Choosing a Lightweight PHP CMS

• cms
• php

Choosing a CMS for a website you are developing so it can be maintained by non-technical users should be a breeze shouldn’t it – I mean there are literally dozens of the light blighters out there.  So why is it so hard?   Well I guess for one, the number of CMSes available does make the decision making a little harder.  If there was one product that seemed to be an industry leader and people were flocking to it, then that would also make things easier.  I guess a couple of years ago, that was probably the case – Joomla had stuck it’s head out above the competition (the likes of Drupal, PHPNuke and Mambo – a project from which Joomla was forked).

Today, however, it’s a different ball game.  Back then (woah and wasn’t it such a long time ago), a CMS in PHP land was really a community site engine.  Whilst community sites are still important, the primary function that most of us are looking for now is the ability to edit and structure content in a meaningful way on a website – and then let someone else who isn’t a web programmer do that to.  In my own mind I’ve lost interest in those community focused CMSes and crying out for something simple, that isn’t so bloated – and it seems that I’m not alone.

So where to from here?  Well thankfully we live in a world where product comparison websites are commonplace.  So I headed over to OpenSourceCMS.com to get a picture of where things were at at the moment (I’d recommend sorting by user rating to filter out some of the noise).  Now it’s clear from their list, that Joomla is still doing well, but there are other CMSes focusing on the simple things that are gaining ground.  In particular there were a few that stood out to me based on rating and popularity (the number of ratings against a CMS):

• CMS Made Simple (http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/)
• MODx (http://www.modxcms.com/)
• TYPOlight (http://www.typolight.org/)
• Concrete5 (http://www.concrete5.org/)

Based on an individual’s needs looking through each of the products there are things in there that will make one appeal more than another, but my take on each product (from spending just a little while investigating demos of each product) is outlined below:

CMS Made Simple

Nice to see a product so clearly differentiating itself from the other bloated products out there.  The CMS caters nicely for (and focuses on) core content publishing, but doesn’t completely throw away the extensibility of the other PHP cmses out there.  I guess one strange thing that strikes me is that the administration interface doesn’t push your site content right in your face when you login (as I guess I thought it would), and when you get to editing your content (which is pretty find and start doing admittedly) the interface doesn’t strike me as targetted at non-technical folks as much.  I mean there is nothing confusing in there, but if you are going to distribute your site editing responsibilities shouldn’t you show the page content, and probably just the page content to these users rather than let them change the page type or template (I must admit this is a first glance look, and I haven’t done in-depth analysis to determine if group permissions influence what can be change).

All in all a solid CMS, which is definitely less complicated and bloated than some of it’s rivals…

MODx

Having a play with the admin demo of MODx, the product looks to be nicely done.  The administration side of the site is probably a little overwhelming for a non-technical user, but the MODx system does allow an editor to make modifications without having to login to the administration section of the site.  My only gripe about that is that a popup window is used for content editing rather than doing some magic and being able to edit the changes in place (admittedly this does cause more challenges technically).

One of the very interesting features of this particular CMS, is there is a “Export Static Site” function in the administration interface.  Whilst not something that will be useful all the time, it could be useful if you do have a client who doesn’t have PHP available on their hosting.

I think whilst it is obvious that there is a lot that can be done with this CMS, it does appear to be something of a large piece of work and probably not as simple as I first thought.

TYPOlight

From first impressions the product website is exceptionally well done and if they are “eating their own dogfood” (which you hope they are), then this stands to be a good product.  Delving into the demo, the administration interface is very clean and well laid out.  One of the interesting (and potentially confusing to new users) is that articles which make up the majority of the content on the site, can contain a number of child elements.  On the one hand this is extremely important for building a site that is more sophisticated than your grass roots site, on the other it does add a layer of complexity.   Given what can be achieved from using these elements, however, they are obviously an important piece of functionality in the site.

The key content types that are available are – articles (or pages), news, flash content, forms (with a nice form generator), calendar / events, newsletters and FAQs. For me this is a comprehensive list for building a simple community site in addition to core content requirements.

Other really tasty pieces of functionality that are offered in the product are:

• Task management built right into the admin interface – nice touch.
• A live update facility.  The ability for a trusted user to take full control of their environment and be able to upgrade their installation without the intervention of technical support is very interesting indeed.
• Administrative functions for modifying stylesheets and page layouts quite simply.

Overall, TYPOlight appears to be an attractive little CMS, and should required at most a semi-technical user to administratively maintain a site built with TYPOlight.

Concrete5

My gut says this CMS is going to be big (as in successful).  Given the first bite is with the eye for any product, this thing screams quality.  In terms of usability it’s pretty slick too.  Editing page content is all done through using the site front-end – basically an editing menu bar is displayed at the top of the screen and this drives the experience of modifying a page.  Very slick.

Additionally, the system uses a dashboard for configuring behind the scenes type items, such as look and feel, maintenance tasks, etc.

Definitely worth a look – this is going to be one to watch.

Summary

This one is line ball for me (at least before I have committed any real time to investigation) between Concrete5 and TYPOlight, and the other two are very good products also.  At this stage, I would say that TYPOlight is more of a complete package than Concrete5 but in the long term I’m almost certain the Concrete5 will be making a big impact.  Certainly, from an ease-of-use perspective (for non-technical users) Concrete5 is a superior product.

From here, I’ll be downloading Concrete5 and TYPOlight and installing both of them for a side by side comparison.  Any experience that others have had with any of the above products would be appreciated, and I’ll definitely do my best to follow up on this article once I’ve investigate some more…