I’ve spent most of the weekend looking at Content Management Systems. Not necessarily my first recommendation for a fun weekend, but it had to be done.
I was after an Open Source one, and there’s plenty of choice. Some are primarily oriented towards news-type sites, such as PostNuke and Slash. Others deal more with the idea of a published set of pages, and control access to them, editing, finding your way around etc. The best known at the moment seem to be OpenCMS, Mambo, Plone (base on Zope), ezPublish and Midgard. That’s the sort I needed and yes, I’ve installed and experimented with most of them, except Midgard, which looked good but whose installation instructions ran to rather too many pages.
But the one I’ve been most impressed with and I think am most likely to use is the less well-known Typo3. If you have MySQL & PHP this is pretty easy to install, but incredibly powerful. It won’t give instant results in the way some of the others might, but it has a great deal going for it, if you take the time to read the very substantial documentation. It is remarkable that such a competent piece of Open Source software is so little known. It’s also unusual in being so well documented! Recommended.
Anyway, I must get back to the 120-page ‘Quick Start Guide’ before I get down to the serious stuff…
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