I don’t think it’s so much about how many people voted, because you can probably figure those numbers would scale up.
I was more interested in the actual discussion it might bring. What I find interesting is … most people’s CMS of choice is the one they’re working on, and user-friendliness seems to be the single biggest factor in people’s choices … including my own.
Interestingly enough, I see a battle in the works to see who can win on user-friendliness. The most interesting remark was made by ULTiMATE. These platforms we’re working on, including Wordpress … could all go away in the next 5 years if they can’t compete with something like Concrete5 on user-friendliness. I can very easily see the day when even Wordpress falls by the wayside for being "too clunky’ or out-dated.
What I would really like to see is a shift towards the “CMS on top of a framework” model. For example, if every CMS started moving it’s core over to something like Codeigniter/Zend/Symfony … then we could really see a seismic shift in how these things evolve. Essentially, the core development teams would be freed-up from most of the mundane stuff involved with maintaining the “guts” of the CMS … and instead shift all of their development energies toward out-doing one another in the “Badass User Interface” arena.
Yeah, I may have dampened discussion when I said it isn’t a this vs that thread but I was hoping to hear more about what makes people want to use the system of their choice… Good point about the future of CMS too. I can flip bits with the best of them but I’ve been wrong about quite a few emerging trends (Facebook… what a dumb name, that’ll never catch on )
I think you’re right about CMS on top of a framework too. Up until now Drupal, Joomla, DNN, WP, etc… have tried to be the framework as well as the CMS and I’ve been happy to use them as such but liek you say, if the CMS is built on a well managed framework, the core team don’t have to worry about maintaining the framework, they just have to maintain their features.
I have a colleague who’s developing a CMS on the Kohana framework and he’s doing exactly this. His CMS can be set up and configured right through the UI, including building the theme templates (drag, shape & drop)… No code required. It’s still in its infancy but it’s pretty amazing. He’s also set it up so that you can load only the modules you need when a page loads instead of every active module in the system which make sit quite snappy.
Lots going on in the world of CMS these days especially with CSS3/HTML5 mobile devices
From those in the list I like Joomla best, but there’s one that’s not on the list that I really like and that’s Exai. I like its drag and drop system and that my sites don’t look like common template sites.
It’s hardly surprising because the forum has merged all CMS discussion with a blogging platform, so it’s natural that most users on here would use WordPress.
Both forums should be separate as the WordPress crowd drowns out CMS discussion, but I wouldn’t like to be the person to separate things.
Yes, that’s been a pet peeve of mine and for a while. Hawk separated them before the site was reorganized but now they’re back together again. Thanks for the Umbraco recommendation. I lost interest in it during the v5 problems but I’ll have to give it another whirl.
Ha, I don’t blame you. I spent the best part of a month toying with v5 at home and although I quite liked it I think it took real stones to do what they did. I just wish they pulled the plug before they allowed people to take certification in Umbraco v5 because a couple of companies blew a fair bit of money on it.
I once tried a cms called Geneone which could handle forums, blogs, static pages and I think dymanic pages but it placed all content in a single table, which I suspect would cause it to fall over for a busy site. It never had a PM system and I on;y ever saw it on two live sites, one being the author’s blog which has since been migrated over to wordpress. It was written back during the php4 era so would need a complete re-write.
You don’t have to use just one CMS, say a site needs a blog, a forum, a PM system and a load of static pages it could use for example mediawiki for the static pages, wordpress for the blog and phpbb for the forum, PM system and user management Some CMS software can be “bridged” so that one handles say the login process for the ones that are bridged.
Before you consider any non-free (generally non open-source) cms, you should be able to justify to yourself the costs such as the licence fees, etc taking into account this like estimated site traffic. If you do go for a paid solution, go for one that has a good, clear route to migrate over to a free one should you find that you can justify to yourself the cost of the paid solution once its licence comes up for renewal.
With any plugins for any cms always make sure that as well as keeping up to date with the version of the main cms, always keep up to date with the versions of any plugins and don’t leave installed any plugins that your not using.
This just jogged my memory… I would add, make sure you are well aware of the developer/distributor of the CMS’s policy and practices for updates and upgrades.
I consulted for a media company that produced/sold CD’s, DVD’s, Cassettes, VHS, DAT and a bunch of other media type products. This is going back 6 – 8 years… They were using a Microsoft CMS eCommerce solution and when Microsoft released the next version they dropped support of the existing one and expected that everyone would buy the new license. The issue wasn’t that the license was over-the-top expensive; I think it was reasonable. The issue as I recall was that there was no upgrade path. The new version was a completely different system so the upgrade would result in a new installation/configuration and then export/import of products and imagery. The company I was consulting with chose to continue with the unsupported version and I have no idea what they ended up doing in the long run.
That was one of the reasons I decided OSS and community driven software was a good thing to look at
Well, only a couple more days and the Poll will be closed. I figured there would be more than 16 people using CMS frameworks but I suppose you learn something new every day
I’ll try this again next year and see if I can get some more input.
I used Joomla and it is great, but I find WP easier to deal with and I noticed the costs for maintenance are lower now that I’m using Wordpress (i think the reason is that I can do more things myself, and not refer to any developer)
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