Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: What's The Best CMS?
Slashdot reader pipingguy recently inherited a 2012 installation of Joomla 1.5.26, and while performing four years worth of updates, began wondering about other content management systems. I've built more than a few static websites (I use Sublime Text 3 or Atom, not some fancy-pants WYSIWYG doohickey) and am quite familiar with CSS, but databases not so much. I've been through lots of online documentation and am a bit bewildered, but I'm following the recommendations regarding backups and the like.
What are Slashdot readers' latest opinions on the three most popular CMSes -- Drupal, Joomla and WordPress? Any tips for me before I accidentally blow away the existing site and have to rebuild everything...?
Leave your educated opinions in the comments...
What are Slashdot readers' latest opinions on the three most popular CMSes -- Drupal, Joomla and WordPress? Any tips for me before I accidentally blow away the existing site and have to rebuild everything...?
Leave your educated opinions in the comments...
Notepad
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Ian Ameline
Do you want simplicity to implement without coding, or the flexibility to "carve your own bricks"? Or just the performance to get a frosty piss?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
My favourite programming language is solder.
Each CMS has different benefits. You have to figure out what's important for you and pick the closest fit for your requirements. Use a decision table.
Plone.
Votez ecolo : Chiez dans l'urne !
1) They're not that hard to write - if you're like me, it takes you longer to learn another fucking hipster platform every year than to just roll your own.
2) You'll get exactly what you want, working the way you/your employers want it, and you can write decent documentation for it as you go along.
3) There won't be an army of people looking for how to break into it, as the cost/benefit ratio is way too high unless you're Amazon size.
http://ez.no, you can try it Out at http://share.ez.no
It's more of a CMF (Content Management Framework) than a CMS, but I think nothing beats Banshee. It's secure, fast, small (therefore easy to learn) and has many ready to use modules. It has a clear MVC structure, so changing or extending the code is easy.
It doesn't have to be like this. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.
Wordpress has to be up there for relative ease of use.
PMWiki is a long time favourite due to the flexibility - I use it as a CMS with most of the wiki stuff hidden from normal users.
CouchCMS is another easy to use and dead simple to create themes and style mods. A lot of flexibility.
So, I agree with any advice about finding a decision table and making up your own mind. Take what they have to say with a grain of salt, however, and realize each table has it's own focus which may or may not be what is important to you.
That said, Drupal is the best CMS right now, and it's doing work to stay in that role for a long time to come.
From a usability perspective, the core team has done a lot of work to make it simpler to work with Drupal and interact with content. It's very easy to spin up new content types, add fields, and create pages / widgets that present that information. Now that views is in core, you can actually author a site using only drag-and-drop tools. Which is great for people just looking to get a single site up and running.
From a technical perspective, symphony is now installed as part of core, which opens a whole lot of possibilities around what you can actually do with it. One of my favorite features is the CMI initiative, which allows you to author a site using a config file, and use that to spin up lots and lots of sites. Which is great for enterprises, looking to adopt a CMS in a big way.
From an extensibility perspective, one of the most powerful features in the platform is native support for REST and JSON. Drupal can serve as a provider of data for single page applications, where people author content in Drupal and you load it through apps authored in Angular / Ember / React. Drupal simply serves as an API endpoint in this context, which allows you to pull data from it whenever you need it.
I realize you can do these things with Wordpress as well, but not as easily or as scalably. Whenever you get past trivial use cases, there's always something getting in the way with Wordpress that makes it less appealing. And other commercial enterprise content management systems, like SiteCore, are simply not extensible. The moment you go outside the sandbox they set up for you, it becomes very hard to make them work.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
- Drupal: slow, ugly hooking system.
- Joomla: spaghetti code, too complicated.
- Wordpress: security nightmare, spaghetti code.
All three are horrible products if you ask me. They should be avoided.
It doesn't have to be like this. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.
I consider the big ones quite bloated for my purposes. I'm not a web dev, I'm an iOS developer. What I need, is a very simple CMS where I can just paste in a template and then make very small adjustments. Often, you pick any of the gazillion CMSes with a version number in the 0.x series. Their biggest selling point is that it's "light-weight", simply because it's not yet mature.
CMS Made Simple however is mature, but still light-weight. It has been existing for years and is in the 2.x series. They waited a looong time before the 2.x series was really, really stable and only recently announced that they'll stop supporting their 1.x series. Very professional.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Drupal without a doubt. However, there are interesting flat-file static/dynamic site generators out there, like pico, middleman, nanoc, jekyll, and pelican.
Why do we have to stick with only the top 3? Aren't there great options who some haven't heard of yet?
Personally, I adore concrete5 (www.concrete5.org). They are making some major changes to the structure, and the upcoming version 8 adds new data objects that will make it more than just the page centric pattern it was before. The developers are active and engaging with the community, it's been around for long enough to be mature, and the in context editing is a huge asset to the end user.
When I look at a CMS, I don't just look at how to code within it, although that is massively important. I also look at how easy it is for end users to pick up and customize. And being able to make changes to an area right in that area on that page is a killer feature. The fact that the block architecture ensures you can add special custom areas very easily and in a modular fashion is also extremely helpful.
I've worked with all the big CMSs, and tested them out. I've tested out a boatload of the medium sized ones as well. C5 was hands down the winner.
My recent CMS search and selection exercise made me bypass the "big three" and opt for Concrete 5. It had the right mix of features, mind share, and in particular, ease of adding content. Adding content is simply done while browsing the site by dropping a page into edit mode, modifying it, and then publishing it. This is particularly helpful when multiple technically challenged people need to update the site.
So far I am quite happy with it, but it is not free from issues. There is a decent set of plugins and themes, the community is enthusiastic. Your requirements may differ: there are tons of other CMSes to choose from.
It is now easy tp do it by hand with the new custom micro printed neodymium magnets, sure the new fancy pants disk drives are to senstive but if you get one that is a couple of decades old you can do it. Easy as shaving with lasers.
Stupid question - it's obviously Perl
CMS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIyMWgSDKkY
... And anyone who promises you that there is, does not understand the problem space.
CMS work is all about fit-to-purpose. Best for $0? Best at serving to HTML, docx and PDF from a single source? Best at delivering atomic content? Best at personalization? Best content author experience? WCM or ECM?
Suggest you start to read CMSWire, look at the material from Real Story Group (and consider buying one of their reports or request an engagement), read up on Karen McGrane's thoughts on API-delivered content, and the approach NPR used (VERY good, but no vendor does it this way).
There's no substitute for learning about the domain, and no other way to do it, other than hire a consultant who knows the domain and praying you got the right consultant. If you did get the right one, she'll make you answer many of the questions I ask above and more, and you'll probably have to learn about the domain anyway.
