Choosing a CMS?

I'm looking for an open source PHP/MySQL CMS that I can use as the backend to my website.

My site consists of multiple quasi-independent sections, each with its own subdomain, that should be able to function as seperate sites. The range in style from blogs to articles to file libraries, but all share a consistent global menu system, footer text, 3-column layout, et c.

I've looked at PHPNuke, just because that's the only thing that jumps to mind, but I want to make sure I'm not missing anything before I dive in with it.

What are your suggestions? Is there anything better than PHPNuke for this type of thing out there?

Check out
http://www.opensourcecms.com/

for a site where you can test-drive 25(!) PHP based CMS's out there.

That said, I've spent A LOT of time evaluating CMS's (managing/building CMS's is my full-time gig) and the most flexible, manageable, powerful and easiest to use one isn't in PHP.

It's WebGUI, at www.plainblack.com . It has a relatively gentle learning curve, but for maximum performance it needs mod_perl. I can't say enough positive things about this CMS, and the development roadmap is very well-thought out as well.

I'm considering redoing ALL my web work (except maybe some e-commerce projects) in WebGUI. It's *that* good.

I've deployed about 15 CMS's in the last 3 years. Not a lot, but for all but the last 6 months, it was a part-time gig while I was in college.

One of my personal favorites is phpWebsite. It was ideal for a wedding show organization since it was easy for them to learn and use.

If you must use a Nuke family, use postNuke, they actually have a full time team dedicated to security. which is one reason why some of my business clients have chosen that CMS over others.

Typo3 is another CMS I like, but its a pain in the *** to install.

WebGUI is something I am still in the middle of evaluating. The funny thing is I find myself migrating back to perl for a great many things. My current consulting company's website is all .shtml pages. I actully went back to SSI.

We just set up an online mall for several artists in this area and using SMC Webmall, which is still in PERL with flatfile databases even after evaluating several differnet options. Granted I worked for another company that used it back in 2000/2001 when there litterally wasn't any other options other than write it yourself and Time to market didn't permit that option.

Thanks for the advice, guys. I'd really like to try out WebGUI, but I have a remote host, and it doesn't look like I'd be able to accomplish their installation without access to root on the server. I don't think my host has mod_perl, either.

I've been looking at Xaraya as an alternative. Has anyone had any experience with it?

WebGUI is more feature-rich than anything I've seen. It's up there with Plone/Zope and a successor to the ArsDigita system.

Xaraya is a little baby in comparison after looking at it. I've done a large amount of work on CMS's (including building a couple of huge ones, http://www.masslegalservices.org and http://www.neighborhoodlaw.org run on a codebase I created/maintain) and most of the projects hardly have the right to claim a CMS pedigree.

WebGUI has an extremely intuitive model- "pages" can be comprised of "Web objects" that you drop into place. A "Web Object" can be:

- An article (with multiple in-line WYSIWYG editor options and pagination)
- A calendar
- A discussion board
- The results of a SQL query, formatted how you want
- A site (or sub-site) map,
- Custom objects you create.

Permissions are group based- you can give specific users different rights to do different things to different parts of the site.

You can try out the demo at:

http://demo.plainblack.com/

After finding WebGUI, I don't know that I'll build another CMS. It (or features currently on the development roadmap) solves nearly all the problems I've encountered in building/managing large sites in a CMS.

plainblack.com doesn't seem to generate pages that are responsive to text size changes in Internet Explorer. That is, when I change the text size in IE, nothing happens to the page. (This is a common problem with CMS and BB software.) Is this inherent in all WebGui-generated pages or is it just a particular problem with plainblack.com's site?

Hi,

Be sure to check out the CMS we have been developing over the past year. It is quite advanced, read more about it at our homepage

http://eternitytechnologies.com

It is fully customisable, itegrates a WYSIWYG editor (Rich Text Editor), multi domain, sms support and much more.

For a demo visit

Management Interface
demo.eternitytechnologies.com/manage
username: admin
password: password

Live Interface
demo.eternitytechnologies.com

Feel free to ask any questions

Cheers,

Peter Swan
Co Architect
Eternity Technologies
staff@eternitytechnologies.com
http://eternitytechnologies.com

WebGUI is simple to set up, but very limited in what it can do. I have had experience with Xaraya since its first release. It takes a little to get the hang of it, but the starting documents help you along. Easily one of the most powerful CMS apps around. It comes from a nuke-related string of CMS apps, so it is still pretty universal in the way it works with a ton of security built into it. Definitely worth a look.

Does Xaraya cause passwords to be transmitted in the clear? If not, maybe it's worth a look.

I would try a Drupal CMS. It fullfills all your described features and is Open Source.
For multiple sites I would recommend Durpal with the newest CivicSpace . It can manage multiple domains with one installlation.

Greetings, Madcats
http://madcats.freezope.org/

This sounds like something that would help me out a lot, but I don't seem to see where Civicspace allows you to manage the multiple domains. Is there a doc that I could find regarding this that I didn't see on their site?

Try to look at opensourcecms.com.
There you can try and see numbers of popular CMS along with users review and comments.

My current favorite is Drupal (Portal), Etomite (Lite Portal), and TextPattern (Blog).

Look no further than www.joomla.org. It is a great, simple-to-use CMS. The community is uber-friendly, you get to know each other by the first name. International support and a great roadmap of feature and plug-ins.

e107.com and typo3.com is pretty nice CMS in opensource especially if you're looking for corparate site.