Looking for a good CMS

Warner Onstine — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 09:54:15 -0700

I’ve been working on a project for a family member and need a good Content Management System for them to use. Here are my requirements:

Easy to understand interface
Generates URLs that are human readable - no blah.php?page_id=123 crap
Easily supports internationalization as the site itself will need to be translated into multiple languages
Preferrably Java (but open to Rails, and not really interested in PHP)
Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to create and edit site templates

What I’ve looked at so far has been:

Radiant CMS - too simple, with code embedded and no Rich Text editor that they won’t understand
Magnolia - Waaaay too complex, nice for an enterprise solution but not for what they need it for

Just downloaded Liferay and will be taking a look at that, Daisy and JBoss Portal. Another suggestion made to me was to possibly use Contribute, which I think I’ll have them download and try out to see if it works for them (but then I’ll have to do the whole locale thing through Apache).

I’ve looked at the CMSes listed here.

Jahia - ok, after relooking at it I may download it and try it out
Magnolia - too complex for my needs
InfoGlue - looks complex just like Magnolia
Apache Lenya - had a very bad experience with this in the past and the interface looks just as awkward to use as it did before - pass
Daisy - looks interesting
MMBase - no online demo and I wasn’t wild about the screenshots I did see, passing for now

What I’ve found so far with alot of these (just through using their online demo) is that the interfaces are very complex. I don’t know if this is supposed to go along with their “Enterprise” tag or not, and of course a fair number of them tout their JSR-170, 168 compliance. Ok, JSR-168 might be important to know, but do I really care if they are a fully compliant Java Content Repository? Nah, not really, I just want it to work and have a usable interface. Some may care about that but to me it isn’t a selling point. I respect the CMSes who put up an online demo, it gives me a chance to play with it first to see if it’s even close to something I want, those that don’t I look for screenshots, and most likely move on anyways.

BlackBox : Tag cms

Looking for a good CMS