Top 10 Content Management Systems

Who doesn’t love CMS? Today everyone and their cousins are using one content management system or the other to publish and manage content online for their own website or their clients. Every day I see a few more posts and new articles promoting and reviewing a new online content management software. Here are the top 10 list of my favorite content management systems.

10: Nucleus CMS

NucleusCMS is one of the lesser known players in the field of PHP, MySQL content management system. It has quite a few features that has become the hallmark of most modern CMS such having multiple authors per site, maintaining multiple websites with one installation of NucleusCMS, decent taxonomy with categories, search engine optimized URLs, saving drafts and scheduling posts to publish at a later date/time. It also has a few good plugins listed on the website to enhance its functions. But NucleusCMS fails to offer some unique features and fades away at the bottom of this list. Learn more about NucleusCMS.

9: Textpattern

From the very beginning Textpattern is touted as an easy to use, flexible and elegant CMS. At the centerpiece of the system is Textile - a very simple text editor. Think of WYSIWYG without the buttons and all the tags listed around the editor. One very useful feature of Textpattern is the ability to post to any website by multiple authors. 5 levels of user permissions come in handy when you assign specific tasks to your editing team. Like most modern systems, Textpattern is based on PHP and MySQL and is extensible with an army of plugins and the ability to modify themes based on CSS. Learn more.

8: Dokuwiki

Dokuwiki is a very simple wiki which anyone can start off using. Dokuwiki has a flat file structure – this means no messy databases or complicated installation procedures. Although this causes a problem with extra server load when each page is generated. All the individual pages are saved as text files in a folder hierarchy on the server. The wiki syntax is easy to use and understand and follows pretty much all the same techniques as other standard wikis such as Mediawiki. The detailed documentation, extensible plugins, templates and themes make Dokuwiki an easy to modify and customize platform which can suit pretty much all needs. However the Dokuwiki continues to be over shadowed by its bigger brother – Mediawiki. Learn more.

7: XOOPS

What is XOOPS? It’s an acronym for eXtensible Object Oriented Portal System. My experience with XOOPS has been quite frustrating. The documentation for XOOPS is lacking. In fact the documentation is being hosted on a separate domain which seems to be down at the time of this writing. Unless you know how to read code and know how to integrate modules you will find it difficult to bring your site up to speed with others. For newcomers I would suggest avoid XOOPS till you have more experience dealing with PHP and MySQL. Learn more.

6: Mediawiki

Wikis do not make the best of content management systems. They are often slow to load and are difficult to administer and maintain. Because of the open nature of Mediawiki (by default it can be edited by anyone) it might not be the best system for managing content online. Select Mediawiki if you are looking for a community driven site and you need it to be able to be edited by anyone. Mediawiki has detailed documentation and the project has gained traction mainly due to Wikipedia. It is based off of PHP and MySQL which gives it some ability to extend its functions. Learn more.