NYCPHP Meetup

[Mitch Pirtle]

EPAUL wrote:

>Hi All,
>
>I am looking into several types of CMS myself. I am interested in knowing
>how many people from this list are using or have used CMSs and which ones
>you like or dislike.
>
The easiest CMS I have ever worked with (from the front-end perspective) 
was Plone, which unfortunately was a huge beast and required running 
Zope as well.

The best I could find in the PHP world was Mambo, which I am helping 
migrate to database independence because I want to use PostgreSQL, and 
am annoyed at folks telling me I have to use MySQL or risk not being one 
of the kewl kids.  I tried maybe twenty others in a week's time, and all 
either had poor administration, difficult-to-impossible installation, or 
significant bugs er, features.

<salespitch>

The things that I find unique with Mambo is a super light distribution, 
simple install, awesome administration interface, and an established 
community providing add-on modules and templates (both free and 
commercial).  The latest few releases added some excellent performance 
increases, so Mambo portals are very snappy.  Also interesting to note 
is different content types (or views of content, if you will) - you can 
group your content as articles, blog-style, or whatever you want.  The 
code is very easy to work with, and is all OO-based.  So you can jump in 
and make any changes that you want.

(As a new initiate into serious OO usage in PHP4, this has been an 
excellent learning experience for me as well.)

The next major release is going to really do amazing things, and will 
raise everyone's expectations about what an open source CMS should be 
capable of.

</salespitch>

http://www.opensourcecms.com/ will give you the chance to test drive 
many CMS before a single download.  Highly recommended.

-- Mitch