I'd prefer a static content generator simply because less complexity is less bother and more speed. If you somehow can't do that... well, try and fit your static content generator around some database access doohickey. Of course, to do that properly it would help immensely to actually understand databases, more specifically relational database management systems. A solid introduction takes about a semester. Combine with an introduction programming if you haven't done that yet, and you can get started. Quite an effort, and in fact an effort that most CMS writers evidently never expended, not on databases anyway. Probably not on programming except by the usual self-taught brute force and ignorance method. If you like you can do better, and there is plenty material online. Entire courses.
Consequently, those CMSes don't use databases for database work but as a glorified file system for (not-so-)small bits of data. It's why mysql* is so popular. You could perhaps make use of a key/value store; some of things floating around in the NoSQL-movement are in fact "document stores, typically meaning json-wrapped glorified file systems.
But if you must use a CMS, well, pick one that's at least written in something that isn't quite as stupid as PHP. Yes, I know facebook uses PHP, and if you look closely you can just see them regret it, too. And anyway, would you seriously contend that facebook is not a stupid website? Drives me bonkers in seconds. Dunno about you but I'd not try and duplicate that user experience for my users.
Anyway, there are actually quite a few options here. Do your own research, but do it after you've made clear to yourself what sort of things you want your CMS to do. "Be one of the big ones" is, er, ultimately a self-defeating thing to ask, but at least you've shared your misery. If that's what you're after, then pick the biggest of all. It's not the smartest pick, but hey, the mostest sharededst misery of all gotta count for something, right?
* Which, for various reasons, sucks balls at the relational and database parts. It's lots of "system", though, with a front-end and pluggable back-ends and lots of varies-per-back-end behaviour in-between. It'll also lose your data much easier than a proper RDBMS. It's no loss for most cookie-cutter websites, and hey, maybe it's not for yours, either.
This should be fun.
I've been doing Web sites since the 1990s. I've written my own full-featured CMS systems in Perl (I told you I've been doing this a while) and in PHP, have completely modified open-source CMSes, and have used a number of CMS systems; including Java systems and even ASP .NET systems. I've written many, many plugins, modules and themes.
However, just because I actually have a couple of decades of direct, relevant experience in exactly this, doesn't mean that my opinion will hold any weight at all. This is SlashDot, where poo-flinging monkeys rule the roost. I'll be soundly attacked because I don't drink the right brand of Kool-Aid as some kid out of Java School.
My opinion: You want commercial-grade, the .ASP systems are generally robust as hell, but you need to pay for a good one. Free: You need to go to a PHP-based system. Drupal is definitely the best; but has a Matterhorn learning curve. WordPress is the easiest to set up and actually, despite all the screeching, has very good quality and support up the yin-yang.
There's a couple of off-the-beaten-path CMSes, like TextPattern and EZ. They are actually fairly good, but lack the enormous code base and community support from the "Big 3."
I tend to avoid Joomla. It's easy to set up, has a lot of support, and is about ten thousand times more complex than it needs to be.
I think we're likely to see some good Node.js systems coming out soon. RoR never really made it out the gate, and if you see Perl, like Movable Type (Which is actually a fairly robust and mature system), start running.
FLING POO HERE -->
I'm afraid that "Content Management System" as a description for a GUI for managing websites is part of the problem with most of them. Content management systems allow sharing of digital content, typically code and databases. This is a very separate set of requirements from a website management toolkit. The needs to support consistent coding standards, to give a variety of developers and graphic designers and non-programmers the flexibility _in a GUI_ to publish and arrange their content as desired are very separate needs from consistency, backup, security, and reliability of the underlying content management itself.
The trade-offs are good reasons for people who do actual software development or systems management to stay away from the work. The client's needs have to be balanced against the software capabilities, and no matter what balance is chosen, it is often considered wrong by more than half of the clients, even when they are on the same team.
Take a look at Grav if you want to move toward a static-file CMS, helping to reduce security attack surface on the webserver. Otherwise, Wordpress and Drupal still are goto CMS' in terms of support, plugins, and themes
time
Been using it for a while and works fine. Not written in PHP so that's a plus.
http://cms.web.cern.ch/
I would advise using Plone. It's perhaps not easy to apprehend at first as the PHP CMS, but it is very feature-rich and has a strong security focus, as can be seen with the number of CEV concerning it compared to other CMS (about 10x as less) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The latest version (Plone 5) that was released quite recently also brings much better performances (which was one flaw of earlier versions) and easier theming.
It's going to heavily depend on the functionality you need. You'd need to explain the needs and usage a bit more. Is there a reason you can't just let someone like wordpress.com run it for you? This alleviates all the headache of tracking down updates to 3rd party plugins, security errata etc. There's enough core functionality with the included plugins (they call them widgets) for most general website/CMS uses. You could try using the free option and if you want a custom domain and other stuff then pay for it.
Since others are mentioning it, on the topic of editors I prefer vim with a few plugins and tweaks.
Have a squat over at the hobo house.
You may instead consider a static site generator (there are a ton, jekyll, hugo, a google search for static site generator will turn up a bunch)
Then your server load is much lighter by getting out of server side anything by people just reading), you can still provide search most of the time (lunr). By avoiding a CMS, you are less likely to have a gaping security hole (e.g. my team has an internal only git server to coordinate maintaining it and building it, then uploading it to a dumb static server).
So step one is considering whether you really *need* a CMS, a lot of folks really don't.
RespondCMS looks promising. I've used its predecessor and that was nice too. It's useful for CMS sites that need bootstrap widgets and non trivial layouts that stack on mobile.
GetSimple may not be the best CMS in general, but it fits the bill for me, simple and fast, with a comprehensive set of features that keeps growing, good and fast support (most of the time) and no database. Simple to install, simple to manage, simple to update, and very fast. Broad choice of themes that are easy to customize. I converted a text-based site to GetSimple in an afternoon. I cannot say in detail how it compares to the big CMS you listed, but I can tell you that the learning curve is not nearly as steep (I tried two of them), and I do not feel that I have handed my life to somebody else.
The best CMS is no CMS. Seriously. Everything out there is rubbish under at least one scenario.
My "static file" CMS is the most stable and easy to fix, but it doesn't scale well with having to regenerate 60,000 text files. The point at which you stop using static files is when you have more than about 50 pages.
