World's best CMS?
Written by Lasse Gejl 1292 days ago in category: cms
From day one of my web developer career I’ve been searching for the world’s best CMS. Never found it though.
Just recently I came across Symphony CMS by Twentyone Degrees, and it’s absolutely beautiful, flexible and user friendly. Despite all the nice words, I have one big concern about Symphony:
It doesn’t fully support Internet Explorer.
Wow. What happened here? Did the IE market share drop massively overnight? Did Bill decide to make IE render as it should? Unfortunately no.
A bad business decision
Somehow the dev-team of Symphony took the bad business decision to not support IE, because they think it’s too difficult to make the admin interface work properly. What else is new? IE has always been the mother of trouble for any front-end developer. But skipping approximately 80% of the potential users is plain wrong. And it’s bad business.
I presume Twentyone Degrees want’s their CMS to be popular, and therefore make it usable to most people, right? Serving a simplified admin interfaces to all IE users is not the way, because it will make the CMS less usable for commercial use.
The search continues
I’ve used several hours on Open Source CMS trying out different types of CMS. And I’ve done numerous comparison searches on CMS Matrix only to be frustrated by the lack of choices if you want a user-friendly, pretty and semantically correct Content Management System.
The nerd convention
Half the CMS’s are written for nerds by nerds. They’re not build with the end consumer in mind, thus having serious usability issues for the average user.
A possible solution
One could argue that the reason for all of my problems is that I’m solely looking at Open Source CM systems and the like. And yes – that might be the answer. Maybe there’s a bunch of great commercial CMS’s out there. Hell, it might be the reason why they are commercial and not Open Source. Because they’re better products.
Cash brings quality?
The cool thing about commercial CM systems is that you have some-where to bitch about stuff, which is not working. The downside is that you have to pay for it. Well, your client have to pay for it. Another thing is that you often get a lot better response in a Open Source forum than with the guys that sold you the commercial CMS.
I’m ready to be impressed
But anyways. If you know a CMS (commercial or Open Source) that meet my demands listed below, I would love to hear about it.
Demands for the world’s best CMS
I’m looking for a lightweight CMS for professional use. My focus is on the end user, and their easiness to use the CMS in a no-hassle way everyday. I’m looking for a CMS that can do the basics perfect instead of a truckload of stuff poorly.
And it must:
- Come with easy standard installation script
- Run on an ordinary shared LAMP-server
- Have a non-browser specific admin interface
- Output semantically correct XHTML
- Support 100% CSS controlled design
- Be easy to internationalize
- Include image editor, possibly third part software
- Include simple Standards Compliant WYSIWYG editor
That’s about it. A simple yet difficult list to fulfill. Anyone?
What to do
Unless somebody miraculously points me to the world’s best CMS, I must look for other options:
- Edit an existing CMS to make it fit
- Build a new CMS from the ground
Option 1 could be several things. I could make a complete make-over of the Textpattern admin interface, and thus make it look and feel my way. But the CMS would still lack some basic functions. Or I could re-script and re-style the IE part of Symphony, and await the united applause of the commercial oriented part of the CMS community.
Option 2 is what I feel like doing, but it’s damn time consuming. The upside is huge flexibility, and the power to make it like I want it.
What are your thoughts?
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