Open source CMS alternatives

Which content management system do you use?

[Hanu]

Can anyone recommend an open source CMS? Currently I use Typo3. It's very powerful but it doesn't have a clean architecture, lacks quality documentation and has a steep learning curve for users and administrators.

[denisdekat]

You will find these with most any web hoster with Cpanel and Fantastico:

Portals/CMS:
Drupal: [drupal.org...]
Geeklog: [geeklog.net...]
Mambo Open Source: [mamboserver.com...]
PHP-Nuke: [phpnuke.org...]
phpWebSite: [phpwebsite.appstate.edu...]
Post-Nuke: [postnuke.com...]
Siteframe: [siteframe.org...]
Xoops: [xoops.org...]

They are all very popular ones, I have yet to hear very negative things about any one in particular but phpNuke (which I think is due to the fact that they are the most popular, not becasue they are that bad)

HTH :D

[Hanu]

Thanks denisdekat for this list. I will have a look at them this week and post my opinion.

I came up with these features that I consider a must have:

1) Templates beyond the PhpNuke-style approach à la 'you can choose what the
blocks look like.' This will weed out most of the PHPNuke clones.

2) Caching of result pages.

3) Permission system.

4) Managing of multilingual content.

4) Easy to learn.

4) Good documentation.

5) Straight-forward, clean and modular achitecture. This is a trait most PHP-
based solutions do not posess because PHP didn't have many of the higher level
programming constructs in the beginning.

6) News with teasers on home page.

Also I would like to hear what webmasters think about the CMS they are using right now.

[bakedjake]

I'm currently playing with Zope/CMF/Plone [plone.org].

It's very cool, and looks to have all of the features you've described. Plus, you've got the Zope backend, so it's very easily extensible.

[bill]

Movable Type
It requires a bit of customization, but it will spit out static pages that validate.

[Hanu]

I looked at Drupal and the various PHPNuke clones suggested earlier. Especially Drupal looked promising. It even had a caching module. The only drawback with Drupal is that most Drupal sites look the same because the templating feature isn't too flexible. I need complete control over layout, images and style sheets but I don't think Drupal can do that. A very promising feature of Drupal is its 'taxonomy' concept which goes beyond the simple hierarchical organization of content found in most others CMSes.

Anyway, the Zope/CMF/Plone triad looks best to me so far. It's mature and has a clean architecture. Plone is a layer on top of CMF (content management framework) which is a layer on top of Zope which is implemented in Python. I always wanted to learn Python, so this is a good chance to do so. Zope's ZPT is the most clever way of introducing dynamicity into HTML I've seen so far! Compared to, say JSP, PHP, Perl's HTML::Template and SSI; that is.