A semi-static CMS (once where the pages are generated on the fly, but always served from the cache until marked stale) is the best compromise for a single-server (web, files and database on the same machine)
Dynamic CMS's are utterly rubbish depending on which direction you take them. If you need scale, don't consider wordpress at all, The only thing Wordpress is good for is attracting hackers and spammers once it misses an update. Still if that's your forte you can just turn commenting off, delete xmlrpc.php and it will be pretty reliable. But it's a resource pig, requiring 250MB of RAM just to render a page with the amount of godawful plugins people use.
Joomla and Drupal are the "best" free CMS's you can get and they they scale somewhat better. BUT. Drupal adopted the Symphony framework and sites that use Symphony tend to be some of the most godawful slow and hacker-friendly sites in existence. Joomla has much less feature creep, but Drupal are more the same than different, they both use unwieldy template systems which means that unless you want to know yet-more-macro-rubbish, you're in for some pain.
If you are already using Joomla just upgrade the hell out of it and stick with it. It's often more of a pain to switch a CMS (due to the losses in meta data) than it is to just write your own "static page" generator based on the data already in the backend.
https://www.getnikola.com/
If your users can write markdown they can write nikola pages. I have mine attached to git hooks so publishing is done by pushing and pulling.
Additionally GitHub pages.
My company, over my objections uses Wordpress for a CMS on 100+ websites. Why do I object? Because Wordpress is not a CMS. Wordpress has good support for blogging built in but that's it. How many of those sites that we maintain have a blog? Exactly one, and I'm the only poster, we don't allow comments and yes I would be more comfortable using notepad. (Textmate has long been my editor of choice). Wordpress is a mediocre theming engine due to it's lack of support for basically any content that is not text. Even images are not intuitive to work with and things like putting images in insert/callouts means writing html in the plain text composer thus breaking the rich text composer. We toss plugins and more plugins at basically everything because the guy that does most of the website buliding doesn't understand how to build a real theme and uses the same paid for theme for everything then customizes it into slow agonizing complexity so that when I'm called on to fix something because one of those plugins needs updated... it becomes a three hour ordeal minimum.
So why do you want a CMS? To apply themes? To allow others to edit content?
My favorite CMS is the hierarchical file system, well formed html with css. It is hard for others to use because let's face it the average PHB can't use notepad let alone understand HTML but static html is really hard to hack or break with an update. Keeping the site in a version control product like git can also be beneficial as you can edit locally, and "git pull origin master" on the webserver (you do have two physically separate with DNS load balancing right?) Oh and it supports every content type you can put on the web without plugins. You do have to do a bit more work to get things like a site map but I in my humble experience... I have to do that work even when using Wordpress or Drupal anyways because the sitemap plugins are badly flawed...
rather than say "its the best!" I'll just say it is an alternative to far heavier systems like those mentioned in OP. https://bolt.cm/
I think this has been said, but worth saying again.
A couple of years ago, we replaced a complex (and, clearly, superfluous) CMS setup etc. with a couple of overnight scripts that generated some (pricing, it was financial services) static html. Enough for what was needed and goodbye performance and maintenance problems.
More recently, I used Joomla for something I'm now stuck with, because the users don't know how to administer it. Wordpress would probably have been better.
If you have a couple of pages, to be updated once every six months, then get an html editor or (better) learn a little html your good self. We teach it to 8 year olds.
So the moral of this story, is that there isn't 'one best' and it depends. Like Wargames, the best CMS in certain circumstances may be 'no CMS'. As a really old person, I'm often amazed how the requirements and user analysis stuff is forgotten in an immediate rush for (often inappropriate) tools.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
setup a git repo
vi webpage.html
git add .
git commit -m "The Website"
git pull origin
git push origin
rinse repeat
Compare Content Management Systems http://www.cmsmatrix.org/
I found Statocles (based on Mojolicious) the right way to build sites with nearly-fixed text content and a few up-to-the-moment database-backed bits that can talk to almost anything front-end or back-end.
If you know HTML/CSS a flat file structure with dynamic XSLT stylesheet templating might be a good option.
The advantage is that the complexity of using a database is removed. Also the complexity of the web-based GUI is removed. Fairly simple XSLT programming will automatically create navigation bars and the like. XSLT is pretty well standardized (included in all modern browsers, too, but that doesn't matter for this) so it should be pretty future-proof.
So how do you do this?
XSLT is a language to represent XML->XML transformations. As long as you are willing to write your content in valid XML or XHTML (or add a tidy step), then running it through an XSLT processor can wrap it with a template. The template can be intelligent, for example looking up the navigation bar specification from a separate file, and using the title, h1, etc. to determine which navigation bar entry is current. On Linux, the command-line xsltproc processor can be very handy for testing, and mod-xslt is a plugin for Apache that will do dynamic XSLT translation.
XSLT has a bit of a learning curve -- functional programming language and all that -- but this approach achieves the vision of separating content from style and templating. It can also be layered with scripting languages (mod_wsgi for Python, php or perl if configured to generate valid XML) to support dynamic content, so the script generates simple, untemplated XHTML that is filtered by mod_xslt, adding the appropriate style templates.
It seems counter-intuitive, but the Simple Machines Forum is actually an excellent base for a CMS. There are a number of CMS-plugins for it, thousands of themes and extensions, and almost all of them are free. SMF is open source.
- excellent, fine-grained user management
- active development
- clean code, easily modifiable
- large user base
- vulnerabilities are far and few between, and fixed aggressively
- literally thousands of plugins and extensions
- excellent support forums
Personally I like TinyPortal, ezPortal, and PortaMx, but there are others.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I like Craft CMS. https://craftcms.com/
It's more hands on that most CMS but I like the fine control you gain.
yes the real 'sharing' economy --> the rest of you are bit flipped chrome polishers and can't code and use stuff derived from MS open source aka classic ASP otherwise only the best .js libraries will be rolled into a browser api --> google rolls over when typescript gives them an angular for number 2 in Peter Norvigs fart-official-in-smelly-gents
TL;DR version: A CMS will let you get a very nice website up faster, but you pay for that with with a long term maintenance nightmare. Go static unless you specifically and absolutely need dynamic content.
The problem with virtually all CMSes is that they security-hole ridden messes. If you use, say Wordpres, you have to be prepared to babysit the thing on a daily basis because new vulnerabilities are being found and fixed constantly. And heaven forbid that an update to the core code base breaks a plugin you happen to use, and that plugin is no longer maintained.
It's just not worth the effort. There are plenty of tools out there that will let you work on your website locally as if it were a CMS, but the final output is plain static pages. Unless your site specifically *needs* dynamic content, such as being able to allow users to make comments on articles, etc, a CMS is unnecessary.
A classic tool is dreamweaver. There are plenty of open source static CMS generators you can find, with just a little googling.
z/70 is nouveau :)
Joomla: The Shit. No not good. Shit. Concepts and the way Joomla requires you to do things is ass-backwards.
