// May 13th, 2006 // No Comments » // Technology
In building out a site for a customer recently, I decided to expand my search for a viable, free, open-source, user-friendly Content Management System (CMS) beyond Wordpress. Wordpress is my blogging tool-of-choice. I have also used it as a regular-website-CMS on one occasion before and although it ultimately worked out, it took a bit of work to decouple it from it’s blog-centric nature.
Most CMS’s are overkill for what I need. All I want is a simple, easy to manage CMS with:
- A short learning curve so my non-techie customers can quickly learn it
- The ability to accept PHP code in the content without massive rewriting or retagging
- Support for friendly URL rewriting
I don’t need the handholding of menu-building or pre-defined site templates. I typically build a standalone site, then pull it into a CMS after the fact so my customers can manage it themselves.
I ended up looking at Mambo, CMS Made Simple, and Etomite.
Ultimately I settled on Etomite and here’s why.
- Mambo was a very sophisticated solution that I had used before. But I didn’t feel like the interface was all that intuitive for non-technical users, which are who will maintain the site in question
- CMS Made Simple had the best interface of the three, but I had to re-code the PHP tags in my content, which was irritating, and I never could get URL rewriting working to my liking.
- Finally, Etomite had me up and running pretty quickly with a reasonably good interface for non-techies to use. It would accept normal PHP tags in the content, and I was able to get the URL rewriting working right away.
Just wanted to pass this along in case it helped anybody.
As I’m asked this question almost weekly – “How Do I Setup My Email In Outlook” – I felt compelled to re-publish a tutorial on the matter.
