BrainBreach

A client of mine asked about our experience with different CMS’s available today. I gave him the following thoughts and review:
In my opinion, most CMS’s are built for no one particular. They try and contain your site, and any application therein, rather than compliment it. A CMS must be able to predict all of your needs. I haven’t found the crystal ball to do that, and I suspect it would be unreasonable to program anyway. Trying to reach a perfect generic state is the root of all CMS evil!

Many times the client’s needs don’t line up with a CMS. Do you want to manage content (pictures, articles, audio, video) in generic, stiff, ungraceful pages and over hierarchical admins? If so, then a CMS will probably work for you. Do you want a simple website that is easy for a client to manage? Then I have only one suggestion for you, at the bottom of this page.

With a standard Django site it’s easy to make certain pages work as a CMS, and other work alongside your main application. See, Django has a admin interface package that almost auto-creates and admin based off your application. Most of the time, where there is a budget, Django site is more appropriate than getting locked into a CMS.

However, if you want to know my experiences with some CMS’s, here you are:

Plone

Really heavy. Confusing to setup, heavy on resources, and only easy to customize the look via css. It has a tun of plugins which is great, and those probably aren’t too hard to modify. The end user experience is pretty good though, and it is very complete in features.

Drupal

Easy to setup, not very heavy on the server, a tun of good templates available for a low price. The admin experience is confusing, for both programmer and client. Lot’s of plugins, but not necessarily for the latest version.

Joomla

I had to ditch Joomla because there is no clean URL functionality last time I looked. It was a deal killer. No plugins or built in functionality that was reasonable.

Mambo

Confusing user experience with administering. If I can’t quickly figure out how to administer, I certainly won’t send a client to learn it.

Wordpress

Not a good CMS, but extremely easy to setup. Customizations through plugins are generally easy, but don’t offer a tun of flexibility for robust CMS needs. It’s a nice blog tool.

TextPattern

Easy to setup, administration is pretty simple, and markup is easy to learn. Easy to template. Not a lot of users, so customizations are really up to you.

SilverStripe

This is a good user experience when administering. It’s a decent option, but there is a lack of control with URL cleanliness and configuration. Certainly worth looking at.

ModX

Trendy and simple admin interface. Easy setup. Not much power when building anything BUT a simple CMS driven site. Some important features missing. The lack of releases might indicate poor code quality and support.

Radiant CMS

I am extremely impressed with this CMS. Take a look at the simple flexibility. It’s backwards from every other cms: It allows you to build pieces and compose them into pages and then a structure, as apposed to building your content inside ITS structure. Think in terms of pages, snippets and layouts.

This site, along with a few other of our online properties are ran by Radiant. It’s not particularly easy to setup which is its main downside. Modrails helps.