Right then,

the old "whats the best open source CMS" thread.
I recently did a comparion of some of the top open source CMS' and I would be happy to forward that document to anyone who is interested in it. The results were skewed by the client who put far to much weight on the activity of the surrounding community.

Initially we were going to recommend InfoGlue, because it seemed like a sound product, and we wanted to work with something Java based, but in the end we went with OpenCMS, because of it's active developer community.

In hindsight, this was a mistake. OpenCMS doesn't split up the content from the presentation layer nearly enough. I find that to make a nice looking site in OpenCMS, I am having to put tables and formatting into the content area. Not good.

If I had the choice of all the free CMS's I think the 2 most interesting ones would be brickolage and the one from Squiz.net.

Bear in mind the cost of development for an open source CMS can sometimes be more than buying one.

My gripe with Open Source CMS solutions, (and I'm coding up a site in OpenCMS in my other browsr right now), is that as soon as they are released as open source, the momentum of development seems to just stop.

The classic path to open source is for a company to write a bespoe system for the client, then realise the code is reusable, so either take on the CMS as a new product and start selling it, or release it as open source and make cash for consultancy.

If it becomes a new product, it shoots up in price but tends to have major releases every 6 months to fix bugs and add nice features.

If it becomes open source, it's free (whahey!) but it hardly ever gets updated, and you will find yourself spendng a LOT of time wrestling with bugs that never get fixed, and delving through community email archives trying to find out how to use functionality that should be in basic documentation, and would be if someone were payed to write it.

So thats the choice, expensive, but quicker with good docs and support, or cheap but frustrating and long winded.

Thats my experience so far anyway... i hear that squiz.net CMS isn't like that, but then that might be marketing.

On 15:30:04 26 February 2004 mikegb wrote:
>Many thanks, that's very useful!
>
>The big issue for me is that many CMS are designed as
>community CMSs not full-blown publishing ones.
>
>cheers
>Mike