7 ms·

To paraphrase Churchill, Wordpress is the worst CMS -- except for all the others. I'd love to find an open-source CMS (preferably in Python or Ruby) with clean

To paraphrase Churchill, Wordpress is the worst CMS -- except for all the others. I'd love to find an open-source CMS (preferably in Python or Ruby) with clean, secure, elegant code and a well-organized framework that comes with a friendly admin and active, responsive development community like Wordpress, but so far I've got nothing. (If anyone has any suggestions, please do feel free to share them!)

EwanToo 14y ago
And don't forget the amazing amount of functionality that's available for free using the plugin system. It's a classic software development problem - Wordpress's complexity is both it's strength and weakness, and will probably be it's downfall one day (but not just yet)
- chc 14y ago
  On the other hand, most of the free plugins are awful. Many of the paid ones are as well, in fact. Many plugins can bring your site to its knees as soon as five people look at it sideways.
  - JVIDEL 14y ago
    And the templates, some are simply STUNNING it makes you wonder why pro designers charge you so much for stuff that barely holds a candle to stuff you see on WP. Then you install the template and everything goes to shit, you have to read some of the stuff support writes to users, it boils down to "we sold you a broken product and now we will give you just a hint about how to get it to almost work". Still lightyears ahead of templates on other CMSs...
    - chc 14y ago
      > Still lightyears ahead of templates on other CMSs... Yup, but I think that's primarily because WordPress has a stranglehold on the market. Nobody will use another CMS because WordPress has all the stuff, and nobody will develop mass-market stuff for another content management system because WordPress has all the users. The network effect is strong, and displacing WordPress wouldn't be profitable enough to be worth the effort to counteract that effect. (Obviously this is a slight exaggeration — somebody uses another CMS — but I think it's pretty accurate from a bird's eye view.)
      - JVIDEL 14y ago
        I think the best way would be to come up with a way to port those templates to other CMS that doesn't involves rewriting the whole thing, or perhaps a wrapper?
        girvo 14y ago
        WP templates are so coupled to WP itself, I truly don't think it's worth it.
    - rhizome 14y ago
      and now we will give you just a hint about how to get it to almost work Whenever I've come across situations like this, I assume it's them fishing for consulting hours.
    - AznHisoka 14y ago
      Then you install the template, and realize the only reason it looks so good is because they have pretty top notch photos and pages filled with content.
- mikepurvis 14y ago
  I've found plugins to be extremely hit-and-miss, though. I was helping a photographer friend who bought a commercial theme, which broke admin-side Javascript when he did the 3.4 -> 3.5.1 update. We still haven't figured out exactly what happened, but it just reinforced for me again that a) Wordpress hasn't adequately documented which APIs are stable and not, b) Authors, even of paid add-ons, don't keep their stuff up to date.
  - chrisguitarguy 14y ago
    The theme replaced jQuery bundled with WordPress with some external version (eg. Google hosted or otherwise) and did it so on both the admin and front end. That's usually the cause of those sort of issues. 3.4 -> 3.5 brought up a lot of JS compatibility. Look in the theme's directory for `wp_deregister_script` and see if anything was deregistered and re-registered (`wp_register_script`). > Wordpress hasn't adequately documented which APIs are stable and not If it's it in a major release, it's stable. When you buy any piece of software you're relying on its author knowing "the right thing to do (tm)". The author of the commercial theme thought it was okay to replace some bit of core javascript and din't bother to check on it. Or they didn't bother to be specific about it -- only do custom JS stuff on their theme's options page or on the front end. It's easy to do that, but you have to know how to do it (it's not documented in the Codex).
bzudo 14y ago
I would love to have an open-source, Python based, CMS. Even better, one I could install on a GoDaddy domain, as easy as I can install Wordpress. To me, that is the biggest reason Wordpress is the best, except for all others.
- riccardoforina 14y ago
  Have a look at django-cms.org The "automagical installation" is something that can be done, but it's up to the provider to do it. A Python website (as well as for Ruby) ain't a bunch of files served by Apache, but something more... smart.
  - Jgrubb 14y ago
    Call me crazy, but being able to drop files into a docroot of an apache install and have them Just Work seems like a much smarter market strategy for uptake of your product than what can currently be done with either Python or Ruby. Then again maybe you had a different idea of "smart".
    - andybak 14y ago
      Yes, it's a better marketing strategy for new developers and the extra hassle to deploy Python and Ruby sites probably does put people off. But I'm not sure if 'good at attracting new developers' is the only criterion worth evaluating when picking a framework.
- pekk 14y ago
  Why do you insist on using GoDaddy? This is a particularly terrible ISP which severely and artificially limits your deployment options... why should your choice of blogging software depend on it?
  - Jgrubb 14y ago
