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Hi! Thanks for the compliments about Sitellite!

Not sure what you mean though that the URLs don't make sense... They're SEO-friendly (ie. /index/page-name instead of /index.php?page=page-name) and have a special structure for dynamic requests as well that avoids the .php and ?foo=bar parameter passing. If there's a way you think would be better, I'd love to hear it. :)

Here's some info on the full workings of our URL scheme:

http://www.sitellite.org/index/tutorials-story-act ion/story.11/title.url-rewriting-in-sitellite-4

Cheers,

Lux

I was hoping from the summary for a bit more depth to the article, maybe a few pages in length. Good start at least. There are many differences to consider when comparing open source vs commercial CMS (ex: open source CMS developers tend to be quicker about embracing standards), in addition to the general open source vs commercial software differences.

There's also a lot of difference between types of CMS, from blog-level packages to easy site builders and Mambo/Joomla-esque packages which are missing any real enterprise-ready features such as versioning, workflow, and fine-grained access control (more advanced than Unix permissions please!), to mid-level packages which vary greatly within themselves as to their focus (marketing/SEO, publishing, or traditional content/document management), to high-end enterprise packages. There's also a big difference between a CMS that includes a content server/content publisher and one that doesn't. An easy comparison of these in the open source world would be Midgard vs any of the Midgard-based CMS packages. The no-content-server packages are more flexible, but require a lot more implementation effort as well.

Really, it comes down to defining your goals. And often people find that some commercial CMS still solves them better than the open source ones, while many find the opposite to be true. Different goals. (note: I'm the lead developer for the open source Sitellite CMS that also has a commercial counterpart -- dual-licensed).

A few articles I found interesting related to CMS selection:

Tire Kicking and CMS Shopping
Will your chosen CMS vendor go bust?

While everyone mentions their own favourite CMS, I thought it wouldn't hurt to mention mine as well. Check out Sitellite at http://www.sitellite.org/ as well as our company website where you can get professional support and add-ons at http://www.simian.ca/. The company website also features some articles from well-known pros in the CMS industry about content management, online publishing, writing for the WWW, etc. at http://www.simian.ca/index/content-management-101

Being the lead developer of Sitellite means it's obviously my first choice, however it does have many features useful for medium-sized websites that are lacking in lower-end systems like Mambo and Contribute, as well as lots of documentation and a very usable GUI.

Anyway, good luck on your pursuit of the best CMS for your site. :)

Feel free to check out our CMS, called Sitellite. I won't claim it's the leading CMS in PHP by any means, but its code is architected and mostly pretty clean (there are a few rough spots around the edges, but the core is very much OOP + MVC). Plus we just released a major new version with lots of great stuff in it. For more info, see:

http://www.sitellite.org/

Disclaimer: My sig links to the company that supports Sitellite and funds its main developers (incl. me).

Yes, but does it have a large, active open source developer community? The community site seems kind of dead.

The community is building rapidly. We're nearly 200 registered users strong now, and the site has only been going since the beginning of February. We're up to 600 unique visitors a day too. We're doing what little promotion we can, but we're a 2-person company/project, so time to get the open source word out there is pretty limited.

However, with those stats, I wouldn't call the developer site dead. :) It's no google.com, but it's a good start.

Where is the CVS site? Are OSS contributors required to license their changes for the corporate version?

The anonymous CVS instructions are here:

http://www.sitellite.org/index/cvs

Yes, contributors are required to license their changes (changes to the core system, add-ons are a different matter) back to us, for inclusion in both the open and commercial versions (the two being identical, aside from license, warranty, resellability, and a few extra add-ons). We don't try to hide this, but even the Free Software Foundation require that you assign/grant unlimited copyright to them on contributions. So I don't think it's unfair for us to ask the same thing.

Also, a commercial version is a good thing for the community as well. The fact of the matter is that programmers need to eat too, and that costs money. You can't make money offering nothing but free code, free support, etc. So we sell a commercial version for people who have commercial interests in the software (just like MySQL does, for example). So a commercial version helps keep a core of developers working primarily on the CMS itself, not as a hobby, but as their day job.

Without an active OSS developer community, it matters fairly little what license it comes with.

Yes, but these don't come overnight. That's why we're trying to get the word out there, and going an extra mile to get people interested/involved right now. New projects don't just pop up with 10,000 members. :)

Technology-wise, we have one of the top CMSes in PHP, and I know we compare favourably to Open Source CMSes in other languages too. That's not to boast, but it is true (go look). What we're trying to do now is fill in the blanks -- community, documentation, more free add-ons, etc.

Anyway, it's getting late. I should catch a few zzz's. :)

Cheers,

Lux

Ours does, and it's cross-platform too (based on Mozilla's Midas extension, available since Moz 1.3). You can check it out here:

http://www.sitellite.org/

In fact, we're not the only cross-browser WYSIWYG editor in town either (ours is already built into the CMS however). Another I know of is here:

http://dynarch.com/mishoo/htmlarea.epl

I'm sure there are others as well...

The big benefit we've had so far with it is that a lot of our users come through web design shops, and design shops have traditionally been Mac shops. With Mozilla support, we can offer something our customers can use even on Macs.

Cheers,

Lux

...to plug another newly-open-sourced CMS I'm the lead developer for:

Sitellite CMS

Written in PHP, unusually flexible, very strong add-on framework, free add-ons, including a search add-on based on Apache Lucene (no PHP Java extension required though), and HIGHLY usable by non-techies. Cross-browser WYSIWYG editing is built-in, and it's designed for non-techies to use, but real techies to code in. Like any proper template system, standards compliance is up to you however (although our XML-based templates require XHTML or XML output, so we do encourage at least ;)).

There's also a commercial version, and commercial support available (this was the qualm that the reviewer had about Plone) at simian.ca. We also sell commercial add-ons (gotta eat too, right? ;)).

Anyway, </plug> -- just trying to scare up some more interest, never hurts to try. :)