The Madness of a Web Designer….

I’ve spent the last three days doing almost nothing but test out various Open Source CMS packages.
Fot a long time, I’ve been thinking of using CMS for the WordPress. I’ve used WordPress for over five years for my blog; it’s very flexible, extremely customisable and it can be used as a CMS. However, getting it to work for a pure directory site requires more hacking and template rewriting than I’m prepared to do. So, with great reluctance, I’ve had to abandon WordPress for that particular project.
of the programs I’ve tried so far, only three stand out for me – Drupal, e107 and CMS Made Simple.
Both Drupal and e107 are in the running for the Oakleaf Circle site – they’re well-supported, have lots of modules and plugins and have fairly intuitive admin interfaces. e107 is the easiest to operate, but Drupal has completely customisable stylesheets (which is what a CSS maven like me demands), plus more themes. So I’ll be playing around with both of them for a bit longer.
I’m impressed with CMS Made Simple – it does what it says. Very much suited to small personal sites (although there are modules for blogs and forums), it’s easy to operate and highly customisable. I won’t be using it for Oakleaf, but it’s certainly what I’ll use for clients who ask for a CMS.

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2 Comments

  1. When you wish to compare different opensource cms, blogs …
    You can try live demos of them at http://www.opensourcecms.com/

  2. Yes, that’s a good resource that I’m already aware of – the reviews of the various systems are extremely useful. But for me, testing is much easier on my own PC, with my CSS and PHP editors. I have very particular requirements for the Oakleaf Circle site and haven’t found anything yet that completely fits the bill; also I like to customise everything (which is why I love WordPress’s Sandbox theme).