    I might be wrong, but perhaps they mean "any generic commodity hosting company with a one-click installer", for which GoDaddy is the prime example.
MostAwesomeDude 14y ago
I would settle for an alternate-universe version of Wordpress that is clean, secure, and elegant. :3 But seriously, if one is to rid the world of PHP, Wordpress is a great place to start.
chrishenn 14y ago
I built a site using ProcessWire[1] a while back, it was a joy to use. Really clean modern php cms. [1] http://processwire.com/ http://processwire.com/
- mortenjorck 14y ago
  ProcessWire isn't just the best PHP CMS out there right now; I'd argue it's the best thing to happen to the CMS landscape in the last few years. There are more powerful CMSes out there, to be sure, but the crazy thing is just how completely unprecedented PW's power is for its ease of use. It's easy like WordPress, yet it's scalable to enterprise sites with deep content taxonomies. And it's elegant. Ironic for something built in PHP, I know, but working with its simple building blocks of templates and fields and its jQuery-like content selectors comes with a feeling of "why didn't someone do this a long time ago?"
FilterJoe 14y ago
Mezzanine is quite nice: http://mezzanine.jupo.org/ http://mezzanine.jupo.org/ It's Python (a Django app). BSD license. It has many advantages over Wordpress that I won't get into here, but all this is offset by one massive disadvantage: It rests on the Django framework. Django is a nice framework for web development but it takes at least a few months to learn for someone starting from scratch. The installation process for Mezzanine requires some Django knowledge. Installing Wordpress on the other hand requires zero PHP knowledge. A reasonably intelligent person can teach themselves Wordpress basics in days (the basics of self-hosted Wordpress, selecting a theme, selecting key plug-ins, etc.). No PHP required. With Wordpress, it's not too difficult to select a provider (i.e. Bluehost) and have Wordpress automatically installed within minutes using Simple Script. If Mezzanine could be automatically installed like this, I think it would quickly become a popular and much more maintainable alternative.
- JVIDEL 14y ago
  Some cloud providers have auto-installers, its all paid though.
  - FilterJoe 14y ago
    Can you name 1 or more cloud providers that have auto installers for Mezzanine? I'm not aware of any. Here's a post from 4 months ago comparing installing Mezzanine on a number of PaaS providers. None seemed anywhere close to as simple as installing Wordpress on Bluehost: http://appsembler.com/blog/paas-bakeoff-comparing-stackato-openshift-dotcloud-and-heroku-for-django-hosting-and-deployment/ http://appsembler.com/blog/paas-bakeoff-comparing-stackato-o... Read the comments and you'll find out that Mezzanine isn't yet compatible with Django 1.5, causing headaches for those trying to install it for the first time.
    - elithrar 14y ago
      > Read the comments and you'll find out that Mezzanine isn't yet compatible with Django 1.5, causing headaches for those trying to install it for the first time. Django 1.5 came out less than a month ago. Given the size of Mezzanine, it's not surprising that it hasn't been upgraded immediately. I'm not sure why this would effect the install process, either: any host that can handle Django apps is likely to have both 1.4 and 1.5 available at the very least.
andybak 14y ago
You could take a look at FeinCMS for Django. But seriously with Rails or Django - especially Django due to the admin site - a bespoke CMS is a fairly trivial endeavour. My initial CMS took a couple of days and it's been easy to extend it for every site that's come along since. It's a hell of a lot easier for end users than Wordpress and as it's bespoke for every client, they never get clobbered with chunks of the admin that bear only a loose relationship to their own content.
jordanlev 14y ago
I discovered Concrete5 ( http://concrete5.org http://concrete5.org ) a few years ago after building many Wordpress sites (large and small), and totally fell in love with it. It's not perfect, but it's much better than any other CMS out there for end-users, designers, and developers: * Editing UI is on the front-end -- users just go to the page they want to edit and click on things to edit them, which is much more intuitive than a back-end dashboard * Content on pages is a collection of "blocks", so each portion of content on the page can be edited separately (as opposed to one WYSIWYG editor for the whole page). I've even built a free addon that lets designers compose their own custom block interfaces ( http://concrete5.org/marketplace/addons/designer-content http://concrete5.org/marketplace/addons/designer-content ), so if you have a "employee bio block" (for example), you can have an image chooser, a textbox for a headline, a wysiwyg editor for the description, and a page chooser for a link instead of requiring the user to fidget with alignments, floats, and custom styles in TinyMCE/FCKEditor. * Create themes from your existing design / markup -- the CMS flows around your design as opposed to you having to construct your design around the requirements of the CMS (this is much more of a problem with Drupal than Wordpress, but still gets annoying in WP for non-blog-like designs). * Underlying architecture is fairly sane -- definitely has some idiosyncracies, but nothing like Wordpress (or Drupal or Joomla). There's a simple MVC pattern going on so you separate your model / controller / view code, and the underlying system has a decent "API" for working with pages, content, users, files, etc. Also, if you have very customized functionality, you can just create a separate page in your site and tell the system to not do anything... that you will handle everything yourself on that particular page or area of your site. The only downside is that it's not as popular as wordpress so the documentation is lacking and there are not as many free plugins and tutorials available (but hopefully this will continue to change as time goes on). But it has made building CMS-based websites so much more fun for me. Hit me up ( concrete@jordanlev.com ) if you want to discuss further or have any questions.
