[gamestar]

Hi evryone, I am new to this site, so I apologies if this has been covered somewhere else. I did have a quick look but couldn't find anything.

I am looking for a decent feature rich content management system for medium sized websites that has a reasonable sized community behind it.

Here is the twist, most CMS pay no or little attention to W3C compliancy or semantic mark up, so as an end result you find tables injected in odd places or a missing h1 tag.

I am looking for something either under GNU licence or at a reasonable price, say $400. Needs to be written in pure php, and has a good templating engine.

Sorry, very picky!!

Has anyone come across anything they could strongly recommend.

I have tried Joomla but this suffers greatly from points mentioned above.

I love wordpress as this has all the function required, but used as a cms requires a little more imagination when building sites. E.g. I can only make split menus by hardcoding them in the template, which restricts clients ability to make changes.

Many thanks in advance

[freelancr]

Why not build a bespoke one? Should people really be selling a website to a client that is built up from Open Source software? I thought that was against the terms of the licence?

[Larixk]

^ Depends on the license. There are lots of licenses allowing for commercial use.

[gamestar]

I just double checked and both wordpress and joomla can be commercially sold on.

Creating a bespoke cms would be the best option in a perfect world, but as a designer, I deal almost solely with front end look and feel.

[freelancr]

Learn something new every day...

Selling Free Software - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF)

[visualweb]

There's a more semantic version of joomla out which -may- fit your needs. It's called a8ejoomla.com and is based on the latest stable version 1.0.12a. Currently, the developers are working on bringing a8ejoomla up to the current joomla 1.0.13 cvs which adds a few needed security enhancements, otw... a8e plays nice with most existing components and modules.

[gamestar]

^ Hey thanks for that visualweb. I will download it later on today for a quick play and let everyone know how it went

[RaelRode]

Web 2.0 Content Management System for Designers | Content Management System for Ad Agencies | CMS | Light

[Dusteh]

Light looks a bit noddy to me. Both CMS made simple and Drupal are as W3C compliant as you want them to be.

[Resilient]

Symphony by twentyone degrees would be one I'd recommend. Great CMS and W3C standards compliant.

[gamestar]

Thanks for the tips guys.

Has anyone got much experience with expression engine? I've heard a lot of people talk about it, but when I had a look through, static pages seem to be the biggest problem it encounters.

Besides that it has some really cool features.

[pgo]

EE is cool if you're doing publishing. Also, it's not great it you're picky about the way your URLs are styled. After spending 30+ hours tinkering with it and getting nowhere, I gave up.

I like CMS Made Simple. Because it's easy to use and extensible. My only complaints are that some of its modules seem to tax a server and it makes a lot of queries per page. A lot of that has to do with some modules being poorly designed, I think. Version 2.0 is in the pipeline and promises to be a huge improvement.

[gamestar]

Cool thanks pgo. I downloaded the core version of ee, I had the same issues, it takes a long time to learn. If it takes me loads of time to learn, clients will take forever..lol!

CMS made simple - Is there a lot of plugin modules avaiable for it? And what are their quality. I know from experience Joomla has some really good modules available as well as some that have been poorly designed.

[iblastoff]

EE should be pretty intuitive. I mean if you already have a website designed/coded in xhtml/css then its just a matter of copying/pasting your code and then inserting EE tags where they're needed? what difficulties are you having with this?

[pgo]

CMSMS has some good modules. Some not so good. There won't be nearly as many as there are for Joomla because it's not nearly as popular.

Originally Posted by iblastoff

EE should be pretty intuitive. I mean if you already have a website designed/coded in xhtml/css then its just a matter of copying/pasting your code and then inserting EE tags where they're needed? what difficulties are you having with this?

You can't (easily) create static pages. It doesn't really generate menus for you. You have to deal with "categories" and "weblogs" (yes, you can change the name of weblogs).

It's not simply a matter of pasting in XHTML...I don't know what EE you've been using.

[demonzmedia]

I am looking for a decent feature rich content management system for medium sized websites that has a reasonable sized community behind it.

An excellent CMS with a GNU lisence is Joomla.

It is highly customisable and has an excellent open source community with many extensions. It doesn't produce tableless design without some modifications, however you can write your own w3c compliant semantic templates fairly easily. There are a large number of extensions and forums on creating w3c compliant sites using Joomla CMS.

[iblastoff]

Originally Posted by pgo

You can't (easily) create static pages. It doesn't really generate menus for you. You have to deal with "categories" and "weblogs" (yes, you can change the name of weblogs).

It's not simply a matter of pasting in XHTML...I don't know what EE you've been using.

ok maybe that came across as a bit oversimplifying but i assumed people would know theres a bit more you'd obviously have to do to set up a dynamic page.

firstly, 'categories' and 'weblogs'? every cms has its own lexicon. thats hardly to be unexpected. i think people get completely confused when they approach EE and expect it to behave like a page-based cms like drupal (which with its taxonomies and blah blah crap is far more confusing than EE)

there is no 'menu generation' (at least not in the way i assume you expect it to be) but i dont see any reason why someone couldn't just set up a static 'weblog'(or whatever you want to name it) entry and then post their menu choices to it. then set up your template to output that particular weblog:entries tag and voila a customizable (by posts, ordered any way you want) menu.

as for static pages, there are multitudes of ways to do this, including the 'official' static plugin or the muchly used 3rd party one by mark hout. of course you can do it natively within EE as well if you're able to read a few simple tutorials.

basically i dont know of any cms where you can login and 'easily' do anything.

[stealthcow]

Originally Posted by iblastoff

EE should be pretty intuitive. I mean if you already have a website designed/coded in xhtml/css then its just a matter of copying/pasting your code and then inserting EE tags where they're needed? what difficulties are you having with this?

EE is far from intuitive - its what we use as our CMS but its got a huge learning curve

[stealthcow]

i actually blame the difficulty to learn expression engine on the fact that they use the term "weblog" to describe a table in a database. People automatically think of a blog when they hear weblog, which confuses people right from the beginning