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Content Management System, or CMS is an application used to manage news easily so that users can publish, edit and delete articles from the back-end admin system. HTML and other scripting language are not necessary to operate a CMS, though having them will add more advantages.
Since we had looked into 22 open source PHP frameworks, i decided to do a roundup of 20 Open Source PHP Content Management Systems so that readers who don’t have strong PHP knowledge can easily create their website using free and open source CMS.
1. Wordpress
Wordpress is a powerful yet easy to use content management system. Initially it was designed as a blogging platform. However, it slowly become popular and can be customized into a powerful CMS with some tricks and plugins. I had wrote an article about Wordpress SEO plugins and also talked about things that you should know about Wordpress 2.8.
2. Drupal
Drupal is a free and open source modular framework and Content Management System (CMS) written in PHP. It is used as a back-end system for many different types of websites, ranging from small personal blogs to large corporate and political sites.
3. Joomla
Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.
4. Frog CMS
Frog CMS simplifies content management by offering an elegant user interface, flexible templating per page, simple user management and permissions, as well as the tools necessary for file management.
5. SilverStripe
SilverStripe is a PHP CMS built with Sapphire framework, and it uses MVC design pattern. you can view example sites that built with SilverStripe from the official webpage.
6. Mambo
Mambo is a full-featured, award-winning content management system that can be used for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications. Although some Mambo sites had already migrated to Joomla, but i think i should include Mambo as it is still a great CMS.
7. TYPOlight
TYPOlight is a PHP 5 CMS and it has a lot of features such as live update, cross-browser CSS framework generator(IE7 compatible), templated based front end output, use Ajax and Web 2.0 technologies. You should check out the main page for more info.
8. Concrete5
Concrete5 is an open source content management system with simple administaror interface. You can edit a web page live by using the editing toolbar provided after you log in as administrator.
9. Textpattern
Textpattern is yet another very popular content management system. It requires PHP 4 to run and has a lot of plugins that you can use for various customizations.
10. Symphony
Symphony is a CMS that uses XML/XSLT as its templating language. Symphony lets you customize anything you like, from the website’s URL structure to your publishing environment. For a non programmer, this CMS might be complicated to learn.
11. MODx
MODx is both a PHP application framework and content management system. MODx is the first free PHP CMS to offer an API that fully supports Web 2.0 Ajax technology. It is SEO friendly CMS, and allows you to configure the meta content for each page.
12. Habari Project
Habari is a highly recommended open source blogging platform. It is being written specifically for modern web hosting environment, and uses modern object oriented programming techniques.
13. CMS Made Simple
CMS Made Simple is highly customizable and there are a lot of Modules for you to download. The Documentation is pretty complete and easy to follow.
14. ImpressCMS
ImpressCMS is a community developed Content Management System. It is highly scalable and is extremely useful for managing online communities.
15. Exponent CMS
Exponent uses an intuitive and flexible content editing system that allows website pages to be edited on the page as it is displayed. You can download modules and themes from the official website too!
16. MiaCMS
MiaCMS is a fork of the Mambo CMS. It has a powerful and extensible third party entension system, and also a flexible site theming capabilities. MiaCMS supports OpenID and can consider to be a stable and mature CMS.
17. Jojo CMS
Jojo is a search engine friendly CMS. You will have SEO friendly URL to your article, and Jojo will handle www/non-www domains for you. Beside SEO friendly, Jojo also lets you extend the functionality by adding product databases, blogs, image galleries or whatever takes your fancy.
18. TYPO3
TYPO3 is a free Open Source content management system for enterprise purposes on the web and in intranets. It offers full flexibility and extendability while featuring an accomplished set of ready-made interfaces, functions and modules.
19. Elxis CMS
Elxis CMS comes with a lot of features such as Search Engine Friendly URL, strong security, adjustable member list and complete user profiles. Its automated tasks, modern design, AJAX technology and multi-lingual interface helps you be more productive.
20. Chyrp
Chyrp is a lightweight blogging platform and it uses Twig as the templating engine. The documentation is quite complete and you can download a lot of useful modules from the main site.
beautiful article – I always like to check some kind of different CMS, though I know I will never completely learn them
The problem with a few of those is that they are bulky and come with bloatware – lots of unnecessary features that are put in to add in features but that someone who doesn’t want can’t really disable or remove and thus causes a severe slow down or load.