- wonderyak 14y ago
  I liked Concrete5 when I was playing around with it. I was very excited by its potential; especially looking at projects where maybe WP was overkill. Where the bottom fell out was in two areas: 1. Paid plugins I cannot rationally tell my clients 'this software might have a few cases where it is easier than WP to use and manage; but you'll be spending several hundred dollars replicating free functionality available on WP'. Its a non-starter. 2. The software still looks kind of 'hokey' compared to WordPress WordPress has lots of issues and there are a ton of other great alternatives. But, its like Facebook vs. all other social networks -- you go where the people are because it makes everything better.
ebbv 14y ago
I like ExpressionEngine if what you really want is a CMS.
- josephjrobison 14y ago
  Is ExpressionEngine better for medium to large sites? I've worked with it a bit and did not like it at all, just wondering what it's better for. Did not seem as intuitive for content creators or mom and pop site users.
  - ebbv 14y ago
    I don't think EE is intuitive for Mom and Pop people. If that's your market then WP or something else will probably suit you better. But if you're an actual business who can spend an hour training your Content Manager(s), then it's worth it, IMHO. It's a dedicated CMS and IMHO better to work on than WP.
  - kmfrk 14y ago
    It's annoying to configure, and the community is infinitesimal compared, but it has a stellar security record, and it's feels much more extensible. The main thing to consider is that the community isn't like Wordpress's, which is often a pretty big deal when tussling with it.
- tunesmith 14y ago
  As someone who hasn't spent a ton of time extending any CMS but uses a lot of frameworks, I enjoyed EE too during the short amount of time I used it. Out of wordpress, drupal, and EE, EE is the one where writing plugins felt like normal programming since they hooked right into code igniter. (Not sure how things have changed in the last couple of years though.)
  - ebbv 14y ago
    Still pretty much the same.
    - 14y ago
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
velodrome 14y ago
Avoid Joomla and Drupal.
the_imp 14y ago
I maintain a number of sites that use PmWiki [1] as a CMS. The community's small (though active), it's in PHP, and the editing isn't WYSIWYG, but the reason I ended up with it in the first place is how well the framework is organised and how easily add-ons can be packaged and included to add to or even replace core functionality. Templates are also completely separate from the PHP. One feature of PmWiki that I've yet to come across in any other CMS are PageLists, which allow you fetch semi-structured data and other content from the rest of the site and displaying it using a custom template. [1] http://www.pmwiki.org/ http://www.pmwiki.org/
IheartApplesDix 14y ago
To make up completely asinine quotes with no basis on reality -- Elephants like water, except on Tuesdays. I'm not really interested, but I love being a pretend expert on anything. (If anyone has any comments to flesh out this thread, please feel free to bump my comment!)
cdevroe 14y ago
I'm just catching up with this thread but the reasons that jshakes states in his blog post is some of the reason why we started hacking away on http://getbarley.com/ http://getbarley.com/ We'd love to open source it (API is built on CodeIgniter) when its ready. My .2 about the current state of CMSes is that it is time for a bit of a disruption. WordPress codebase is directly tied to a lot of very big publications being able to do business daily and I don't see it being rewritten from scratch any time soon. Unless, of course, a sub-project is created. That being said, there is a lot of room for new ideas, new approaches, and new CMSes to capture at least _some_ of what WordPress currently powers. Another reason why we started hacking away at Barley... we think it is time for something brand new that is MVC from a codebase and specifically built for HTML5 / Mobile from the front-end. We hope we're right.
omgsean 14y ago
Our CMS, Forge (http://factore.ca/forge-cms http://factore.ca/forge-cms) is a semi-open source (in that you're free to use it for whatever you want but we don't have a community built up for it yet) Ruby on Rails CMS that focuses on rapid application development. It's VERY opinionated (moreso than Rails) but it lets you get things done really quickly and mostly stays out of your way on the front-end. Shoot me a message if you're interested in checking it out.
spohlenz 14y ago
It's not open-source, but Wheelhouse (https://www.wheelhousecms.com/ https://www.wheelhousecms.com/) is my answer to not being able to find a CMS I could enjoy working with. It's Ruby on Rails based, so that power is always there when you need, but it then adds a flexible templating system for generation of content-editable fields (example here: https://www.wheelhousecms.com/blog/2011/8/flexible-templates-in-wheelhouse-cms https://www.wheelhousecms.com/blog/2011/8/flexible-templates...).

