNuke. I like the backend of PN - the WYSIWIG content editor for members, and overall "community" design.

But those are the only things we kept, and it took a heck of a lot of work to get it into shape.

Overall, it was less time-consuming (for us) than building from scratch, and there are lots of available PN modules which we can use, again tailoring as necessary or can "borrow" code from. They'll slot straight in if we want them.

I find the pool of resources available for open-source projects can be a massive time saver.

Like Maccas, we also have a heavily modified phpBB2 (for PN) with proper page titles, description tags, H tags etc. Combined with Mod_Rewrite it does extremely well. That was actually really really easy to hack. Most front ends are. What is time consuming to build from scratch is the WYSIWYG back-end stuff, which does not require any SEO.

That's why we picked phpBB2 as a base model and just ripped the front end to bits.

TJ

[peterdaly]

I was just urged by a friend to try Macromedia Contribute 3. I have to say I was impressed, although it's client based and pay per seat. I may go from using a text editor to using it instead when I need to do pure content changes/additions on at least one of my sites. It's basically the dreamweaver editing engine with all of the design aspects stripped out to the point where it's truely a web page "editor" and not a design tool.

Why:
It's easy and fast. Because it's a fat client, it's not limited by what html can do in terms of UI.

Like most Macromedia products, there is a 30 day demo available.

[bunltd]

I looked at Midgard and Zope some time ago, but am now using WebGUI for around a dozen sites, so far. It's pretty flexible, lots of included content types - and the templates to display the content types can be modified to suit. (In addition to site-wide style templates) I have it installed on several servers, once there you can run multiple sites, each with it's own configuration and database, etc. It also works with mod_rewrite making for nice friendly urls, and the title and meta-tags are customizable on a per page basis.

I've even got a gamma version running locally on Windows as an intranet here, my other installs are FreeBSD or Linux based.

LisaB