Without naming any names – because all of these are created my people who have poured hours of hard work, let’s just say that the best solution isn’t always the one with most features out of the box.
Outside the usual suspects; Drupal, joomla, mambo, etc… (which are all great in their own right) there are some pretty decent CMS platforms out there.
I really like how ModX handles user generated content, and CMS made simple is a great one when you want to bang out a quick site. Frog and Concrete5 also have merit for various reasons.
Kudos to all who participate in Opensource projects! If you use opensource, be sure to give back and donate your time/support.
Wow, that is really cool dude!
RT
http://www.complete-privacy.tk
don’t forget ExpressionEngine (http://expressionengine.com/).
version 2.0 is looks like it is about to be opened up for beta testers and so far it looks fantastic. IMHO it could be the next WordPress. It’s also being written with CodeIgniter which will make it great for web developers out there like myself.
I should have noted that if you want a commercial version of EE you’ll have to fork over the $. but i still give it high marks.
“IMHO it could be the next WordPress”
Does that mean that you feel (as you stated as your Humble Opinion) that WordPress is above/better than ExpressionEngine?
It is quite the opposite, also my own opinion.
WordPress is not a CMS, it is a “Blog Tool and Publishing Platform”.
That is an argument that you and other WordPress users have dealt with for a long time now. You require plugins to do things that EE does out of the box.
Without ranting & raving, EE is an exceptional Content Management System. It does not belong on this list of 20 Promising Open Source PHP Content Management Systems. The Core version is free, not Open Source. Big difference.
I own both a Personal & Commercial license. Have developed a few EE Core sites.
I’ve worked with WordPress, Drupal, Mambo, ModX & Joomla.
None of them come close to the sheer versatility, speed, and customizability or EE. The attitude and professionalism of the EE Community Forums alone is worth the price of ownership.
I <3 EE
I should have been a little more clear about this. I love EE, CI, and everything EllisLabs. EE is great software and comes with a great community. I would recommend EE to anyone. It’s great for the developers and great for content managers.
EE just seems so easy and intuitive for those that are not developers that it can be transformed into publishing software that works similar to WordPress. I think, for that reason, it will become a popular option.
i had no idea EE 2.0 wasn’t even out yet. the first screenshots i saw from 2.0 was almost 2 years ago? i’ve used EE for a few sites but personally i can’t justify the cost of it when there are other open source free solutions that can do the same thing. i remember having to wrestle with the whole /index.php issue and it just seemed silly. textpattern and symphony come to mind.
i’ve tried out wordpress on my personal blog and was at first wow’ed by the admin area design. after a few weeks though its limitations started pouring out and its backend speed was obscenely slow unless i installed google gears, which made certain features like image uploading not even work anymore. i honestly have no idea how wordpress got so popular.
Great, I only knew about Drupal wordpress joomla and mambo initially. Which one is the top picks?
I use WordPress as a CMS (I have worked on a site that is huge and it uses WP). Yes, it was for blogging, but it does soooo much more if you want it to.
I also use CMS Made Simple. CMSms is so simple to theme and easy for the user. My clients really like it. But is lacking in the plugin world compared to WordPress (of course).
thanks for the list, i did a lot of research to pick the one i wanted to go with for my clients and i missed a few of those.
Hi,
There is no top pick actually. It depends on what you want, your project budgets, timeline, and also your knowledge on that particular CMS.
If your project is simple then i will recommend Wordpress. Because you need minimum time to pick-up everything and Wordpress has a good documentation plus active community that will answer most of your problems.
Wordpress isn’t a CMS. Its a blogging tool.
You can do some CMSy things with it and it can be upgraded with plugins into something akin to a CMS but it is not developed as one
Zac, WordPress was not initially developed as a “CMS”, though basically that is exactly what it really is – blogs are content, and wordpress manages that content. More and more people today are using WordPress as a complete CMS… Watch this video from WordCamp Dallas 2009 : http://vimeo.com/5354329.
I personally have been developing sites with Joomla for quite awhile, switching to WordPress actually made my job easier.
