the quantum matrix

In the past two days I’ve installed over a dozen different “Content Management Systems” looking for my “ideal” CMS: it would need to be standards-complaint (preferably XHTML 1.0), it would need to include an easy-to-use template engine, it would need to have a news posting system (of course), it would need to have “static page” management (like through articles), it would need to use PHP/MySQL, it would need to have an active support community, and if it had a poll, a gallery, statistics, and a link directory available/integrated, that would be a plus. In short, I don’t need much in terms of user-end features, but quite a bit in terms of the core operation of the CMS. And my definition of a CMS may not be the same as yours, so please don’t flame me for calling a “portal system” a CMS… :)

!!! DISCLAIMER !!! These are not meant to be total reviews of any of the CMS’s, they are simply my thoughts about what *I* needed and what the CMS provided – if you are considering any of the following systems, please install it on your own server and try it out yourself! Also, if standards compliance is not very important to you and user-end features are, any of the following systems will probably suit your needs.

PostNuke 0.726: Primarily, any of the “Nuke” CMS’s are just too heavy for what I need – it does have lots of modules and blocks available for those who want to enhance or customize their basic weblog. For example, PostNuke 0.726 has 1413 files in its distribution (WordPress has 116). I simply do not need all the extra “features.” As for standards-compliance, there are many non-standards-compliant HTML tags in its “core” (as opposed to the themes or templates, which are more easily modified) at this point in its development. With so many files, it is an overwhelming task to go through each one to check for non-compliant tags. And the support community is huge, with 71,610 articles posted (as of *this* post). Future releases are supposed to remove all the “deprecated” code in the core, but I didn’t want to wait for a release that may be months away and that may or may not address my needs.

PHP WCMS 1.1-RC1_2003-11-18: Not standards-compliant, with tables and HTML 4.01 all over the place. It has an annoying website (there is no features listing, but a flash movie in German, and lots of pages say “no content available.” It has a much smaller support system than PostNuke, with only 2,048 articles posted. As far as “features” are concerned, it more than fulfills my simple needs, but is again, too heavy.

pMachine Free 2.3: pMachine is NOT GPL, but they have a free “lite” version available. The support is thus a bit sketchy since only “Priority” users can actually access all 30,000 something posts (free users get 14,000 posts, but the search engine cannot be used to restrict searches to those posts only – you have to search through them by hand!) All of the features that I want are there except the links database, but it has a small problem with standards-compliance (extra <pt> tags) and would then only validate to HTML 4.01 Transitional. Also, when I tried to import all my Movable Type posts in, it copied all the comments on all the posts to all the posts (so every post has the same, identical comments). If you buy the Pro version, it’s probably much better, but there are other GPL’ed CMSs that do the job just as well (IMHO).

Xoops 2.0.5: This was a strong contender in the beginning since it tried to be XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliant, but it failed (even using upper-case tags!) and the conversion, while not as difficult as the Nuke systems, would still involve a good amount of work. The provided documentation has some holes in it (it’s a Wiki) but the support forum has 59,760 posts. Again, Xoops has all the features I want, via Modules, but the Administration menu uses DHTML and so makes it a little difficult to maneuver within.

Drupal 4.3.1: Drupal has all the features I want and then some – not as many as PostNuke, but plenty for the majority of people. It is not standards-compliant, but it would still take a little bit of work. The support forum has about 8,000 posts and the documentation is *very* extensive. Recommended!

e107: I wanted to like e107, but the templating system was almost completely undocumented and the code was not fully standards-compliant. It had all the features I wanted and the support system has 10,446 articles, but it wasn’t enough…

Nucleus: A minimalist CMS, it has a nice set of features (everything I need), but again, it does not produce standards-compliant code and would require some amount of work to do so. The documentation is minimal, but the support forum has 10,359 articles.

Movable Type: Ah, my old favorite… Movable Type is great except that it is not PHP based and instead generates static HTML pages for each article, so everytime you update the site template, or change an article, you need to rebuild. This is fine in the beginning, but over the past three months I’ve entered about 100 articles and rebuilding them takes time. The support community is great with 143,710 posts (yes, that’s correct) and a good set of documentation. The templating system is easy since there are no scripts inside (unlike PHP) so you can just enter the Movable Type tags where you need them. In fact, my old set of templates was XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant, so it is definitely possible. However, the “rebuilding” thing was annoying, and the idea of a dynamically-generated website was simply more appealing…

b2: The original “classy” weblog, I believe development has stopped on the original b2 “fork” in favor of WordPress. I love the templating system (there’s really only one file), and the system is close to being XHTML 1.0 Transitional. The documentation is a bit sparse but the support forum has 21,488 articles posted.

b2Evolution: While I was evaluating b2Evolution, the website was down and so all the documentation and forums were unavailable. I assume it is something like WordPress, but since WordPress was running at the time, it won out…

WordPress: The CMS I chose, it has all the features I want (I’m just using Gallery, what I used previously, for the gallery) and amazingly enough, was very close to being XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant (good job!). Also, I was able to import my Movable Type posts in quite easily (installing b2, importing into b2, then switching to WordPress). The documentation is a bit sparse but the support forums have 6,373 posts and have addressed the questions I’ve had so far… :)

I guess it was really the standards-compliance that made me choose WordPress over all the others, since each had the features that I wanted. And don’t think that I’m lazy – I would go through all the files on a CMS to change it to make it XHTML 1.0 Strict, but why if there is one that already is compliant? Hope this was *somewhat* informative, but again, if you are considering a CMS, please try it out yourself before making a decision! ***UPDATE*** You can go to opensourcecms.com where they have a bunch of CMSs already installed with accessible control panels so you can play around without having to install the program yourself. Thanks Soso…