In the ever exiting and flourishing world of Content Management Systems (CMS), you can almost lose yourself searching the one that’s just right for you.
After a lot of research and testing several different CMS applications you end up discovering that all of them have great and not so great features. Sometimes one might wonder if it’s worth going through the trouble of installing, learning the always steep curve of how to configure the back end, and apply a unique template just to realize that, in the end, there was not really much to say on a weblog.
My journey in search of the perfect CMS not only involved having the capability of adding new content but also the ease of doing it through mobile devices (such as the iPhone), adding new static pages without having to use Dreamweaver, Coda, or some other web editor, add new menus, allow commenting, allow me to tweak the code if I felt like doing it (so it had to be open source), and to customize the layout so it wouldn’t look like every other website with a weblog out there.
I first started (quite a few years ago) with Movable Type in its early releases, it was a great tool, however the constant comment spamming would prove to be a major deal breaker. The search led me to find Mambo which not shortly after found its original developers breaking away from the project to develop Joomla!, which I also followed (after all, we have got to stick it to the man!) and used it for quite a while. I became a Joomla! fanatic, developing my own modules, changing code and making it my own CMS, however changing layout proved to be a daunting task. It turned out that the designer in me overcame my developer and I decided that it was time to restart the search.
Others came around:Typo3, Plone, newer versions of Movable Type (amazing tool!), Drupal (another great CMS) and even attempts of developing my own miniCMS for Vidor Media Productions proved not being the right tool, until Automattic the creators of Wordpress, released the latest version of Wordpress (2.7). Oh what a joy!
Once again wiped the server clean and created a fresh install of Wordpress. I have to say that the folks at Six Apart did a great job, and hopefully the open source community will help to develop this great tool.
Now enough of playing around with installing, uninstalling and configuring and let’s focus on helping you focus on what’s important!