Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 5 years ago.
I am building a website and need to use a CMS. If I use an already made CMS, I need to be able to extend it easily. Is there a specific CMS that you recommend or should I make my own?
OpenSourceCMS is an excellent place to start. They offer demos, user rankings, etc. of many different CMS systems.
You can also find relevant questions here on stackoverflow by searching for "php cms".
Personally, I like Drupal, MODx and Concrete5. Drupal and MODx because of their extensibility, Concrete5 because of its simplicity.
I have found SilverStripe to be quite useful, used it on an intranet project - built in authorization, nice content editing built in, easy templating language, workflow, content versioning. I also like that they have good documentation and Help. The Demo is also impressive.
http://drupal.org/ comes highly recommended.
good community and plugins/addons.
Josh
If you are looking for simplicity try Concrete5 or MODx. They are both easy to install and work with.
Had the opportunity to use Joomla, there are many plugins/templates/tutorials and a few books out there. If you are good in php you will find it very easy to create your own plugins or extend existing functionality. However big drawbacks are the many exploits and some limitations (only mysql as a database, versioning of articles, detailed permissions, multilingual support) that hopefully will all be fixed with Joomla 1.6.
The beauty of most good packages is it won't hurt you too much to get dirty with a few of the well managed and easily installed packages to see what's best for you.
I have stumbled through Drupal and ended up on Joomla. I found Drupal to be highly powerful and technical. Joomla is the same, but seems to do straight-forward stuff a bit easier. Both work quite well.
If your application is very simple, Concrete5 is definitely worth looking at. I go with Joomla for most projects right now and am keeping a close eye on Concrete5...
Let us know what you went with and why!
I really like SilverStripe's admin and extendability. Right now, I'm running http://gallery1401.com/ on SilverStripe. It has nice image upload, and custom fields, and rails-like associations and data management. Runs on a typical php/mysql stack, with strictly object-oriented architecture.
I'm surprised no one mentioned ExpressionEngine. It is not free (that's probably why) but it's PHP, has a thriving community, a lot of plugins (good ones not free, but a php programmer could consider this a possible revenue source). It's built on a PHP framework - Code Ignitor.
I'm playing with Concrete5 right now - I really love the in page editing. It's MVC based, extensible. Simpler (so far) than EE, EE is easy to use and template, simpler than Drupal. Drupal is amazingly powerful, but as others have noted there is a steep learning curve. Even if you're a php whiz you have to learn "the Drupal way" to template, to code, everything, it's really quite involved. That said, Drupal can really do anything and powers some very robust and high profile sites and has a huge community.
UDPATE: MODX Revolution (v2) is no longer "brand spankin' new. Use v2 instead of v1.
If integrating custom design is a big factor I highly recommend using MODx (v1 since v2 is still brand spankin' new). It's loved a lot by designers and developers alike. I have heard good things about EE, concrete5 and SilverStripe though. I really only know MODx though. The design integration rules (no themes to mess with like many other CMSs). Very extendable for PHP ninjas as well and the community is SUPER helpful and friendly. Hope this helps someone as I know I'm replying a year and a half later from the last post!
its sad that no one seems to include wordpress in these discussion my recomandation is wordpress.org but it also can be wordpress MU and MU in combination with buddypress
one great advantage of wordpress is plugins it has if not the most extensive plugin selection and on top of that the same goes for its template selection please do check them out
I haven't been impressed by CMSses out so far, but Concrete5 and MODx are definitely two to check out.
I'd like to see the documentation and community of Concrete5 grow into something as big as Joomla or Drupal. That will only happen with more users, but it's good enough to get started with right now.
If you want to go the "Rails way", you may want to check out CakePHP, a rapid development framework that adapts most of Rails' functionalities. Also VERY easy to extend!
