Brian Sweeting

I’ve been evaluating open source CMSs for a while now. It is a frustrating undertaking to say the least. There are so many frameworks, and within those frameworks there are numerous packages.

On one hand you have the “nuke” packages like Xoops, Postnuke, PHP-Nuke, etc. I have a hard time calling these products content management systems, because they are largely inflexible and force you into creating a site that is little more than an overgrown blog.

Then there are other frameworks that more closely fit the definition of a true content management system. Some of these would include Plone/Zope, Apache Lenya, Redhat CCM, and Midgard. These CMSs are great, but definitely not for the faint of skills. To take full advantage of these you really need to know the language they are based on such as Python, Java, or PHP.

This article at CMSWatch really summed up my feelings on this subject.