Wordpress: Convenient for users. Looks prettier. Shit.
Drupal: Not familiar enough to say. Never read anything particularly good about it. Supposed steep learning curve; barebones out of the box.
ProcessWire: If you like to code, enjoy power and security. This might be what you are looking for. V3 is shaping up interestingly.
XSLT?
It's a very cool language. I became somewhat of an expert on XSL a few years ago (It is also not so easy to grok), and started the whole "my only tool is a hammer" thing. Annoyed the hell out of lots of people. My ugly mug now graces many dartboards as a direct result.
The biggest problem is that XSLT 1.X is pretty much worthless, and XSLT 2.X is only supported by commercial systems. Also, you need to get your hosting company to install something like the Saxon engine.
It seems like most of these recommendations are all PHP based. My team has mostly Java/C# skills so it makes sense to me to find a CMS built with the tools we know.
Is the Slashdot community just more interested in PHP based CMSs or are there Java/C# based CMSs which should be on this list?
- Who is managing the content, and what is their skill level. ... should they also have publish permissions?). ... ie blogs, selling something (ecommerce), news feed, event calendars, image sliders, RSS feed, caching, contact form, image management for galleries, SEO management features for meta tags and Open Graph, etc and on and on. As some code-challenged individuals have mentioned, you could write all this from scratch. But why? Just take writing a CMS based event calendar. Think of recurring events. Look at how Google calendar does that. How many hours to come close to that funcionality (probably in the 100's of hours of programming time to re-invent a f'n wheel).
- How many people need to authenticate, for managing content, and/or accessing protected content. Do we need permission levels (ie a full blown admin and then someone is allowed only to write content
- How often does content typically change? An occasional page change is different than a site with an active events feed, active blog (maybe with comments, etc), promotions?
- The skill level of the person managing the site (ie the code and hosting environment)
- Features. This is a big one. If we are talking "basic page" type content, that can be handled by every CMS ever invented. Where it gets dicey, is building out potential CMS features from there
- Documentation and support
Assuming there is an important client relationship here, the worst thing you could do is write this yourself. a) it will very unfeatureful b) it will be really difficult to extend or add features to and c) if you get hit by a bus many people will likely be cursing your one-off POS.
That said, I've done tons and tons of WordPress and Drupal. I've dabbled in Joomla and Expression engine. I've evaluated concrete5 and several others on behalf of clients. My opinions:
- Anyone that claims php is inherently insecure is either living way, way back in the past, or just regurgitating something they read on the internet and wasting their breadth and your time.
- I have never seen a good reason to use Joomla over the others. Ditto Expression Engine.
- WordPress has hands down the best management user interface. It is less painful for clients to learn.
- WordPress has the best support / documentation in their overall ecosystem (ie official and otherwise). Want to do something you've never done before? WP is a good choice.
- WordPress has the best third party integration tools.
- WordPress plugins can be great, or really awful. Be very discriminating, and that can be a big plus (but very much a double edged sword here).
- WordPress tends to be easy to upgrade. There is a lot of effort put into making that really simple and very backward compatibility.
- WordPress started as a blog builder, and is hands down the best blogging platform out there.
- WP has really good responsive image handling built in (using srcset).
- WordPress (core) is probably the most secure CMS out there, despite the perception of the uninformed who are being swayed by click-bait blog headlines. It is the most scrutinized. Its is also the most targeted because of its popularity. Be wary of any plugin. Keep a secure server environment, and if you don't want to do routine updates, then do what you can to harden the system. (I manage a bunch of WP sites for clients. I have one that is running WP 2.6, which probably dates to 2009, and its not been touched by anything malicious because its hardened to the bone).
- Drupal can do more "site building" type stuff from within the CMS. To get comparable from WordPress, you need to write code or use plugins (boo). Things like blocks, views, content types and taxonomies, and triggers, can be powerful tools to build and manage a site. Views is particularly powerful, but the learning curve really, really steep.
- Drupal has bett
1200 baud? When I can't find enough wood for a signal fire, I just strip the insulation from the ends of the telegraph wires and tap them together using Samuel Morse's wholly sufficient code.
You kids and your "modern ways." Buncha pampered whiners.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
They are making some major changes to the structure, and the upcoming version 8 adds new data objects that will make it more than just the page centric pattern it was before.
So their upcoming version 8 does what Drupal did years ago (at version 5) and that's impressive?
And being able to make changes to an area right in that area on that page is a killer feature
Uh, what does that mean? As you wrote it you can do that with any CMS. That's what they're for!
The fact that the block architecture ensures you can add special custom areas very easily and in a modular fashion is also extremely helpful.
Yeah, Drupal has blocks, too. So you're awed that someone is reinventing the wheel?
I've worked with all the big CMSs, and tested them out. I've tested out a boatload of the medium sized ones as well. C5 was hands down the winner.
Well, why don't you give us a reason that should be the case? Because you're listing features that everyone else has as unusual, and features that everyone else has had for years as upcoming for your champion, and it's a bit perplexing why you don't think every other CMS has the same functionality (they do) and you haven't explained why this one is better in any way as a result... like everyone else who has mentioned it in this thread.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Heck why not an iis based one such as umbraco - platform was not specified.
The best CMS
Liferay is a solid enterprise platform that incorporates CMS functionality.
I've been Using Joomla since the pre-Joomla 1.5 days, so have seen the arc of development. The current 3.5 version is light years ahead of the 1.5 era, especially in terms of the user experience and upgrades. I am a retired computer database admin, but do not have MySQL or PHP skills. If I was well experienced in those two languages, I might be a lover of Drupal. But without PHP background, Drupal is daunting. So that took it off my plate. I rarely get into the PHP code, though I've dabbled in replacing a line now and then. Mostly, I use and revel in the menuing system, which like Wordpress, lets the entire edifice be managed.
:).
It is worth mentioning that Wordpress is the most popular CMS in the world, at 26.4% of the entire Internet (gazillions of sites), that Joomla is second at 2.6% of the entire Internet (millions of sites), that Drupal is third at 2.2% of the entire Internet (millions of sites),and the rest come in at or under 1%. Wordpress is a blog-specific CMS, while Joomla and Drupal are general purpose CMS's.