EwanToo 14y ago

And don't forget the amazing amount of functionality that's available for free using the plugin system. It's a classic software development problem - Wordpress's complexity is both it's strength and weakness, and will probably be it's downfall one day (but not just yet)

chc 14y ago
On the other hand, most of the free plugins are awful. Many of the paid ones are as well, in fact. Many plugins can bring your site to its knees as soon as five people look at it sideways.
- JVIDEL 14y ago
  And the templates, some are simply STUNNING it makes you wonder why pro designers charge you so much for stuff that barely holds a candle to stuff you see on WP. Then you install the template and everything goes to shit, you have to read some of the stuff support writes to users, it boils down to "we sold you a broken product and now we will give you just a hint about how to get it to almost work". Still lightyears ahead of templates on other CMSs...
  - chc 14y ago
    > Still lightyears ahead of templates on other CMSs... Yup, but I think that's primarily because WordPress has a stranglehold on the market. Nobody will use another CMS because WordPress has all the stuff, and nobody will develop mass-market stuff for another content management system because WordPress has all the users. The network effect is strong, and displacing WordPress wouldn't be profitable enough to be worth the effort to counteract that effect. (Obviously this is a slight exaggeration — somebody uses another CMS — but I think it's pretty accurate from a bird's eye view.)
    - JVIDEL 14y ago
      I think the best way would be to come up with a way to port those templates to other CMS that doesn't involves rewriting the whole thing, or perhaps a wrapper?
      - girvo 14y ago
        WP templates are so coupled to WP itself, I truly don't think it's worth it.
  - rhizome 14y ago
    and now we will give you just a hint about how to get it to almost work Whenever I've come across situations like this, I assume it's them fishing for consulting hours.
  - AznHisoka 14y ago
    Then you install the template, and realize the only reason it looks so good is because they have pretty top notch photos and pages filled with content.
mikepurvis 14y ago
I've found plugins to be extremely hit-and-miss, though. I was helping a photographer friend who bought a commercial theme, which broke admin-side Javascript when he did the 3.4 -> 3.5.1 update. We still haven't figured out exactly what happened, but it just reinforced for me again that a) Wordpress hasn't adequately documented which APIs are stable and not, b) Authors, even of paid add-ons, don't keep their stuff up to date.
- chrisguitarguy 14y ago
  The theme replaced jQuery bundled with WordPress with some external version (eg. Google hosted or otherwise) and did it so on both the admin and front end. That's usually the cause of those sort of issues. 3.4 -> 3.5 brought up a lot of JS compatibility. Look in the theme's directory for `wp_deregister_script` and see if anything was deregistered and re-registered (`wp_register_script`). > Wordpress hasn't adequately documented which APIs are stable and not If it's it in a major release, it's stable. When you buy any piece of software you're relying on its author knowing "the right thing to do (tm)". The author of the commercial theme thought it was okay to replace some bit of core javascript and din't bother to check on it. Or they didn't bother to be specific about it -- only do custom JS stuff on their theme's options page or on the front end. It's easy to do that, but you have to know how to do it (it's not documented in the Codex).

