PHP Content Management Systems: Build or buy

[ssampier]

Gear-heads, propeller-heads, and the like, I implore you. I have a fairly small website I designed for my organization. The site is plain-jane xHTML with CSS for presentation.

I want to add more functionality to the site, including templates, breadcrumbs, and archives. Ideally, I would like search and RSS feeds as well. What is a good, but fairly simple php-cms you would recommend?

Free is best, but I'm not adverse to cost (reasonable, $100 >). I have tried a few of the other free CMSs. Drupal was nice, but the learning curve was a bit steep. WordPress has a lot going for it, but it's more of a blog engine (duh) than what I had in mind.

Any other ideas? I could probably borrow code to build it myself. I'm a novice coder, so it'd be a spaghetti mess.

 

[Cergorach]

http://www.joomla.org/
Has tuturials up the wazoo...

 

[ssampier]

I tried Joomla once, I don't remember why I didn't like it. If I can't remember, I'm sure it wasn't important.

Thanks.

 

[IcyCool]

We run our Montana Game Faire site off of Joomla.

A few others that aren't too bad are:
phpNuke
PostNuke
Drupal
Xoops(sp?)

The host that we use has several free php CMS's available, and these were just a few we checked out before settling on Joomla. If you have a very specific need, I'd check out those first to see if any of them will work for you, otherwise I'd recommend creating your own rather than trying to shoe-horn something. There are several tutorials out there for creating this sort of thing, and the php community in general is pretty decent.

 

[ssampier]

I was all set to write my own (READ: copy others work through the tutorials), but I was feeling a bit overwhelmed. I was wondering if there really was a simple CMS solution.

Here's an interesting one: It's an $100, but it doesn't use a database.

http://cmsfromscratch.com/

Not sure I'd deploy a CMS that is described as "cute."

 

[ThirdWizard]

Never, ever, write your own CMS. It's time wasted that you'll never see again.

 

[Dimwhit]

Never, ever, write your own CMS. It's time wasted that you'll never see again.

I strongly agree. Find one that's close to what you want, then modify it if need be. Writing one from scratch would be a huge waste.

 

[Alan Shutko]

I strongly agree. Find one that's close to what you want, then modify it if need be. Writing one from scratch would be a huge waste.

I disagree. If you want much more than your CMS gives you out of the box, write your own. The fundamental truth about CMSes is that they all suck unless you just happen to match the designer's use cases perfectly. If you happen to have very simple needs, you can use one. If not, you'll probably spend less time and effort writing one from scratch than you would trying to modify one of the misbegotten messes out there to fit your needs.

Mind you, your homegrown CMS will also suck. However, it will mostly suck at doing things you don't want to do, so while other people will hate it for their projects, you will be able to make it work well for your application.

This is why there are so many CMSes out there. Honestly, they aren't hard to write for any given need, but I think it's impossible to make it work well and be generalized. (For a similar problem domain, look at CRMs.)

 

[bodhi]

Try before you buy (or download for free).

www.opensourcecms.com

 

[drothgery]

Of course, the other fundamental truth is that coding workflow (i.e. support for review cycles before publishing to the outside world) is a real pain, and very hard to get right. Mostly due to budget constraints which made buying a serious CMS for work impractical, I've cobbled together a pretty massive homegrown CMS over the years. And so although it can let people put in content that will look exactly right, it's also not much more than a simple database front end.

Given a chance to start from scratch with a real budget (which I might get; we were acquired by a much larger company a few months ago), I'd definitely be looking at third-party solutions (though I'm an ASP.NET/IIS guy, not a PHP guy) for at least most of what we use homegrown stuff for now.