If I were upgrading a 1.5 site to a current 3.5 site, it depends on how complex the site is, specifically how many articles. If less than 100, I would do it manually, and copy each article by hand. Larger than that, and I would use a migration tool. Look here: https://docs.joomla.org/Joomla.... That being said, I have wasted a lot of time on migration tools, and I usually opt for a manual rebuild. Ultimately, it is faster and much cleaner. Think of a Windows "upgrade" vs a Windows "clean install". Similar experience. Easier but clunkier
What I love about Joomla 3.5, over 1.5 is that the upgrade process has gone from ugly to good. In Joomla 3.5, you simply look in two places, the "Joomla Component" to upgrade the Joomla Core, and the "Extensions/Update" manager to upgrade all extensions. To upgrade, simply click the "Upgrade now" button, and "Voila", the upgrades are completed within a few seconds. Light years ahead of the manual processes needed in Joomla 1.5. This means ongoing administration is quick and simple. It is worth mentioning too, that Joomla 3.5 is completely designed to be automatically scalable from Smartphones to Tablets to PC's, where Joomla 1.5 was strictly PC's.
Manually, I would first create an empty 3.5 site. I would then install a current template and try to configure it to look as much like the original as I could. This actually will be the hardest step, and the most artistic. Then I would first create and copy over all the articles and categories as needed, then later the menues. The BEST way to copy articles is to switch to the HTML view, and copy the pure HTML code. Trying to copy the wysiwyg view is never satisfactory. Articles can be copied at the speed of CTRL-C, CTRL-V, which is pretty fast. Then I would create the menu structure and assign the articles and categories, as in the original. Finally, I would examine all the addons, the components, modules and plugins that were added to the original. It will be necessary to find the 3.5 equivalents. Install each one, and configure it as close as you can to the original.
I usually copy the images for the "image" folder lock stock and barrel to the "images" folder on the new site. While Joomla 3.5 does away from the need for the "stories" folder (it was required in Joomla 1.5, not needed but ok in Joomla 3.5), it will still be true that the copied over articles all point to the "images/stories" folder. So unless you want to modify every image link in every article, you can just leave them as they are.
I might add that the two extensions that I always insist on are the JCE editor component and the Akeeba backup component. Both are free, and superb. Good luck however you go.
Yes. However, the reasons to do it yourself are also well known. Further, security is becoming more and more of a problem, and frankly, has become the largest reason in the room to consider a custom CMS by a huge margin. Wordpress etc. brings features, but it also brings risk, and very large amounts of it, which in itself will cost a goodly amount of time and effort, almost all of it unpleasant. You have to disable the various back-door mechanisms, keep up with security updates (and then again, disable the back-door mechanisms), vet each and every plug-in line by line (waiting for others to discover vulnerabilities and addressing them some time after they are published on the web is an invitation to disaster), and you can still end up writing your own functionality because of the low-quality and/or high-vulnerability natures of various plug-ins.
There's a very wide range of skills among those we so casually call "programmers." There are plenty at the higher end who can add whatever, whenever, and turn it into a revenue-generating process rather than an irritation. Not to mention a certain degree of job security.
Here's a red flag. How many features take "a couple of weeks to implement" for a competent programmer working with a decently designed system? We're talking about a CMS, not launch code for the space shuttle. I'd expect a half a day for the vast majority of more complicated features, particularly if your initial architecture is half reasonable.
You want easy? Wordpress is about as easy as it gets. Just keep in mind, it's not just easy for you. It's easy for everyone. Including hackers.
On the other hand, you want hacking security, job security, control, precise targeting of needs, choice of implementation language(s), and the opportunity to design instead of swap black boxes around? Then a custom CMS is not an unreasonable path to consider in many cases.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The answer is Quills.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CA...
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Two years ago I was in the same situation. I looked into Joomla, Drupal, Typo3 and Magento. They all seemed so complicated. So I started to create my own php framework (had database knowledge enough to do so). Later on I had( the opportunity) to learn Joomla for a project and realised that these systems are complicated for a reason. Reasons I saw now that I developed a very small cms myself. To my experience Joomla is well supported in terms of community and plugins and reasonable simple to adapt to your likes. Magento that's a different case. Drupal, I have no hands on knowledge but I do know that it is not supported on all hosting providers. That it is a bit heavier on the server. So I should go for Joomla.
OpenCMS (Free)
http://www.opencms.org/en/
Unless you want your sites to be patched and your server rebuild every now and then because of:
WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and their unsecure plugins and bad coding practices...
OpenCMS does not have a lot of plugin, but if you want something that high profile customers can update their content,
without paying IBM WCM (pronounced wee-cam) millions of dollars, that is a VERY good solution
and it scales well to over 1M traffic / month / site / box in a load balanced environment.
You just need JDK + OpenCMS + Tomcat + MySQL (Master-Master) + Apache with mod_ajp / mod_balancer / mod_proxy / mod_redirect
Very low maintenance, but the developing cost will be a bit higher than PHP, since you have to do some Java development for fancy modules.
If it's just for a small business, public facing, etc, then there are many viable suggestions already. Yet if your working on the enterprise level, inside a Microsoft AD domain architecture, the only viable choice is Sharepoint. It requires a chunk of hardware, even multiple machines, but if you have multiple internal teams that need their own CMS deploying new Sharepoint sites from a farm is pretty effective. Expensive, but effective.
run!
out of a wet paper bag I prefer Drupal. Its a bit weird at first once you get past the taxonomies and needing to put in custom code into the template.php file to allow you to use different templates per node path yoursite.com/mypage yoursite.com/mypage2 you can build amazing sites. Best module to learn would be views as you can present your data in many ways just by clicking some buttons. Add in Ubercart for smaller Ecoomerce sites or Drupal Commerce for bigger ones and you're set.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
... to check out ExpressionEngine. Seriously.
You got offline editing, version control and variables.
See? Even you can use it!
http://www.slashcode.com/www.slashcode.com/about.shtml
It's a wiki compiler, which makes it a lot more secure than CMSes which render pages on the fly. It looks very bland right out of the box, so you need to do some CSS work. But it has many plugins, supports different kinds of markup languages, and can be easily extended (if you know Perl).
https://ikiwiki.info/
Don't know which one is best - it seems they are all bad.
But I do know which one is the worst: SharePoint.
Anyway, this approach looks interesting: https://developmentseed.org/projects/healthcare-gov/
And while we're at it, perhaps any Jekyll-based workflow with a good editor and some content publishing automation would do better than those monstrous database-backed security nightmares.
24Watch by Orases (orases.com) built on CakePHP 3.x
I've used both Concrete 5 and Drupal. Concrete 5 isn't as powerful, but is easier to use for normal users. I'll set up a web site for coworkers and but I definitely don't want to be involved every time they want a new page. Granted it's been a few years since I've used Drupal, but it was a confusing mess of crap before. I used Jooma as well, and while it looked nice, it was rather convoluted. Concrete 5 seems easier for newer users and is very easy to maintain. Concrete 5 isn't perfect, but neither are the others.
