An Evaluation of Selected Open Source CMS Systems

Přemek, April 2004

For some of my websites, I need a CMS (content management system). This page summarises my experiences and feelings about those that I have come across and maybe even thoroughly evaluated.

The project was initiated by the needs of my websites and the How to evaluate a content management system paper by Step Two designs. I would also like to include ideas from "analysis report by Ariga":http://www.ariga.cz/saa1.html about requirements on CMS systems as well as look at "Jeffrey Veen's famous article":http://www.veen.com/jeff/archives/000622.html .

Prerequisites and Standpoint of the Evaluation

Before reading the results, please have a look at the following so that you know what to expect:

Types of websites considered for the evaluation, i.e. what kind of web structures I'd like the CMS to support, were primarily company/departmental presentation with tree organization and mostly "permanent" content;
Evaluation criteria used to rank the CMSes ? include ease of installation and use, content structuring and templating system, as well as quality of generated output and avoidance of simplification of website structure;
LAMP(Linux-Apache-MySql ?-PHP) platform with open source availability was a must-have feature.

This approach resulted in a pre-selection of some CMS systems, and the ranking of the evaluated ones as shown just below.

The CMSes Dissected (The Results)

So far (9/2004), I have had a deep look at the following (a-z order): Mambo, PostNuke, Textpattern. Yet to come are: Drupal, WordPress, type3, XOOPS.

Mambo: a strong workhorse, esp. when beefed up with plug-ins, but ouch the templating; details in MamboEvaluation
Textpattern: simple effective solution for smaller (mainly personal) sites; details in TextpatternEvaluation.
Drupal: TBD; details in DrupalEvaluation.
XOOPS: TBD; details in XoopsEvaluation

Below the Bar

PostNuke: known and popular ... and skipped. I do not want a CMS from people who are not able to create an understandable, accessible and navigable website... Details = the accessibility test story: I want to try the thing - where is "download" from the title page? [answer is "under pnNews"...] Where is the installation manual? Not in the distro... Maybe in pnSupport, huh! the first article there is "PostNuke ? tutorial in Indonesian language", eh..., no link in pnSupport Main Menu either (why do they call it "support"?)... Back to title page...wait a minute, how do I get back? the "Postnuke" logo is not clickable... aha, see the tiny tiny pnNavigator?... Finally I found the installation manual under FAQ, heavy with the "click here" syndrome and - surprise - on an external website... That was the give-up point for me.

Background note: how I got to this eval

Having authored HTML in vi for years (started in ca 1995), I learned the benefits of good editors like dreamweaver and have used them for about 5 years now. But (1) the web should be editable in itself [todo: find link to supporting docs from TBL], (2) dreamweaver grows in features, weight, startup time, consumed screen space etc, and yet 95% of time I use it just as a WYSIWYG editor for simple markup, (3) for other web content authors, which I co-operate with, dreamweaver and similar are a bit too complicated -- all they need is just to put pieces of information on the web.

So I tried WikiWiki ?, and I like it for its near-purity of hypertext idea implementation, but (1) it is a flat system, not a hierarchy, and most websites are not flat, (2) it mostly promotes open access to the authored content (for a good reason), but sometimes you really need only those responsible for the content to have write access.

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