Content Managment System

which one is best?

[moltar]

I am looking for a simple CMS with the following requirments:

- Simple
- Completely customizable design
- Edit categories
- Add/edit/delete articles in categories
- Able to edit user profiles that have access to CMS
- Able to display user profiles (writers)
- Open-source
- Free

Thank you!

[choster]

The latest "thing" seems to be to use modified blog software for content management.

[georgeek]

Mambo Open Source is worth looking at.

[rogerd]

Moltar, don't forget "creates nice URLs" if being indexed in search engines is important to you. Static pages are good, as are dynamic pages with simple urls, e.g., one query parameter. The latter have a good chance of being indexed, and are easy to rewrite to look static. Session IDs and complex query strings are bad.

[rcjordan]

>mambo

[webmasterworld.com...]

>I am looking for a simple CMS with the following requirments:

You and a few hundred thousand other webmasters, moltar. I suspect twiki (see sourceforge) is the closest you're going to get.

[BwanaZulia]

Take a look at Zope (http://www.zope.org) with CMF and Plone (http://www.plone.org).

- Simple (mostly)
- Completely customizable design (totally)
- Edit categories (yup)
- Add/edit/delete articles in categories (sure)
- Able to edit user profiles that have access to CMS (yup)
- Able to display user profiles (writers) (roles/groups)
- Open-source (bingo)
- Free (double bingo)

BZ

[bunltd]

We're using WebGUI by Plainblack for a CMS. (they have a demo available)

- Simple (once it's installed)
- Completely customizable design (your design, and you can have multiple designs - one for each area of the site, or such)
- Edit categories (yes)
- Add/edit/delete articles in categories (yes)
- Able to edit user profiles that have access to CMS (yes, various levels for different folks)
- Able to display user profiles (writers) yes
- Open-source - yes
- Free - yes (they have a pay for support deal in addition to their free forums)

It's also customizable, you can write your own widgets. It's written in Perl, uses MySQL. It comes with the ability to do articles, link lists, calendars, polls, surveys, faqs, message board, site map and more. It also uses mod_rewrite to make for very search friendly urls. You can also handle multiple sites with a single install.

LisaB

[Dale]

Take a look at Coranto (http://coranto.gweilo.org/)

It meets all of your requirements, with how SIMPLE it is relative to your skill. You can customize all output. Once installed it is simple for multiple users to edit and add content.

[edited by: DaveAtIFG at 11:48 pm (utc) on Nov. 11, 2003]
[edit reason] DeLinked URL [/edit]

[DaScribbler]

Try phpWebsite (http://phpwebsite.appstate.edu/)
It matches everything you asked for, and then some. There are also several 3rd party modules designed for it, so you'll find everything you need.

[edited by: DaveAtIFG at 11:48 pm (utc) on Nov. 11, 2003]
[edit reason] DeLinked URL [/edit]

[hanuman]

check out the most amazing slashdot.org , their entire engine is open source.

the best!

[mack]

The new version of Mambo open source is looking very impressive. In this version that have addressed the issue of search engine friendly url's

Mack.

[techrealm]

Mambo works for me nicely, easily customized if you understand mysql, php and like templated systems. For the last three years I have tried php nuke, post nuke, phpwebsite. I liked php website for its solid coding styles but it suffers in flexibility as it was a offshot of phpnuke ditto for post nuke. There is/may still be sooo much developer infighting between those projects during that time those three suffered greatly. I haven't successfully gotten plone to install/work but I have to also admit I did it half heartedly and under a strict deadline. I have previously liked zope based products and can imagine it working great.

[bedlam]

- Simple
- Completely customizable design
- Edit categories
- Add/edit/delete articles in categories
- Able to edit user profiles that have access to CMS
- Able to display user profiles (writers)
- Open-source
- Free

Typo3!

Simple: Well, depends on what you mean by this. If you mean simple to learn, look elsewhere, but once you learn the system, development is made very simple indeed - you can do things like this:

• Change the whole site over by swapping a couple of pure html/css files (with no special markup)
  
• Use the system itself for a substantial part of developing extensions (i.e. the system helps generate extension file & directory structure, sql, etc)
  
• Relatively easily change/customize almost all markup without mucking in source files

Completely customizable design: See above. about 99% of all markup is administrator-customizable. The *nukes are not even in the same universe in this respect. I migrated to Typo3 because this was impossible in PostNuke.

Edit categories: Easily.

Add/edit/delete articles in categories: Yep. Can also archive articles, 'hide' them without deleting them, schedule them to appear and end at certain times...

Able to edit user profiles that have access to CMS: Yes.

Able to display user profiles (writers): Yes.

Open-source: Yes! ;-)

Free: Yep.

And a couple things you've missed...

Documentation: There is a huge amount of developer/administrator documentation (running to many hundreds of pages and more than 7 hours of video documentation[!]

Extensions: There are a lot of these too, including a number of very high-quality projects.

Image manipulation: If your server has some version of ImageMagick and GD, you have a full suite of image manipulation tools at your disposal (partial list):

• Image resizing
  
• Image framing
  
• Image rotation
  
• Dynamically generated graphical headlines
  

URLs: so long as mod_rewrite is enabled on your (Apache) webserver, you can generate 'static' urls in a couple of different ways. The page "index.php&id=114&type=0" can be rendered as "114.0.html" or, if you prefer, "blue-widget.html", or even "widgets/blue-widget.html" [i.e. simulating a directory structure].

[Hooray, my first WebmasterWorld post using "widgets"!]

It's the best thing in its price range that I know about.

Be warned though - it's a complex and professional system, and as such it will take time to learn!

-B

[encyclo]

Hi moltar - I see from your profile that you're in Ottawa. Do you speak French? Is this for a newspaper-type site? You could try SPIP - h**p://www.spip.net/ Loads of documentation in French, but modules for other languages available, and some documentation in English. Highly recommended!

[NeedScripts]

Have you thought about checking out PhpNuke (download it from nukecop.com) it does all what you are looking and whole lot more :)

NS

[amoore]

I'm personally a big fan of Movable Type from movabletype.org. It's perl, can use mysql backend, is really extensible, and is affordable.

I even use it to generate HTML::Mason code that is then interpreted by Mason. Very extensible.

[bedlam]

Have you thought about checking out PhpNuke (download it from nukecop.com) it does all what you are looking and whole lot more :)

...except that PhpNuke absolutely does not make "Completely customizable design" possible - at least not if that means more than just switching the site's theme or skin.

-B

[NeedScripts]

except that PhpNuke absolutely does not make "Completely customizable design" possible

From what I understand, you can do it.. however it would require lot of work in setting up a design they way you would like it. But again... nothing that is real good and fits 100% of your need is generally easy to come by.

NS

[bedlam]

Well, it's been about a year since I tried out PhpNuke, but at that time, there was a lot of hardcoded html in the source. It would have required extensive hacking of the code and that of every module used in the system to completely customize it...not my cup of tea when there are alternatives where this is not necessary.

-B