[rglover]

I'm trying to decide which CMS I should choose to focus on. I'm slightly familiar with WordPress, but that's about it. If I were to professionally develop CMS based sites for customers, what CMS would be best to learn?

[Maltor124]

Joomla is extremely versatile, but it can get pretty bloated pretty fast. It has a lot of extensions for it, though, is free, and has a very gentle learning curve. I suggest you at least give it a shot. Keep in mind that it'll take quite a few extensions to get you where you want to be.

A nice looking one that I also found recently is called ModX. The entire management system in the backend is loaded through AJAX, and it comes with some nice features and a decent theme. It doesn't look like it has that big a user community, but I was still pretty impressed with what it includes out of the box.

[pgo]

I like CMS Made Simple for a sort of "general, everyday" CMS. Does what it says on the box.

It's not really appropriate for a publishing site or for most specialized sites, but it's good when it comes to traditional hierarchical sites.

Other good options are Textpattern and Drupal, but both have a serious learning curve (especially Drupal).

[datahound]

I have just managed to get a handle on Wordpress creating a site that uses only the pages side. Works fine as long as the customer does not create a sub page of a page and is happy with a straight menu.

Donna Dwyer Hypnotherapy » What Can It Help With?

[iblastoff]

i still pick textpattern over all. although i'm now involved in a fork called xpattern to extend things a little more.

a slight preview of things to come (colors will probably be changed):

[datahound]

I am going to have another look at Textpattern.

What is the picture inclusion like? Is it a WYSIWIG now?

[joey]

I'm learning Expression Engine right now. So far so good. I actually really like using it and the possibilities seem to be endless when using it.

[pgo]

Originally Posted by joey

I'm learning Expression Engine right now. So far so good. I actually really like using it and the possibilities seem to be endless when using it.

EE always looks attractive to me and smallbeer (our resident EE expert) does some good work with it.

[adras]

Don't use one ... yet. But looks like WP will be my choice.

[pgo]

Originally Posted by pgo

I like CMS Made Simple for a sort of "general, everyday" CMS. Does what it says on the box.

My only complaint with it is that it requires unique page aliases.

For example, if you have "Product A" and "Product B" each with a sub-page called "Features", the urls might end up looking like:

/product-a/features/
/product-b/features-2/

Instead of what you might want:

/product-a/features/
/product-b/features/

This is massively irritating to me.

[rglover]

I had forgot about Expression Engine...I like it a lot as far as look goes.

[iblastoff]

if you want something with a whole load of flexibility, try out symphony cms. version 2 beta was just released a couple of days ago.

i've always found expression engine to be slow as hell for what it offers. their forum module is absolutely worthless and so is the e-commerce paypal module. there are definitely better, free alternatives.

[phpninja]

I use Wordpress for all of my projects.

[syntaxsmurf]

Well if we are talking open source. Typo3 has the best rep. I would focus on that. Otherwise focus on frameworks and build stuff yourself. KohanaPHP or Symfony comes highly recommend.

[pgo]

Originally Posted by syntaxsmurf

Well if we are talking open source. Typo3 has the best rep.

Really? Care to back that up?

[Paul]

radient seems ok, only used it for my port but seems to get good review from the RoR community.

i also use CMS made simple, maybe drupal or EE for bigger projects

[larz]

For eCommerce, use GoodBary.

goodbarry[dot]com