But honestly, picking from any of those three would be a decent choice. I'd stay clear of wordpress since it's just too basic for doing anything but a blog. Anything I wanted to do required some skanky plugin. And being a top target, you really have to stay on top of security updates.
I don't know, but it works for me.
The response here are ridiculous and based on a senseless loyalty to idealistic code architecture and are largely useless in the real world.
This guy is taking over a site.. who knows what the customer will ask for next. Say tomorrow they say "I want to sell a product on my site, and have a popup ad/newsletter signup on the homepage with exit intent behavior, and a blog. Can you add all of those this week?" If you are using anything but Wordpress, you're in for a major problem.
WooCommerce has an amazing plugin ecosystem. Wordpress itself has the best plugin ecosystem of any CMS period. Anything you want is there - and most importantly, almost all of it can be implemented by the average person with zero coding involved. You can add the blog, ecommerce, with a ton of features: Wish lists, integration with authorize.net and other payment systems, countless other things, all with zero coding whatsoever. Sure, the more plugins you add, the less secure it is, but nothing is secure anyway, so just make sure you have good backups and a tech wizard on call if you suddenly have repeated attacks or something, and you're delivering amazing value to your client with a minimum of effort.
If you're using anything but Wordpress when you don't know what your client might want next, you're just being hard-headed.
Hubzilla (http://hubzilla.org) is a powerful platform for creating interconnected websites featuring a decentralized identity, communications, and permissions framework built using common webserver technology.
If you want to build a website that can support decentralized authentication and access control **across independent websites**, you should learn what Hubzilla can do for you.
Wordpress is designed to be insecure.
There are two simple rules which apply to many things in multi-user computing and, therefore, also to CGI:
Don't allow execution where you can write.
Don't allow writing where you can execute.
Wordpress fails this miserably, which is why Wordpress is the top phishing hosting platform on the planet. They've said that they don't want to change this because they prefer ease to end users over doing things properly. This is a horrible idea because people don't update when things are working, particularly if they know so little that they require this "ease".
In the opinion of many people who AREN'T Wordpress developers, you don't make something both simple AND insecure - you stick with secure, and if that's too complicated for some people, then that should be their problem. Don't foist that insecurity on everyone because of the inabilities of some people.
The solution is simple: set permissions to comply with those two rules. When it's time to install a plugin or do an update from within Wordpress, change the permissions to insecure, Do the update / install the plugin, then set the permissions back.
Do you think the Wordpress people would do this? Hell, no! This is how they push people to pay to host on wordpress.com! "Oh, you're not smart enough to keep your own site secure, so pay to have us do it."
From a sysadmin perspective, having to patch a server, drupal, and related components, as well as deal with a secure, repeatable template for hundreds of sites is a pain.
How about the headless CMS route? Go with Contentful for the WYSIWYG users, and the web devs can stick with static file generation via Jekyllrb. Then deploy your site and related DB, search, etc. components via Docker containers.
Dude, at least come up with something original. That 'toon has been posted here something like 57,000 times already.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I've got a web designer friend who prefers Joomla, in large part because it works similarly to the design tools he's used to...though he fully admits that it has a much bigger learning curve than others.
My personal blog is run on WordPress. This is, in large part, because it's a blog and intended to be one. I like the fact that there's a mobile app for quick uploads and microblogging. I've never had to write a line of code to make anything work. I use a few plugins to make it work, namely The Shield and IQ Block Country to make my blog much more secure.
I'm not a web designer, and I don't claim to be. I just want to blog. Wordpress helps me do that much better than the other CMS's I tried - Ametys, Concrete5, Silverstripe, and at least one other one whose name escapes me. There were always drawbacks to the others - theme availability, responsive/mobile layout compatibility, media management, or something else - Ametys requires Tomcat, which required a special hosting account (I tried both Arvixe and HostISO, both became a world of regret), and even in a sandboxed environment, lots of things were much more complicated than they should be.
I'm certain the Slashdot groupthink goes against Wordpress, and there are legitimate reasons why - PHP and security spring to mind. Even so, I've been hack free, and it's allowed me to focus on content, rather than implementation.
If you have complex content use Drupal. If you have a blog use wordpress.
I have used CoreMedia CMS in my last company. It is an enterprise grade software with lot of bells and whistles. Over the years, it has become better. However, it is somewhat rigid, and not customisation friendly.. this can become a huge problem if your client is a news media outfit trying to reach social media market urgently with crazy creative ideas. Scaling comes at a huge cost, so be ready to buy/rent lots of servers. Furthermore, whole software is written in Java/Spring... which may explain the drain on resources... and if Java is your cup of tea, you may like it (Disclaimer: I hate Java with a passion). And finally, licenses are quite pricey.. so this solution will only work for giant corporations with sizable lucre under their HQ.
Then I happened to work at a hand's distance with WordPress earlier this year. Security is a major problem as many highlighted. There are other administrative issues (e.g. can't make admin accounts for tech staff to troubleshoot things). Unless you have a caching mechanism on the front, expect 10+ seconds of latency YMMV.
In my opinion, there are no one size fits all CMS in the market at this point. All comes with some "gotcha".
Wordpress.com - don't self-host because you don't have the experience to secure and maintain it properly. Once you start adding plugins, the maintenance and security issues pile up exponentially. It _can_ be both performant and secure, but only by someone who REALLY knows what they're doing.
