I have dug around in the very large world of free CMSs, focusing on those based on PHP, and narrowed our options to a few. Without further ado:
Drupal. People love Drupal or they hate Drupal. It is famously unfriendly in its initial setup and configuration, and there are some basic things it doesn’t do out of the box, like storing images. But there are thousands of extensions and an enthusiastic user base.
Pro: will do everything we need it to do.
Con: steep learning curve.
ModX or SilverStripe. Friendly and lightweight, built on frameworks with well-documented APIs. Each has plenty of free extensions and an active user base. From what I can see they cut corners mostly in the area of workflow, which really shouldn’t be a problem for a small group like ours. They support forums and restricted areas (e.g. if we want to require a password to get into Lesson 4 or whatever). Pro: user-friendly, pretty interfaces, object-oriented code, short learning curve. Con: possibly too lightweight – a blow-by-blow feature analysis is forthcoming.
Concrete5. Similar to ModX and SilverStripe, except that many of the plug-ins are not free. On the other hand they’re not expensive – the forums extension is probably the priciest at $55. Going by their site they really try to make it easy both to develop and to create content. I am not yet sure whether they are actually better at this than SilverStripe or ModX. Pro: user-friendly, pretty interface, object-oriented MVC code, short learning curve. Con: again, possibly too lightweight. Further assessment is needed.
Wordpress. Wordpress won the Best Open Source CMS award (from Packt) last year, so I guess there’s something there. I am personally hesitant to build a site on Wordpress that is not at its heart a blog – I feel like we’d constantly be hacking things to do something they weren’t meant to do. But it does function as a powerful and flexible CMS and lots of people like it, so I think it should be part of our evaluation process. Pro: popular, powerful, familiar to all of us Con: intended to make blogs, which is not how our site is fundamentally structured
I’ll post the feature breakdown here by Thursday for your further consideration. But if you have strong feelings about any of the above (and I know from the poll that some of you do), now’s the time to speak your mind.
And you can log in and play with Wordpress right here. MODx has a later release with (apparently) significant differences; I’m going to install 2.0 on my hosted account to play with. Will update this post with a link when it’s running.
CMS options : the short list
Hi everyone,
I have dug around in the very large world of free CMSs, focusing on those based on PHP, and narrowed our options to a few. Without further ado:
Pro: will do everything we need it to do.
Con: steep learning curve.
Pro: user-friendly, pretty interfaces, object-oriented code, short learning curve.
Con: possibly too lightweight – a blow-by-blow feature analysis is forthcoming.
Pro: user-friendly, pretty interface, object-oriented MVC code, short learning curve.
Con: again, possibly too lightweight. Further assessment is needed.
Pro: popular, powerful, familiar to all of us
Con: intended to make blogs, which is not how our site is fundamentally structured
I’ll post the feature breakdown here by Thursday for your further consideration. But if you have strong feelings about any of the above (and I know from the poll that some of you do), now’s the time to speak your mind.
edit Here are links to live demos:
And you can log in and play with Wordpress right here. MODx has a later release with (apparently) significant differences; I’m going to install 2.0 on my hosted account to play with. Will update this post with a link when it’s running.