Choosing a Lightweight PHP CMS (Round 2)

• cms
• php

Well after installing and running up my two contenders from the last round (TYPOlight and Concrete5) the clear winner for me was TYPOlight.  I don’t doubt that Concrete5 will be a great CMS but it’s not there yet.  So if you are looking at contributing to a CMS or getting in early with one, Concrete5 is probably worth a look.

Not yet satisfied, I have come up again for air to ensure there is nothing that meets my needs more appropriately.  Having a look at the Packt Publishing Open CMS awards, I saw that Drupal had taken out the “Overall Open Source CMS Award” for 2008.  Now I’ve used Drupal in the past (but nothing serious) and it always seemed pretty solid to me.  I guess I better have another look at it – perhaps I’d excluded it from my investigations simply because I wanted something new, when maybe that isn’t appropriate.

Additionally, I noticed that SilverStripe won in the category of “Most Promising Open Source CMS”.  I’ve certainly heard rumblings about SilverStripe before, so it is probably time that I ran that up and gave it a go also.

So for the contenders for round 2, we have the following entrants:

• TYPOlight – feature right, clean interface, perhaps a bit more complicated that an average user would like.
• Drupal – a tried and true solution, looking a little bit more glossy now that it’s got an award sticker on it.
• SilverStripe – from looking at the demo, clean interface, simple for non-technical, needs further investigation.

Stay tuned for the results – from early indications it looks to me like it’s going to be a shoot-out between TYPOlight and Silverstripe (kinda has a ring to it even).  Drupal’s entry to the race has been hampered by a stumble in the starting blocks when the automatic installer fell flat trying to prep the database tables :/