[Caveat: I've worked for large companies in this space since 2000 and do this for a living. I also am a avid supporter of open-source software and an active contributor to GPL and Apache-licensed software projects.] In order to try to sidestep some of my personal bias, I'm not going to recommend a solution, but I will let you know what the drawback is to using an open-source solution for this kind of thing and where the line in the sand is for what a large implementation would want, say a Fortune 500 company, vs. a small brick-and-mortar company or medium size business. For a small company who runs their own hardware, and has a few IT guys selecting the stack and has little or no budget; then the most likely solution that will work is one of the popular open source frameworks. Even more so for a medium-sized company because if IT is running the show then there is enough hands-on-keys to work around all the obstacles and find solutions to common problems, growing pains, customizations, etc. There comes a point, though, where the inflexibility of these systems shows through and the design of these have you painted in a corner so much so that you're virtually rewriting half the stack to do things they way you wanted it. On the other hand, if you wanted a simple solution and the design fits your needs then that's fantastic. You don't get security as a guarantee so unless you have a network admin with a brain, you're going to have some serious problems one day. Once you get out of that space, though, in larger companies the first thing that you don't have is an IT-run solution. Sure, you get a server maintained by a more general IT group of admins who really don't want to look at someone's code to figure out why the server is performing or not performing. It's not a question of ability or talent, it's because they're much more worried about keeping the exchange server running, keeping sharepoint up, and possibly 25 other production systems. So troubleshooting a server used by the marketing department is not something they would want to sign up for willingly. This is generally the point at which all open-source solutions fall flat; because once you want to customize them, apply regular updates, etc then it requires some level of support. The open-source products generally require so much customization that the supportability and upgradeability is questionable at best. So either you use a commercial product designed to be upgraded, or you use an open-source product and put more sweat equity to keep it patched over time. More importantly, many of these solutions do not scale terribly well in some areas compared to the larger enterprise systems. If you're trying to serve 50+ internal users and publish content to be viewed by folks in the millions, chances are you're also willing to actually pay money for a system that was designed for that kind of thing. As scary as they look, this is where the scale of things like J2EE start to make a lot more sense. It's no good to try to have a single point of failure (aka one single Authoring content server) when the daily operation of your website can be monetized in the hundreds of thousands. Putting J2EE aside (as I have for the last five years), unless you're using platform built for horizontal scale then things like failover or on-demand scaling will really bite you hard the moment the server goes down during that critical close of the quarter -- when everyone and their cousin is trying to meet their deadline. So back to the recommendation: Use an open-source solution but only after you've assured yourself that you have the resources on-hand to keep it running, and it will absolutely meet your demands of scale now and in the future. Otherwise whatever you put together today will just get chucked in the bitbucket within 2-3 years. Same goes for commercial products too, but generally speaking if you're in a position to pay for one of those then you're also likely to invest in your people to support them as well. Either way, you get what you pay for whether it's the license/training cost of commercial vs. customization and salary time for someone to maintain something that was "free." Free software means freedom, it's not always free from an operational perspective at the end of the day.
Of course.
Do you have something personal against C5? Because you did almost exactly the same comment to two posts with completely different points?
Anyway, whether or not drupal did it a few years ago, it's about implementation. I actually DID explain what I liked, but whether you understand what I meant or not, it doesn't mean my points were invalid. The last time I checked (admittedly a few years ago) only one other cms did in context editing. Like, if you had a blog, you could drag a block of content, or an image slider in on that page, right there, while looking at it, tweak the content, and see how it will work. With most things, there is no need to go to the dashboard/backend.
I arrived at this "need" for a customer that literally said he wanted his website to be as easy to use as his fantasy football site he frequented. Now, the issue is, that site was very good at only one thing, but he liked being able to see the changes inline, as they would appear. And not just having to go into a wysiwyg editor to do all that, but be able to add custom areas with different specialties wherever they wanted. Drag and Drop, tweak the content in a logical fashion (for an image slider, add the images, text, titles, etc, and then just hit save).
The page centric paradigm C5 had some use cases where data objects would help, so they added it. So, you are offended because they are adding features that you have had, but yet your CMS still doesn't have some features or implementation they do have? This is the WHOLE POINT! Each CMS has it's benefits and drawbacks. Some did X first, others, Y. I pick android as my platform for my phone, you may pick iOS. They both evolve differently. Some people here may be desperate for a feature in one that they didn't realize was native to another. It may be that the implementation of data objects is more or less flexible or usable than in Drupal, frankly, I don't know. If you would like to show me how their in context editing in drupal blows the lid off c5, I'd love to see it. But frankly, like I said, for end users, and I've had a good number of them, they seem to pick up C5 really fast and like the customizing options and flexibility.
So, you enjoy Drupal for what it does have, and I like C5 for what it has. I was pointing out they were eliminating a pain point in a nice way in the next version, which some people who have evaluated C5 in the past would likely want to know. I was providing info.
Finally, your point falls on it's head. You asked for a reason that is the case? I said it clearly: "I look at how easy it is for end users to pick up and customize". That's the important part, and when I last checked, C5 beat Drupal by a lot. That could have changed, admittedly, but in just checking a v8 video demo on youtube, it's no where NEAR as elegant and clean and usable for users. It's night and day.
See for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Move away from those garbage PHP frameworks and try these less garbage Python ones. Drupal is absolute worst choice you can make. I know, I used to use it.
Go here: http://www.opensourcecms.com/
Open Source CMS has the various offerings grouped by purpose/application/specialty. It also provides links to CMS demo sites.
FWIW, I'm using Concrete5. It's okay. Seems to be getting better.
I can also suggest trying e107: http://e107.org/
An effective "democracy" creates the illusion the people have a say in their government.
"I've built more than a few static websites (I use Sublime Text 3 or Atom, not some fancy-pants WYSIWYG doohickey) and am quite familiar with CSS, but databases not so much. "
Are you the only one involved?
There is HTML, Javascript, PHP, Java, Python, XML, SQL and a whole mess of other technology that is involved with web site programming.
As a consultant I get asked this kinda quick question on a regular basis. There is no quick answer to this. The general answer is to take the time to understand the requirements, understand the technology, understand the tradeoffs, understand the staffing, understand the testing, understand security and then do a bake off of at least three solutions. If you are upgrading looking to scale out then does management really understand the financial commitment needed to replace and grow?
Be a job little or small, do it right or not at all. Too many people are glib these days about the complexity of software applications and as such get themselves in a whole lot of trouble in the long run.
Confluence is a wilki with super-flexible read/write permissions, awesome macros and tools, all combined with a document versioning system and it integrates with Jira if you're also working with devs who use that system.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
They're all dependent on crappy HTML and insane CSS.
I too have been looking for a very simple CMS. I can design and build small static websites; but when the "client" (a friend who I'll do a website for - for beer) wants changes, new pages new images - it becomes a burden. A fun favour becomes a job and beers don't cover it anymore. /.
My fault from saying I'd do it - but beer!
I just want a little UI simple to set up plugin - so they can edit text, up load images and leave me alone after it is built. I'll check out the recommendations - Thank you
Content Management Systems are meant to provide a general solution to allow people to rapidly produce a website. They are obviously not going to perfectly address your specific needs, which only a custom website will truly do. The point is that a CMS will save developers time and thus money and effort and produce a "good enough" solution.
To that end, you can pick virtually any CMS you want to, subject to it providing the features you need. What most people are influenced heavily by are whether they can find someone with the appropriate experience to do the work, and whether they can ensure ongoing support.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Drupal:
+ Reasonably solid code base. Making a good effort in recent versions to improve on that further.
- Massive overhaul of the API with every major release means no backward compatibility, which makes it difficult to upgrade, especially if you're using 3rd party modules.
Wordpress:
+ Popular: Lots and lots of third party resources. Dead easy to use.
