choosing the best fit open source content management system

quick learning novice programmer seeks ideal CMS

[mulanty]

My 1st post...this is so exciting!

I've gotten in over my head and sure could use some advice.

I'm self taught, program in html using homesite, use photoshop for all my image creation and have gotten reasonably comfortable with Flash.

I'm in the process of loading & learning the basics of php, mysql & apache and have been evaluating various open source content management sytems: zope, midgard-project, opencms, mamboserver and typo3.

I'm leaning toward typo3 but am a bit apprehensive about the learning curve.
I want a sytem that will be extremely easy for authorized users to update their site, will speed up the design process while maximizing design flexibilty and won't require me to do a lot of coding.

Before I invest the time in learning typo3 I sure would appreciate feedback on others' experience.

[bill]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld mulanty.

I went through all of those and found that none of them would spit out a valid XHTML page without some hacking (they may be better now as this was over a year ago). That discouraged me a bit. I was just about to write my own but found I could easily hack/customize blogging software to do what I needed. At the time I was looking for:

• Complete control over the output XHTML
  
• Simple interface for user updates
  
• Fairly widespread use (for support)

I went with MovableType (which wasn't open source, but free), but there are others out there that are as good. It really depends on what you value in the CMS package. Some of the ones you've looked at may serve your purpose. Since there are so many CMS packages out there now it's hard to say what's best.

[mulanty]

Thanks Bill,

I'll check out Moveabletype.
What's exactly is the importance of the software being able to output a valid xhtml page?

[bill]

Valid code will generally not give the search engine spiders any trouble. You'll also be able to more closely control your site's display in a wide range of browsers on a variety of platforms. I'm also a control freak. ;)

I also remember some problems with the file naming conventions. It looked like a lot of work to get those CMS packages to output filenames and directories in the same format I used in my existing sites. They weren't SE or user friendly (again some of these packages are now better at that I hear).

[vasudevaserver]

You should give a try to Plone (www.plone.org).

We spent months sifting through the many options, from php based, java based, and we end up trying Plone.

Now we have a few sites running on it, one of them quite large, and there is no going back.

Its workflow features are very powerful, and Plone 3 (based on the upcoming Zope 3) will have event driven workflows, too!

hth

[BwanaZulia]

Another vote for Plone.

Powerful stuff that.

BZ