In my last blog post I have explained a bit more complaints about pretty much all CMS that I have seen in the PHP space to date. Now I wonder is there any CMS I should be checking out? Note I am not so interested in a CMS that is still in its infancy, I am looking for a CMS that can have a fighting chance to compete against Drupal, ezPublish and friends in a feature checklist comparison. Actually I always wonder why Midgard gets to little attention. It seems to be based on the concept of a content repository which in itself sounds promising.
You wondered why Midgard gets so little attention? I think it's because it is too complicated. One Midgard co-developer who worked few years ago for Nemein and after that was short period as my workmate said that even he can't recommend Midgard because it's too low level and complicated for regular CMS use.
If none of open source cms work for you then you must use custom cms. Please let me know your requirement.
Take a look at Croogo, it's a new Open Source CMS built on the CakePHP framework.
http://croogo.org
Well, if none of the existing CMSes around are mature enough or adapted, maybe the best way would be to invest your knowledge in the most promising existing one, and try your best to influence its developement ?
I can only speak from the eZ Publish POV at the moment, since, well, I'm working there, but I know why I joined (and it wasn't the money or position, etc, it was the tool itself, from a developer's position), and I'm still convinced it was a good choice (not the best, but the superlative is a bit relative here...).
Your remarks about what we don't like about CMS were very interesting, by the way. I'll try to answer it too, just to face a bit of harsh truth ;)
I would recommend silverstripe, We used it at work for a couple of projects and we loved it. We tried a lot of them before finding the one that makes everything we needed (Drupal, Joomla, Concrete 5 etc.).
There is also a new book out about this cms.
Content types are easy to create and modify.
The Framework uses a good seperation between DataOjects, Controllers and Templates, wich makes it really easy to theme.
Give it a try and I hope you like it.
@inkubux: I have looked at silverstripe before. IIRC I think it sufferes a bit too much from reinventing the wheel in terms of libraries and frameworks. But the over concept goes in the direction I want, however its too developer centric. As in right now it just does not allow administrators to add new content types etc via the admin panel. So it sort of side steps the issue I am talking about. Without a powerful admin panel it simply does not look appealing to end users. I think what they should look into is looking towards annotations to make it easier for them to parse out generated code so that they can present the code/config inside the admin panel. And of course add some admin panels to create new content types etc.
What is your opinion about TYPO3? We use it a lot at work, but our experience is that the end user in the role of an editor has problems using it. We use TemplaVoila! to allow them the flexibility of content creation and combination, but the backend stays quite overloaded with a lot of features that are not used by our clients. A new version based on FLOW3 is in the make, don´t know yet, what comes out of it, but as you mentioned it, it will base on a content repository, too.
We also used Silverstripe to have something simpler and our end clients had less problems working on content in the backend.
Drupal is very interesting in its architecture and the ease of use of its modules and how to combine them. From the business perspective it is quite promising so we keep an eye on it.
As we work with Symfony PHP Framework, we heard of Apostrophe. Its frontend editing and use of slots is very appealing for the end user. But that does not say anything so far about its CM capabilities.
I think the important thing about content is the ways you are able to present it to the end user, in form of HTML, PDF or simple Text, as RSS or any form of multimedia. The management of it should be as easy and intuitive for the editor. In TYPO3 this is possible, but all features a little bit cluttered all over the place and the combination of extensions is not as easy as in Drupal, in my opinion.
Maybe you want to have a look into this CMS market share report: http://www.cmswire.com/downloads/cms-market-share/
You should check out Sympal, it's developed on the Symfony framework. The lead dev is also the lead for Doctrine.
Typo3 was a gigantic mess internally when I last looked at it, admittedly that was 2 or 3 year ago. In that regard I found Drupal core code surprisingly/refreshingly clean, albeit based on a pretty wonky callback model, which I do not understand them clinging to. Its not like the Drupal team really binds it self to maintaining BC with their new major leases. So I fear their approach is not based on the fact that they are maintaining compatibility to legacy code originating in PHP4 land, but because they actually believe it makes sense.
Anyway getting back to Silverstripe, I believe that it also suffers from the same approach that Drupal, ez Publish, Joomla and friends suffer which is the mixing configuration into the database with sequential auto generated IDs that I explained extensively in my previous post link in this post. It will be interesting to see how the Flow3 based Typo3 solution will look like. It could become the solution, since they have the community size and large end user driven userbase to really push this forward quickly once they come out with something. Its just been taking so long. Not even sure if they have started with the CMS they want to put on top Flow3.
I had a very brief look at Apostrophe and also Sympal. Architecturally I found Sympal more appealing mainly because its build on top of Doctrine. However they are both still in its infancy and from what I have seen they both the same limitation as Silverstripe, they do not allow the creation of new content types via the admin panel. That being said I very much like the idea if people focusing on the CMS aspect and leaving the framework up to other people. Especially since that means that for custom development I have a framework that is also tailored towards that. Most of the frameworks developed solely for a given CMS weren't really all that fun to use for custom development.
