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Evaluating CMSes.

CMS's? Whatever.

I'm getting the urge to start up another new site, so I've been looking at different CMS packages that would work here on my Gandi Web hosting service (PHP with MySQL). So far I've looked at Fork, Frog, SilverStripe, ocPortal, Habari, Processwire, Pimcore, b2evolution, Get Simple, concrete5, along with the usual heavy-hitters: Drupal, Wordpress, and Joomla.

Wow, that's a long list. What I was looking for was pretty simple:

  • has to work with PHP and MySQL;
  • should be easy to create a new template for;
  • should be regularly maintained and have a decent user base, so that I don't feel I'm working on an obsolete product;
  • should be easy to maintain static pages;
  • should be easy to set up different site sections and add content to each one.

Out of the list above, I ended up feeling that Joomla best meets my requirements. The obvious choice would have been Drupal, because it does everything, but it's a bit of work to get it set up to do things that Joomla can do out of the box (or with some plugins).

I spent a couple of hours this weekend zipping through the Joomla sample content and tutorials, and have some ideas on where I can take it. No promises of showing my work anytime soon, but if you're looking at one of the above products for CMS needs, I found Joomla to be pretty easy to pick up and customize.

This article is my 5th oldest. It is 241 words long