Judging five most promising Content Management Systems

This year, I was given the privilege of sitting on the judging panel for Packt Publishing's 2008 Most Promising Open Source CMS Award.  Judges on the panel were required to select their top three CMS based on a number of factors including performance, usability, accessibility, ease of configuration and customization, scalability and security.  These top three CMS were to originate from the five finalists in the most promising category which included: CMS Made Simple, ImpressCMS, MemHT Portal, MiaCMS, and SilverStripe.

As I promised earlier, I'm posting online my notes and comments on how I ranked all five finalists in the most promising category.  For better or for worse, Packt Publishing also gives their judges a lot of flexibility in how they rank a CMS.  While I wouldn't consider this a complete analysis of the CMS, it should provide enough information on the impression each CMS left me when reviewed.  While the methodology for determining the best CMS may be subjective, I do try to design my ranking of the CMS to be fair and non-biased.

The order in which I ranked the top "most promising" CMS were:

  1. SilverStripe (my highest ranked)
  2. ImpressCMS
  3. CMS Made Simple
  4. MiaCMS
  5. MemHT Portal (my lowest ranked)

In order to come with the above rank, I chose to use factors such as performance, usability, accessibility, ease of configuration, ease of customization, scalability, the the amount of support/documentation offered through the project's site/infrastructure.  I did not use security as a factor in my ranking.  Since the CMS must be less than two years old to qualify in the most promising category, it seemed unfair to rank these CMS by security since by definition they're not fully matured projects.

SilverStripe

SilverStripe scored high on usability and ease of configuration.  I really liked SilverStripe's user interface for editing and managing content. The administrative layout with "tab browsing" enabled access to a host of functions without having to scroll down on my screen.  When I tried to add a link to the "home" page the interface and work flow for adding links even impressed me.

In my opinion, SilverStripe's user interface is about a generation ahead of not only the four other CMS finalists but a number of mature CMS already out there in the market.  I recently went on record stating that I thought two of my favorite Web applications, Drupal and Wordpress, could learn a couple things from SilverStripe's user interface for editing content.

 

 SilverStripe
 Performance 4
 Usability 5
 Accessibility 5
 Ease of Configuration 5
 Ease of Customization 4
 Scalability 4
 Support/Documentation 4
 Total Points 31

ImpressCMS

With ImpressCMS a fork of XOOPS it wasn't a surprise to me that the CMS ranked high in scalability and performance as it has a mature code base.  In the spirit of the "most promising" category, I looked at what ImpressCMS had to offer that XOOPS didn't provide.

The ImpressCMS project has added quite a few new features to their CMS since breaking away from XOOPS.  Features that have been added to ImpressCMS since XOOPs includes native multilingual support, administrative user interface improvements, work flow improvements, and an improved installer.  But what impressed me most about ImpressCMS is that it has dropped PHP 4 support in favor of PHP  5.2 or greater.  To me this is an indication that ImpressCMS is looking toward the future and is not resting on the past successes of XOOPS.

ImpressCMS impressed me so much that I decided to add it to CMS Report's CMS Focus.  ImpressCMS pushed XOOPS off of this list!

 

 ImpressCMS
 Performance 5
 Usability 4
 Accessibility 4
 Ease of Configuration 4
 Ease of Customization 4
 Scalability 5
 Support/Documentation 4
 Total Points 30

 

CMS Made Simple

While MiaCMS and CMS Made Simple were essentially a tie, I gave CMS Made Simple the third spot since its code base originated with the project (MiaCMS is a fork of Mambo).

Although CMS Made Simple didn't score poorly in any of the criteria, it also didn't seem to shine as well as SilverStripe and ImpressCMS.  CMS Made Simple scored high in ease of configuration as well as ease of customization.  I did have some concerns with regards to performance and scalability that are not addressed well in the project's documentation.

My feeling is that CMS Made Simple would be a good choice for personal Websites and less for businesses or larger organizations.

 CMS Made Simple
 Performance 4
 Usability 4
 Accessibility 3
 Ease of Configuration 4
 Ease of Customization 5
 Scalability 3
 Support/Documentation 4
 Total Points 27

MiaCMS

Similar to Joomla!, MiaCMS is another fork of Mambo.  However, since the MiaCMS project is still young and the code in MiaCMS too similar to Mambo, I kept seeing MiaCMS as nothing more than a rebranded and improved version of Mambo 4.6.  Keeping within the "spirit" of the most promising category...it just seemed too early for me to put MiaCMS in the top three CMS.  Time will tell us whether MiaCMS will be its own fully supported CMS or only remembered as a fork under the shadow of Mambo.

I really want to revisit MiaCMS next year and compare it with Joomla! and Mambo.  If someone feels that I'm being too harsh on MiaCMS for being a fork of Mambo, know that I was just as harsh on the Joomla! project.  It really wasn't until the development of Joomla! 1.5 before I considered the Joomla! project truly legitimate.  As Joomla! has learned, it takes more than forking the code and opening a site  to create a legitimate open source project...it takes a community willing to change, evolve, and learn.  I think MiaCMS is on the right track, but it lacks the history needed to judge it fairly.

MiaCMS
 Performance 4
 Usability 4
 Accessibility 4
 Ease of Configuration 5
 Ease of Customization 4
 Scalability 4
 Support/Documentation 3
 Total Points

28

 

MemHT Portal

My shortest "review" of a CMS.  I just wasn't impressed with MemHT Portal and couldn't really see myself ever using this CMS for a project.  MemHT isn't a bad CMS, but is also doesn't seem to be a great CMS.  To be fair to MemHT, the latest version of MemHT, 4.0.0 as not reviewed.  Also, there are some signals that MemHT may be catching on and perhaps we'll be seeing some hypergrowth to it's community.  If you're looking for an up and coming CMS and those projects I've ranked higher don't impress you, then you still may want to check out MemHT.

MemHT Portal
 Performance 3
 Usability 3
 Accessibility 3
 Ease of Configuration 3
 Ease of Customization 3
 Scalability 3
 Support/Documentation 3
 Total Points 21