If you think a blogging software is a CMS you haven’t ever used a real CMS. There are great open source CMSes out there, such as Typo3. But now I would like to know how Wordpress compares to a real CMS such as Vignette, thanks!
I have theopposite thoughts to Thomas.
Ive been developing with Joomla for a while and tried a few sites with WP as a replacment CMS. It was taking me days to get the site to look right with neccessary plugins etc.
I went back to Joomla and had sites up and running in a fraction of the time.
I felt WP as a CMS was was too geared towards “Posts” and not “Pages” and trying to structure a commercial site was taking too long. So I went back to Joomla.
My Joomla sites work pretty good. I still love Joomla. But I have clients who need to be able to update their web pages, but don’t pick up the intricacies of modifying a Joomla site. Most of my Joomla sites the clients are afraid to edit anything for fear of breaking something. The wordpress sites have had higher rates of clients adoption is what I am saying. You can develop a small business website using the pages of wordpress as a CMS, if you want to allow for an easy way for visitors to respond to you, it is a snap to configure a contact form that accepts any type of input you want, including captcha. You don’t have to dig through the Joomla extensions library, read up on what’s current. You go into the wordpress administration area and click add plugin – search through the plugin directory, click install. Click Click Click – presto – SEO, SEM, Twitter, Facebook, Videos, Photo Gallery, Contact Form, click click. Try doing that with Joomla. Have you installed updates to J1.5 sites? J1.5.12 just came out. Updated about half my sites to J1.5.11…. some are still on J1.0 … wordpress? autoupdate….
Where’s Expression Engine?
Weak.
The article is about Open Source CMS. Expression Engine is not Open Source.
Excellent list of open source PHP Content management systems.
i think you should also include prestashop its a great solution with lots of community add ons. great article! thanks for sharing.
Prestashop is an e-commerce solution, which i think not suitable to put in this list. However, thanks for sharing such great ecommerce solution with us!
That list is not complete without Expression Engine.
Hi Chris,
Expression Engine is not open source, although you can get its core engine for free…
Totally agree with Television Spy. How about a post on the top 3 SIMPLEST CMS’s? I have worked with quite a few on this list, and they’re just trying to be everything for everyone. Too bloated and complicated.
Hi, nice overview. You could have added Zikula, which is great. http://zikula.org
Hmm nice list.
One CMS that is often forgotten is eZ publish (ez.no). It’s a very mighty PHP5 Enterprise CMS and development framework. Content is handled in an object oriented way (Means you have modifyable content classes from which you will instantiate your content objects). eZs big amount of features can easily be extended with new modules and extensions and it is possible to host a bunch of different pages on the same installation.
Kind regards.
I’m surprised that Enano CMS isn’t on that list. It was one of the few non-commercially backed CMSes that participated in the CMS Vendor Meme from Day Software.
http://enanocms.org
Now it is on Enano 1.1.6
We even have a Pastebin plugin for those who want to set up their own personal and possibly private pastebins, with private pastes to boot.
http://enanocms.org/plugin/gorilla
I’m writing my own custom CMS using Codeigniter, Mootools, and MochaUI. I’m building it to be simple, modular, flexible and fast.
On that note, Expression Engine should DEFINITELY be included here.
nc-cms:
http://www.nconsulting.ca/nc-cms/
Fast integration time, and super simple for clients to learn.
Elgg?
While not open source, for more powerful sites I’m an Expression Engine fan myself. It takes some programming chops (read: learning curve) but there’s really not much you can’t do.
Yes, you have to pay for EE but if $250 (or $99 for 510Cs) can deliver a site worth $1000s more then it’s money well invested.
And for quick & dirty and blog-centric sites WordPress does not disappoint.
Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla are not promising CMS, they are already well-known and great ones
Thanks for a great list.
This is a great overview but if you want to look under the hood, so to speak, check out opensourcecms.com. They provide test environments for many opensource tools (lots of CMS engines but other software as well) that you can try contributing to and also administer. The environments are all refreshed every few hours or so.
It’s a great way to get your feet wet without having to learn the tool well enough to install only to find out it doesn’t suit your purposes.
There are also user reviews.
