What CMS do ye use? Or offer to Customers?

[J-G]

Greetings DIS peers,

Like the title says: What Content Management System (CMS) do you use, if any?
A more accurate question would be: What CMS do you offer to your customers?
What are their pro's and con's?

Background: Most of my webhosting customers are either the "brochure-ware" kind, or e-mail users.
Some potential customers have more-than-one human who needs to update the website. These are typically community organizations, churches, etc.
If I offer them a "browser-based" way to update their sites, I can convince them to pay a little more and become a customer. They typically have had no web presence until now. I tried to teach 'em FrontPage basics, and/or NetObjects Fusion, but with little success.

I'll be glad to hear from you. If you want, I can trade you proof-reading your website for your assistance... if that's allowed.

[Frank Hagan]

I have tried a few of them. And I'm not satisfied with any of them.

Some seem to be geared toward what I would call "techies", people who would be able to learn raw HTML and don't mind futzing with configuration settings, etc. In this class I put the Nuke variations, Nuke, PostNuke, etc.

I like Xoops a bit, but so many of the "modules" are of uneven quality. It is free software, and that's what you get sometimes from volunteer efforts. My users never got the hang of posting a news article.

The one I like the best is phpWebSite, or phpWS, at http://phpwebsite.appstate.edu/, a project of the Applachian State University. The interface is pretty simple, and they seem to be able to navigate it. It still has its shortcomings, especially if you're looking for a great feature-set. But it is in the free category.

In the "pay" category, I like a company called Interactive Tools. http://www.interactivetools.com/. I use their Page Publisher on two of my sites ... it allows anyone with Internet Explorer v. 5.5 or higher to use their browser as a WYSIWYG on-line HTML editor. It works best when you have a template and the customer is just changing some of the elements on the page (you can specify that they be able to change a particular block of text, replace a .jpg, or give them an area where they can upload and display pics as well as format as much text as they like. It is $99 per URL it is installed on. They also have some software geared toward specific things like real estate listings. I haven't used any of their other products, but their support and service are first rate.

[brett]

I've heard great things about Mambo, and would probably be the one I choose:

http://www.mamboserver.com/

Haven't used it extensively yet however. Here is my full list I've bookmarked over time:

http://www.mamboserver.com/

http://www.drupal.org/

http://wordpress.org/

http://www.plainblack.com/webgui

http://plone.org/

http://www.opensourcecms.com/

http://cmsmatrix.org/

http://www.e107.org/news.php

http://phpnuke.org/

http://back-end.org/

http://christophe.brocas.free.fr/LaNewsFactory/

[Jonathan]

http://opensourcecms.com - Good place to review CMS systems.
Also you could try searching these forums for CMS....

[Frank Hagan]

My problem with most of those is that they either require a lot of intervention by an administrator, or they need users who are already savvy technically. I think the original question was not so much where you can find a list of all the CMS out there, but any that we have used that have worked for the specific type of user ... non-technical, group updates, etc.

The easiest from my vantage point has been phpWS. All the rest are horrible for that type of application.

[Fran]

phpWebSite

Frank,

Since the March timeframe, have you used phpWebSite further? If so, has it improved since you reviewed it last? You indicate it's relatively easy to use, so I'm assuming you've had a client use it and they've not experienced any great problems.

Thanks,

- Fran