Open source CMS

After years of not touching it I made a side with PHP again. It was a difficult delivery but during the process many familiar things surfaced and I learned a lot of new things on my way. I am now looking for an open source CMS which can be used with my own created template (instead of included templates). Of course, I could develop something myself, but why reinvent the wheel when ready-made solutions exist? What would be my best option?

Thank you in advance

There are lots of good CMSes out there, so take your pick. Drupal? MODx? Joomla? WordPress? It’s up to you …

Indeed there are 100’s of open source licenced CMS’s around, don’t forget ExpressionEngine.

It’s also worth considering the new generation of CMS’s as well, though not open source licenced Statamic and Craft are well worth looking at.

Consider your needs and community support.

You need to consider what your needs are, eg forum, blog, wiki, etc. If there isn’t a CMS that can do all that you need on it’s own, you could look into two or more that cover your needs and “bridge” them (eg logging into one logs you into the rest). Some CMSs already have plugins available for “bridging” them with other CMSs

The owner of the site should be able to control text content on the different pages and control a few photo galleries. So nothing complicated!

I would recommend WordPress.

Pros:
It’s very intuitive, simple to set up and has an extensive plugin repository.

Cons:
In a word, “Speed”.
Your typical WP site is bogged down with bloated JavaScript files from various plugins and out of the box WP queries a live DB far too often.
You can negate most of this by using something like W3 Total Cache (for example to cache DB queries and concatenate and minify JS).