- Badly written from the start; improving, but still awful. Regular and severe security flaws.
Joomla:
+ Generally good quality code base. Very easy to write extensions; good plugin architecture, and plenty of third party extensions available as welll.
- Some features can be a little over-complex to use.
We recently completed a thorough review of all three, and came to the conclusion that for us, Joomla is pretty much a no-brainer option -- given the choice of those three, I'd pick it every time for pretty much every project. Drupal would have been in the running as well, but the recent release of v8 means that none of the established modules are compatible with the current release version. I'll revisit Drupal in six months time and see how things are moving on, but past experience tells me that it's very difficult to find the "right time" to chose Drupal. Wordpress is just awful. Easy to use but rotten to the core.
However, our review also took in the rest of the CMS market, and there is a lot more out there an just those "big three".
Assuming your criteria is open source and PHP-based You might consider Typo3 ('Enterprise features'), OctoberCMS (new and trendy), SilverStripe (commercially backed) or Magento (good for shopping cart sites). For other platforms but still open source, look into Plone (security focussed), Umbraco (.Net platform), Django (for Python fans).
Ultimately, your choice will be as much about what you want to do with it than about the product itself. If you're planning on using third party plugins for all your functionality, stick with the three big ones because they have by far the largest choice. If you don't have much need for plugins then you can afford to spread the net a bit wider. If you want to write your own plugins, then chose one that is written in a language you know (this isn't the best way to learn a language), and which has a good plugin architecture.
What about Django? I have seen that research fields like it. Maybe because of the native integration of scientific oriented libraries(?).
For the best multi-lingual modular FREE system, use http://www.spip.net/. ...
It's basically mandatory for French public institutions, but it still works brilliantly when you power it up in English. Or any other common language.
The support community is naturally mostly French, but I found the English crowd to be very enthusiastic and helpful too.
Almost all of the documentation is translated into English, German, Spanish, Esperanto, etc etc - this makes it really easy to find support staff.
There are multiple template systems ready to go.
And it's written in PHP5, so you can easily add or tweak whatever you want.
Have a look at http://contrib.spip.net/?lang=en for the most common add-on libraries.
http://herbier.spip.net/?lang=en provides a list of all declared SPIP sites on the internet - some of them are pretty cool
Do you have something personal against C5? Because you did almost exactly the same comment to two posts with completely different points?
Neither comment mentioned any features which were only had by C5, but both spent a lot of time making unsubstantiated attacks against other CMSes. I still hadn't heard any examples of why yet another new CMS was worth looking at. I still haven't.
Finally, your point falls on it's head. You asked for a reason that is the case? I said it clearly: "I look at how easy it is for end users to pick up and customize".
But then no actual examples were given until this video. And what appears to be easy is to drag big blocks of content around, and theme some things. But usually, when a system makes that stuff so easy, it makes more complicated things harder. What happens when the user tries to make a modification more complex than just dragging a block to another page region?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
My requirements for "best" don't match anything I've found.
0) configuration files outside the web server tree
1) admin login page separate from regular login so that they can be protected individually by web server
2) Postgresql
3) prevents sql injection
4) separates code from data (photos, documents, etc)
5) doesn't require webserver to run as insecure user (web server process)
6) separates code from plugins allowing separate upgrades
The best CMS is the one that works for the problem you're trying to solve. So, in essence, it really depends on the project. Just going with what's the most popular isn't the right approach. In my opinion, the most popular CMS platforms are starting to show signs of their age (ie. WordPress, Drupal, etc.). There are more modern platforms that solve problems more effectively by allowing for a more modular approach while give designers and developers far more control over the design.
That said, I have two CMS platforms that I currently use as my go-to's:
SilverStripe - A PHP-based framework that allows for scaffolding out a full data model (very similar to how Ruby on Rails works). Allows for complete freedom over the design thanks to a simplified templating model.
Statamic - A flat-file CMS (no database!) that is incredibly fast and easy to work with. Designers like it cause they don't have to know any code to build complex sites.
I tend to use SilverStripe for projects that have a lot of relational data requirements, that is where there is a lot of relationships between various bits of information. Basically, anytime where the content requirements are rather complex. SilverStripe makes it much easier to create sites with complex requirements while still making it easy for content editors to manage the content.
Statamic to me is a WordPress killer. I use it primarily for sites that would otherwise end up as WordPress sites. That said, you can do a whole lot more out of the box with Statamic than you can with WordPress. It's also much, much easier to design with thanks to a very easy to use templating system.
I'm also looking at adopting October at some point. It's built off of Laravel, which is a very modern PHP framework. My understanding is that October is highly modular and allows for a ton of flexibility under the hood. Might be good for a project or two. :)
Jeff Whitfield jeffwhitfield@gmail.com "I can learn to resist anything but temptation..."
Bill's dad was /is a partner in Seattle's most prestigious law firm. Bill's family was/is prominent in the Greater Seattle area. I have not kept up , but Bill's mmom died some time ago. The Dad did temarry sometime later, to Mimi Gardner Gates, who had come to Seattle to become head of the Seattle Art Museum. Bill's mom, as I inderstand it, was very much a community philanthropist, which no doubt affected Bill's choice of the same type of woman to be his wife . And of coursec, his decision to initiate their personal foundation.,
I'm a Joomla! founder and I won't ever say it is the best, and anyone who claims Drupal/Wordpress/Whatever is "best" would be talking out of their backside.
Forget about the tech - *WHO* is going to be publishing content for this website? The reason there are so many CMS offerings is because there are so many different mindsets and working styles of content publishers (and so many different coders who program without bothering to ask people what they want). Please please please don't pick the tool based on a techie's input! Ask the humans that are responsible for managing and providing content for the website.
For example: My default choice is Hugo (http://gohugo.io/), fantastic for simple sites that are all about content (and not dynamic doodads and whoo-hah of dubious value). Essentially blogging with a static server, relegating scale, cost and security to relatively low-impact issues. If you want a WYSIWYG environment and lots of gizmos, or are not into writing markdown then this is absolutely not the setup for you.
Pick the tool based on who is maintaining the website/content. The tech under the hood is generally irrelevant, it's about the content, silly! :-)
"The mind is a terrible thing to, um, uh, oh bollocks." -- Me
Vim :)
Honestly, I think that at the moment the best you can might just be Enonic XP. I haven't tried it myself, but from what I hear from colleagues who have tried it - it works very well. Don't let the "XP" fool you, it's brand new and nothing like Windows XP. It does require more skill than Wordpress or other stuff, and might be more difficult to host as well - but you can do so much more cool stuff with :)