bzudo 14y ago

I would love to have an open-source, Python based, CMS. Even better, one I could install on a GoDaddy domain, as easy as I can install Wordpress. To me, that is the biggest reason Wordpress is the best, except for all others.

riccardoforina 14y ago
Have a look at django-cms.org The "automagical installation" is something that can be done, but it's up to the provider to do it. A Python website (as well as for Ruby) ain't a bunch of files served by Apache, but something more... smart.
- Jgrubb 14y ago
  Call me crazy, but being able to drop files into a docroot of an apache install and have them Just Work seems like a much smarter market strategy for uptake of your product than what can currently be done with either Python or Ruby. Then again maybe you had a different idea of "smart".
  - andybak 14y ago
    Yes, it's a better marketing strategy for new developers and the extra hassle to deploy Python and Ruby sites probably does put people off. But I'm not sure if 'good at attracting new developers' is the only criterion worth evaluating when picking a framework.
pekk 14y ago
Why do you insist on using GoDaddy? This is a particularly terrible ISP which severely and artificially limits your deployment options... why should your choice of blogging software depend on it?
- Jgrubb 14y ago
  I might be wrong, but perhaps they mean "any generic commodity hosting company with a one-click installer", for which GoDaddy is the prime example.

MostAwesomeDude 14y ago

I would settle for an alternate-universe version of Wordpress that is clean, secure, and elegant. :3 But seriously, if one is to rid the world of PHP, Wordpress is a great place to start.

chrishenn 14y ago

I built a site using ProcessWire[1] a while back, it was a joy to use. Really clean modern php cms. [1] http://processwire.com/ http://processwire.com/

mortenjorck 14y ago
ProcessWire isn't just the best PHP CMS out there right now; I'd argue it's the best thing to happen to the CMS landscape in the last few years. There are more powerful CMSes out there, to be sure, but the crazy thing is just how completely unprecedented PW's power is for its ease of use. It's easy like WordPress, yet it's scalable to enterprise sites with deep content taxonomies. And it's elegant. Ironic for something built in PHP, I know, but working with its simple building blocks of templates and fields and its jQuery-like content selectors comes with a feeling of "why didn't someone do this a long time ago?"

FilterJoe 14y ago

Mezzanine is quite nice: http://mezzanine.jupo.org/ http://mezzanine.jupo.org/ It's Python (a Django app). BSD license. It has many advantages over Wordpress that I won't get into here, but all this is offset by one massive disadvantage: It rests on the Django framework. Django is a nice framework for web development but it takes at least a few months to learn for someone starting from scratch. The installation process for Mezzanine requires some Django knowledge. Installing Wordpress on the other hand requires zero PHP knowledge. A reasonably intelligent person can teach themselves Wordpress basics in days (the basics of self-hosted Wordpress, selecting a theme, selecting key plug-ins, etc.). No PHP required. With Wordpress, it's not too difficult to select a provider (i.e. Bluehost) and have Wordpress automatically installed within minutes using Simple Script. If Mezzanine could be automatically installed like this, I think it would quickly become a popular and much more maintainable alternative.

