On the CMS (Content Management System) hunt

For the last 5 years, we’ve used MODx exclusively and now we’re beginning to look at a few different CMS options. By no means is the posting exhaustive of all the different CMS options that are available, but rather an open and honest look at attempting to find the best option for our clients.

For years we’ve been huge fans of MODx (and still are). With their newest version that came out a year back, (Revo), there’s been a lot of amazing upgrades and additions. I know it’s July of 2011 while writing this posting and Revo has been out for over a year now, but we’ve been waiting for it to be developed and field tested before jumping right into it. We’ve been playing around with it this week and so far we’ve been impressed and will continue working on it most of the week.

In the meantime, we’re also considering other options for more light weight websites that don’t need a lot of fire power. We began to look at the big 3 for starters:

Drupal
Joomla
Wordpress

Obviously it’s hard not to look at these CMS options through the lens of 5 years worth of building using only MODx. All 3 are obviously wildly popular, but we don’t want to base our choosing of a potential new CMS based on popularity alone. We did find a great PDF report which compares the various CMS options available which helped us a bit.

Of the 3, Drupal looks nice but the various comments we keep coming across is the learning curve and time to set it up. Joomla in the past has had somewhat of a bad reputation for its poor code structure, but it appears to be going in a great direction. Wordpress looks awesome, but it’s not a CMS but rather a blogging platform. I know they’re trying to bend it in the direction of a CMS, but right now that requires hacking (which we want to avoid).

One promising new contender we’re going to spend time on this week and try to familiarize ourself with is Concrete 5. It has an awesome user interface experience which makes updating super easy. So far we’re pretty impressed with its ease of use and updating. We found some good docs on it and we’re going to really dig into this week.

One CMS that’s in the works that looks extremely exciting is SilverStripe3. It appears to be a ways off, but based off the article I’m really curious how that is going to turn out.

At this time though we’re still huge fans of MODx. We have found it to be a very reliable workhorse and chances are we may continue to work with it exclusively for the time being.