hello.. i'm a PHP newbie..
but.. i need to find an open source CMS that i can use for myslef, and for clients.

at first, i just want clients to be able to do simple stuff. (add/change/delete new content).. but eventually, i'd like to move into ecomerce, blogs, forums, and paid memberships. i'll also need to be able to assign permissions.

and of course.. still want the site(s) to have valid CSS/XHTML...

what are the best CMS's out there? at the moment, i'm a newbie.. but also a fast learner..

thanks for any suggestion and/or comments!!


oooh.. i've been looking the xaraya CMS ( www.xaraya.com ) - cause its supposed to work quite well with standards.. but its soooooooooo hard to find info on thier site..

indeed, there are a lot of CMSs out there. some good, some not-so-good, and none perfect. I've had experience with a few different ones and I'm now pretty much dedicated to Joomla. I just found it easier to work with.

there are still a lot of kinks to work out with it, especially with regards to valid coding. but there is a great support community surrounding Joomla, which helps immensely for noobs.

if you are willing to take some time with Zope and Python, you may want to give the Plone CMS a try. Haven't got to play with it yet myself, but it is supposedly more focused on standards and accessibility than the rest. I look forward to playing with it soon on a new site i'm about to work on.

Hope this helps!

Open Source CMS.com: This site was created with one goal in mind. To give you the opportunity to "try out" some of the best php/mysql based free and open source software systems in the world. You are welcome to be the administrator of any site here, allowing you to decide which system best suits your needs.

I fully agree with Sam .Wordpress or Movable Type can be tried

thanks for all the comments!
i decided to go with drupal ( http://drupal.org/ )
completing the installation kinda sucked.. but that REALLy may have just been cause i'm so unfamiliar with php/myql. anyhow, the comunity over there has been VERY helpfull thus far, and it seems to meet all of my needs!

again, thanks for all of yoru suggestions!

I have been playing with Joomla, expression engine, and I'm wondering why you said you can not create tableless layouts with joomla?

I have tried a lot of them and I would have to say that Drupal is the most flexible. I recently ditched a TextPattern install on a client site because it was becoming a bit of a headache. I thought Drupal was overkill because of all the features it has to offer out of the box. Boy, was I wrong.

I spent a couple of days trying to get TextPattern to work like I needed and wound up installing Drupal instead. I had Drupal set up like I needed within 30 minutes. Granted, I have setup Drupal sites many times, but it is much easier to learn, in my opinion.

The fact that it has been around for a while (just celebrated it's 5th birthday) and it has a HUGE community base is a plus. I don't think I'll use anything else.

drupal is difficult to install. whats up with that

I don't think Drupal is very difficult to install. Could you elaborate?

I must mention that I am not a PHP developer, by any means. I was impressed with how easy it was to pick up and learn. Like I said the Drupal community is very helpful.

I have a friend that has been working on a Joomla project. He said there were some things he like about Joomla, but still preferred Drupal. I think Joomla is still relatively new, isn't it?

I used to use Mambo/Joomla. It's nice in terms of usability on the backend. (and nice installation wizard. Now I use Drupal. Unfortunately, for newcomers there can certainly be a bit of a learning curve, but it's not too steep (and what software doesn't have a learning curve?) and it makes up for all that with flexibility (and it's getting more flexible with every release).

The seller for me though is that standards-compliance and all-CSS design are much easier with Drupal than with Mambo/Joomla, at least in my experience. That's why I'm using Drupal now.

The main thing to realize though is that the decision really depends on your project. Different CMSs do different things well, and your project, the kind of site you're trying to create, will dictate whether you use a blog-like CMS (like Wordpress or TXP) or a more community-focused or portal one, etc.

TextPattern and WordPress, while both are truely brilliant scripts, don't really appeal to me. I currently have TextPattern installed on my site to play around with it. But like WordPress they are more geared towards weblog or journal type web sites. WordPress is one of the first CMS applications I ever installed, but the administrative panel was so hideous that I didn't care at first if it worked or not.

But choosing a CMS primarily depends on what you need it to do. If you are looking at building a personal blog site, go for TextPattern or WordPress. Larger sites can be done with those mentioned above, but it's not the preferred way to go about it. Some Open Source applications really are brilliant. But there are so many out there, that it's impossible to pick the best ones. One CMS that I'm really impressed with is the Open Source version of Sitellite. Yeah, that's how it's spelled. Go to http://www.sitellite.org for more info. It's difficult to get the hang of at first, and creating templates that are dependant on their XT (?) system. And installation took forever, but it was worth it. It has Web View capabilities and a very advanced control panel.

However, I would not recommend it to PHP beginners. Since it's Open Source, I'm skinning the administrative panel to fit the client's site, and that too is no easy feat. But their web site is great, and if you take the time to read through it all, you'll get everything you need. (Jeez, don't I sound like a salesperson today?).

Another CMS I've come to like is SimpleBytes CMS. Currently in Beta development, it's free to download. I haven't had any problems with it yet.

Good luck on your choice.

The bad markup thing is weird, because a CMS shouldn't shove any markup down your throat. Everything should fall into a template. I know Drupal follows this principle well, and I also believe only valid XHTML output can go into 'core'. There are some modules that drop the ball, but again, you can overwrite just about any modules' output, if the module was built to Drupal's guidelines.

Of course it depends on your level of expertise, your needs etc. Relative to a lot of people around here I'm not what I would call overly 'technical'.

I have been doing a hell of a lot of research on E-com and cms app's out there and I can easily say that for cms, if a client were to come to me and say "i just want to be able to update the content on my site and possibly add a couple of links and display some images myself" .. confidence I would choose. CMS MADE SIMPLE. I love it! I don't even know css very well yet and I can integrate with existing design with no hassle.

Considering what I can achieve as a 'non-programmy' type, it's CMS Made Simple all the way for me. From where I'm sitting the code looks pretty darn clean as well.

Yay Drupal! Good call @GOLGO-13 :)