JVIDEL 14y ago
Some cloud providers have auto-installers, its all paid though.
- FilterJoe 14y ago
  Can you name 1 or more cloud providers that have auto installers for Mezzanine? I'm not aware of any. Here's a post from 4 months ago comparing installing Mezzanine on a number of PaaS providers. None seemed anywhere close to as simple as installing Wordpress on Bluehost: http://appsembler.com/blog/paas-bakeoff-comparing-stackato-openshift-dotcloud-and-heroku-for-django-hosting-and-deployment/ http://appsembler.com/blog/paas-bakeoff-comparing-stackato-o... Read the comments and you'll find out that Mezzanine isn't yet compatible with Django 1.5, causing headaches for those trying to install it for the first time.
  - elithrar 14y ago
    > Read the comments and you'll find out that Mezzanine isn't yet compatible with Django 1.5, causing headaches for those trying to install it for the first time. Django 1.5 came out less than a month ago. Given the size of Mezzanine, it's not surprising that it hasn't been upgraded immediately. I'm not sure why this would effect the install process, either: any host that can handle Django apps is likely to have both 1.4 and 1.5 available at the very least.

andybak 14y ago

You could take a look at FeinCMS for Django. But seriously with Rails or Django - especially Django due to the admin site - a bespoke CMS is a fairly trivial endeavour. My initial CMS took a couple of days and it's been easy to extend it for every site that's come along since. It's a hell of a lot easier for end users than Wordpress and as it's bespoke for every client, they never get clobbered with chunks of the admin that bear only a loose relationship to their own content.

jordanlev 14y ago

I discovered Concrete5 ( http://concrete5.org http://concrete5.org ) a few years ago after building many Wordpress sites (large and small), and totally fell in love with it. It's not perfect, but it's much better than any other CMS out there for end-users, designers, and developers: * Editing UI is on the front-end -- users just go to the page they want to edit and click on things to edit them, which is much more intuitive than a back-end dashboard * Content on pages is a collection of "blocks", so each portion of content on the page can be edited separately (as opposed to one WYSIWYG editor for the whole page). I've even built a free addon that lets designers compose their own custom block interfaces ( http://concrete5.org/marketplace/addons/designer-content http://concrete5.org/marketplace/addons/designer-content ), so if you have a "employee bio block" (for example), you can have an image chooser, a textbox for a headline, a wysiwyg editor for the description, and a page chooser for a link instead of requiring the user to fidget with alignments, floats, and custom styles in TinyMCE/FCKEditor. * Create themes from your existing design / markup -- the CMS flows around your design as opposed to you having to construct your design around the requirements of the CMS (this is much more of a problem with Drupal than Wordpress, but still gets annoying in WP for non-blog-like designs). * Underlying architecture is fairly sane -- definitely has some idiosyncracies, but nothing like Wordpress (or Drupal or Joomla). There's a simple MVC pattern going on so you separate your model / controller / view code, and the underlying system has a decent "API" for working with pages, content, users, files, etc. Also, if you have very customized functionality, you can just create a separate page in your site and tell the system to not do anything... that you will handle everything yourself on that particular page or area of your site. The only downside is that it's not as popular as wordpress so the documentation is lacking and there are not as many free plugins and tutorials available (but hopefully this will continue to change as time goes on). But it has made building CMS-based websites so much more fun for me. Hit me up ( concrete@jordanlev.com ) if you want to discuss further or have any questions.

wonderyak 14y ago
I liked Concrete5 when I was playing around with it. I was very excited by its potential; especially looking at projects where maybe WP was overkill. Where the bottom fell out was in two areas: 1. Paid plugins I cannot rationally tell my clients 'this software might have a few cases where it is easier than WP to use and manage; but you'll be spending several hundred dollars replicating free functionality available on WP'. Its a non-starter. 2. The software still looks kind of 'hokey' compared to WordPress WordPress has lots of issues and there are a ton of other great alternatives. But, its like Facebook vs. all other social networks -- you go where the people are because it makes everything better.

