Which CMS should I focus on next?

Bryan: First off, I really get a lot out of what you do at CMS Report. Thanks a million. Your post seems like a good opportunity to mention Big Medium 2, currently approaching the end of its beta stint. Alas, I've been more preoccupied with coding Big Medium than evangelizing it, so the community is a small one, focused primarily on testing the app, and I'm not sure that it fits your community requirement. Whether or not it's appropriate for the CMS Focus section, I thought you'd be interested to know more about it.

Big Medium is my baby, and like any proud parent, I'm decidedly biased. But I do think it's a new and unusual offering. It's different because it's simple. Big Medium is intended to be installed and configured by non-developers. The target audience is web designers who want a system that allows for extremely flexible designs but remains easy to set up. It's dead-easy to install, with a super-friendly setup wizard. It's different because it's friendly. Its interface is attractive, clean, friendly... unthreatening to CMS newbies. It's different because it does less. Big Medium is focused specifically on running traditional content sites: marketing sites, online 'zines, blogs, community newspapers, church sites. It provides a lightweight workflow and appropriate publishing tools aimed specifically at traditional sites. (But look elsewhere for e-commerce, forums or social-media sites.)

It's different because it's well documented. The 200-page guide to Big Medium is plain-spoken and easy to follow, starting with the basics and building to more sophisticated uses and configurations. It's different because all you need is HTML. Big Medium's templates are plain old HTML with widget tags sprinkled throughout: To add a photo gallery, just add the <%gallery%> tag to the template. It's different because you never see a configuration file. All of the configuration happens in the browser, with a user-friendly interface. (But yeah, it's pluggable if you want to hack your own custom behaviors and widgets.) It's different because it's squeaky-clean. The generated markup is standards-compliant. It's different because it installs anywhere, even the most modest shared hosting plan, which helps Big Medium fit the technical resources of small businesses and nonprofits. You don't even need a database (it's a flat-file system, but it works very much like a relational database and still scales nicely to very large sites).

Now, all of that said, Big Medium *is* less sophisticated than other offerings, both by design and, I'm sure, my own humble coding skills. It's arguably more of an article manager than a full-blooded, general-purpose CMS -- much more than a blog, much less than a drupal. That means it's not the right tool for every need. In fact, I've put together a page that describes the stuff that Big Medium is *not* good for, the cases where I recommend that people look elsewhere:.

Even so, I think Big Medium is a useful, friendly tool that fits the needs of a *lot* of organizations without overwhelming them with features they may never need. I invite you to take a look.

Thanks again, Josh