Sun, 20 Aug 2006

CMS hunting

Filed under: Software and Technology by Hari
Posted at 17:09 IST (last updated: Wed, 16 Jul 2008 @ 20:15 IST)
I'm currently hunting for a good enough CMS which can be used for hosting my media reviews website. As of now, I only have my book reviews at harishankar.org but I plan to make it an all-purpose personal website to host my all my reviews (not just book reviews) when I get the time and motivation to do a complete revamp.

I could do it with WordPress, but of course, I'm looking for more than a blog. So far I've looked at a few but I couldn't really make up my mind. In the meantime, if any of you have suggestions for good content management systems, I'd be really obliged.

Some of my requirements are:
  • Should be fairly lightweight.
  • Needs to support articles, reviews and point rating of reviewed items.
  • Should have a fairly advanced categories system and support comments.
  • A simple and easy to modify templating system would be nice, but not absolutely required if the above requirements are fulfilled.
That's about it.

7 comment(s)

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  1. I've been playing with Mambo for a club website. I don't think it would support your needs - certainly not out of the box - but it's got a lot of extensions that might do the trick.

    Comment by Dominic (visitor) on Sun, 20 Aug 2006 @ 18:58 IST #
  2. Thanks. I also looked at Joomla! which is a fork of Mambo, but these seem to be pretty heavy apps. I'm still thinking of Drupal, but I wish I could install and use it in my localhost (the e-mail account creation process prevents me at the moment).I'm also considering a few "non-traditional" web CMS systems, but none of them seem to be versatile enough and yet light enough to suit my needs.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Sun, 20 Aug 2006 @ 19:00 IST #
  3. The site I always refer people to in order to try before you install/use is http://www.opensourcecms.com/Look to the left side and click the Portals (CMS) link and it's got just about all the known open source CMS systems out there, well, at least most of the good ones worthy of looking at.

    Comment by Drew (visitor) on Sun, 20 Aug 2006 @ 22:02 IST #
  4. Drew thanks for that. I had tried opensourcecms.org and that gave a different site altogether ;)

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Sun, 20 Aug 2006 @ 22:15 IST #
  5. I'm seriously looking at Website Baker as a very promising solution. It's simple, lightweight and easy to build sites, has categories and commenting. The only thing it lacks is a rating system.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Mon, 21 Aug 2006 @ 11:38 IST #
  6. I tried out Website Baker, it wasn't bad at all. I didn't dive real deep into it but it seemed like a really good choice to easily hack and customize to your own liking.

    Comment by Drew (visitor) on Sat, 26 Aug 2006 @ 20:23 IST #
  7. The only issue with Website Baker is that it requires several web directories to be given read-write permissions which is a potential security risk.I'm thinking of hacking up a simple PHP script myself which would read content from text files to serve up "dynamic" pages as a simple CMS solution with no frills and no admin-panel and stuff. Although I wrote a CMS before, that uses MySQL but I would prefer one without MySQL.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Sat, 26 Aug 2006 @ 21:45 IST #

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