How To Choose An Open Source CMS

An anonymous reader writes "Content management specialist Seth Gottlieb has written an easy to understand how-to on selecting an open source CMS. Gottlieb is also responsible for the whitepaper 'Content Management Problems and Open Source Solutions' which summarizes 15 open source projects and distinguishes between open source CMS and proprietary software selection."

Comments

Structure

[mwvdlee]

The easiest way to quickly filter CMS's is by looking at the navigation structure. Do you want a "tree" structure (like most corporate websites) or do you want a "module" (like slashdot, nuke and other community sites).

There are other choices that can quickly filter CMS's, but many of the choices have alternatives or can be hacked around. Only rarely will you find a CMS that can handle both navigation structures.

Too Many

[dkuntze]

I think the OpenSource CMS market is getting too flooded... Do we really need another PHP/MySQL CMS? I know some people who are developing a commercial CMS product. I think they are crazy, since there are PLENTY of free CMS packages out there. If there is not need for a full blown enterprise CMS, why would you pay for a proprietary "non-free" application? How about a list of Open Source Enterprise Content Management systems? That would defintely be a shorter list.

Re:CMSes are going the way of the dodo..

[saltydogdesign]

Sounds like you are describing a sort of crippled Dreamweaver, which is what all this CMS business was designed to escape. At the risk of causing all the anti-Ajax people to have an aneurism, I think that when CMS's start adopting Ajax techniques, their usability quotient will go up pretty sharply. To my mind this is the sort of application for which Ajax is made -- largely internal functions in which you have some control or at least knowledge of the hardware being used. Moreover, updates and changes can be made in one place, rather than maintaining 50 copies of an app.