Need a (free) CMS recommendation

MiCarl

MiCarl

Member
The static content on the shared hosting I'm coming from were built with RVSiteBuilder. I've never been very impressed with it and I don't want to purchase a license for it here.

I'm thinking a CMS is a better approach. I'm looking for recommendations on an open source CMS that is fairly simple to use and makes nice, clean pages.

Thoughts please?
 
well, wordpress is the obvious suggestion, but personally I don't like to use it because I find it can be overkill for many users, and I also find getting my head around customising templates and adding custom code a bit of a nightmare, but maybe that's just me.

If you find a better solution I'd be interested to know. There was an opensource one I was looking at recently that seemed pretty good but I can't remember what it was called now.
 
no that's not the one I was looking at. I had something less blog-oriented in mind and I found a small handfull that looked really promising: open-source, modern, relatively clean and straight-forward. I've just had a look through my browsing history but no luck. I'm sure I left a window open with them in tabs but it must have got lost.
 
octoberCMS is the one I was thinking. However it's technically still in Beta and I haven't actually tried it yet so I can't really recommend it.

I have a project for a client that I was going to 'roll my own' custom/specific basic CMS system but I might give this a look over the next couple of weeks and if it seems solid give it a go.

fork-cms could also be worth a look.

The main appeal for me with both of those is open-source, modern web standards, simpler to use etc so may not appeal to everyone
 
Beta-smeta. Like the most interesting man in the world says,

"I don't always test my code, but when I do...I test in production."

:)
 
fork-cms - Installer failed. Got connection reset message......

CMS Made Simple - Very nice installer. Looks very powerful. Need to edit Templates and Style Sheets. Editor has less functionality than notepad. Looks quite powerful but to use it effectively I'd need to edit the template and css files directly.

Concrete5 - Refused to install. Some beef about some MySQL configuration or other.
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I went back to CMS Made Simple. Can't just file edit the templates and css files because they are stored in the database. I've managed to edit them into something close to what I want, but in the future I might cut and paste back and forth to a real editor.

Of course it just occurred to me that if I look in their community I can probably find templates that are closer to what I want......
 
The CMS I would suggest depends on what you want to use it for.

If you are interested in having a forum check out RavenNuke
It is a patched and highly modified fork of phpnuke. If set up right it is very secure and easy to install.
 
My forum is Simple Machines and I really like that. My business application and the forum were the first things moved.

My web pages are almost static, I make changes very rarely - usually this time of year because that's when I have free time. I got the first site reproduced in CMS Made Simple. Now that I've got the hang of how their templates and style sheets work it's not too bad.

Poking around their add-ons site it appears there may be better editors available. I might give that a try for the 2nd site.

I'm not sure CMS Made Simple is right for anyone with dynamic content, but for basic web pages it does a nice job.
 
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