Content Management Systems to Watch

Blogging

Almost everyone has a blog these days, and whether you need one to keep clients up-to-date with development of your company, want to review music, or just want to publicly write your musings, there are plenty of applications for blogs.

Wordpress has been the defacto choice for easy blogging for a while now and for good reason. It has a very strong community with loads of themes and plugins available to turn it into pretty much anything. It also has Akismet to stop comment spam in its tracks which is fantastic and works with PHP/MySQL - which is offered by most hosts. Try the demo.

Others to check out are MovableType (no demo) and TextPattern (demo).

Lite CMS

Sometimes you want to make a small website, with just a few pages, but not in the form of a blog. Yes Wordpress can be made to do this with a variety of plugins, but there are also some small lightweight CMSs that are designed specifically for this purpose.

ModX is a fork of Etomite (see below), but has a prettier interface and few great tricks up its sleeve. It is easy to install with a good community and some fantastic templates out of the box. It also works with PHP/MySQL so will work on most hosts. Try the demo.

Others to check out are SNews (demo) and Etomite (demo)

Portals

If you are building a large site with many sections, different types of content and need something that was designed for these larger sites then these portal offerings may be what you need. They are generally offer better and easier expandability than blogging and lighter cms.

eZ Publish is the backend to this site and one I have been using for years. It offers great expandability and makes it pretty easy to create any type of content from reviews, to articles to anything more advanced. It does have a relatively steep learning curve, as do most the advanced CMSs, but once you grasp it can do almost anything you could want a CMS to do. It runs on PHP/MySQL. Try the demo.

Others to check out are Drupal (demo), Joomla (demo) and Typo3 (demo).

Forums

If you are building a community whether it is for support for your product or service or just for people with similar interests then forum software is what you need to organise the discussions.

Vanilla is a very clean and easy to use forum application that runs on PHP/MySQL offering a slightly different layout to tradition forums, but actually more intuitive in my opinion. It is easy to install, and use with a great community behind it.

Others to check out are bbPress (demo), PunBB (demo), MyBB (demo), SMF (demo) and phpBB (demo)