ebbv 14y ago

I like ExpressionEngine if what you really want is a CMS.

josephjrobison 14y ago
Is ExpressionEngine better for medium to large sites? I've worked with it a bit and did not like it at all, just wondering what it's better for. Did not seem as intuitive for content creators or mom and pop site users.
- ebbv 14y ago
  I don't think EE is intuitive for Mom and Pop people. If that's your market then WP or something else will probably suit you better. But if you're an actual business who can spend an hour training your Content Manager(s), then it's worth it, IMHO. It's a dedicated CMS and IMHO better to work on than WP.
- kmfrk 14y ago
  It's annoying to configure, and the community is infinitesimal compared, but it has a stellar security record, and it's feels much more extensible. The main thing to consider is that the community isn't like Wordpress's, which is often a pretty big deal when tussling with it.
tunesmith 14y ago
As someone who hasn't spent a ton of time extending any CMS but uses a lot of frameworks, I enjoyed EE too during the short amount of time I used it. Out of wordpress, drupal, and EE, EE is the one where writing plugins felt like normal programming since they hooked right into code igniter. (Not sure how things have changed in the last couple of years though.)
- ebbv 14y ago
  Still pretty much the same.
  - 14y ago

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

velodrome 14y ago

Avoid Joomla and Drupal.

the_imp 14y ago

I maintain a number of sites that use PmWiki [1] as a CMS. The community's small (though active), it's in PHP, and the editing isn't WYSIWYG, but the reason I ended up with it in the first place is how well the framework is organised and how easily add-ons can be packaged and included to add to or even replace core functionality. Templates are also completely separate from the PHP. One feature of PmWiki that I've yet to come across in any other CMS are PageLists, which allow you fetch semi-structured data and other content from the rest of the site and displaying it using a custom template. [1] http://www.pmwiki.org/ http://www.pmwiki.org/

IheartApplesDix 14y ago

To make up completely asinine quotes with no basis on reality -- Elephants like water, except on Tuesdays. I'm not really interested, but I love being a pretend expert on anything. (If anyone has any comments to flesh out this thread, please feel free to bump my comment!)

cdevroe 14y ago

I'm just catching up with this thread but the reasons that jshakes states in his blog post is some of the reason why we started hacking away on http://getbarley.com/ http://getbarley.com/ We'd love to open source it (API is built on CodeIgniter) when its ready. My .2 about the current state of CMSes is that it is time for a bit of a disruption. WordPress codebase is directly tied to a lot of very big publications being able to do business daily and I don't see it being rewritten from scratch any time soon. Unless, of course, a sub-project is created. That being said, there is a lot of room for new ideas, new approaches, and new CMSes to capture at least _some_ of what WordPress currently powers. Another reason why we started hacking away at Barley... we think it is time for something brand new that is MVC from a codebase and specifically built for HTML5 / Mobile from the front-end. We hope we're right.

omgsean 14y ago

Our CMS, Forge (http://factore.ca/forge-cms http://factore.ca/forge-cms) is a semi-open source (in that you're free to use it for whatever you want but we don't have a community built up for it yet) Ruby on Rails CMS that focuses on rapid application development. It's VERY opinionated (moreso than Rails) but it lets you get things done really quickly and mostly stays out of your way on the front-end. Shoot me a message if you're interested in checking it out.

spohlenz 14y ago

It's not open-source, but Wheelhouse (https://www.wheelhousecms.com/ https://www.wheelhousecms.com/) is my answer to not being able to find a CMS I could enjoy working with. It's Ruby on Rails based, so that power is always there when you need, but it then adds a flexible templating system for generation of content-editable fields (example here: https://www.wheelhousecms.com/blog/2011/8/flexible-templates-in-wheelhouse-cms https://www.wheelhousecms.com/blog/2011/8/flexible-templates...).