I would like to emphasize what a phenominal CMS TypoLight is. It is the perfect balance of feature set vs. compact and clean code (no bloat). It is very modular, extensible, easy to set up and standards compliant. I’ve tried about 10 CMS systems, including many on this list, and Typolight is the one I keep going back to.
Also, for those mentioning the need to include Expression Engine, note it IS NOT OPEN SOURCE, so that would disqualify it from this list.
P.S. For those unfamiliar with the term “open source” -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source
It interesting to note also that sometimes it is easy to overlook a system like Tiki, which is both as much a CMS as it is a wiki (http://tikiwiki.org), and is one of the best out there if you want both in one package.
CMS is a pretty broad term and it depends on what use case you have. Arguably, blogging platforms, wiki platforms, online collaboration platforms, web-based groupware platforms, document manegement, records management, etc…. (and the list goes on) are all CMSs
.
Enano is based on the model of a CMS-wiki meld as well. And it works out really well too…
Enano is quite modular, and we have a few respectable plugins, and even though we are a fairly new project (est 2006), I think we have done a good job so far.
Unfortunately, its rather difficult to get people to use something other than the established Drupal/WordPress/Joomla/Mambo/etc.
The CMS world is bitter, yet fun place to be….
I’m a big fan of bitweaver.
http://www.bitweaver.org
Some of them are well-known like @phaoloo said.. look harder
Hi everyone,
Just want to say thanks for your valuable feedbacks and comments.
Although Expression Engine is good, but i am not going to include it into the list because EE is not open source.
What about the others that were mentioned, that are open source?
Hmm…. Sorry i forgot to mention.
Really thanks for those who share other CMS to the readers.
Most of these are pretty established already. I true up and comer is Pluck Cms
http://www.pluck-cms.org/?file=kop1.php
Woo! +1 for Symphony. Been using it for about 18 months now and can’t imagine using anything else.
XSLT may appear complicated, but it really isn’t. I’m a front-end developer so I love tag-based languages. XSLT is just namespaced XML, and there are tons of pre-made XSLT templates on from the Symphony community that I can drop into my sites to do complex stuff like pagination, date formatting and HTML manipulation.
If you love the DOM, you’ll love XSLT and XML, and if you love XML you’ll love Symphony
After many years working with different CMS I’ve come to the realisation that they ALL end up bloated and average performance once you’ve added all the modules, hacks, widgets etc. to achieve the end result.
IMHO if you want to build a solid, stable and scalable site then start with a good MVC framework, then integrate and/or code all the extra bits yourself… More effort the first time, but then you build up your own library of snippets and each project is easier to build than the last one…
Silverstripe if probably the best mix of Framework (Sapphire) and CMS that I’ve used, but even that has some problems with performance and extensibility. If you’ve never worked with MVC then it’s a great entry point.
Great Post!!
You’ve showed us a lot of CMS list
i think wordpress is cool, Joomla is cool too..
Great Day
Caren Tanady
Online Publishing Secret
Two wonderful and light blog/cms solutions:
1 – http://nanocms.in/
2 – http://hardkap.net/pritlog
Wow! Great List…I Have Only Tried Wordpress, Joomla and I can say These both CMS are awesome…
FrogCMS is a PHP port of RadiantCMS. So if you like FrogCMS, you might have a look to RadianCMS: build upon Ruby on Rails, it’s easy to use and customize and tehre many extensions available.
I have to give a +1 to Symphony. It’s streamlined and fast. Some might find the core install to be light on features, but you can easily add what you need with extensions keeping the admin area clean and easy for clients to use. EE and other CMS options just have too much bloat in the admin.
Another reason why I like Symphony is because of the complete separation of content and presentation. I can enter and pull data almost any way I chose. I can also make relationships between different types of content and have it all output in clean, organized XML that’s ready to transform into a Web page or another format with XSLT.
Another killer feature Symphony has is the ability to use any valid XML as a source for data. That means the system can pull any RSS/Atom feed, as well as any API that outputs XML.
I played musical content management systems for about a year. I had a difficult time finding something easily expandable and widely supported – yet lightweight. I settled on Wordpress and have been very satisfied. I am not surprised to see it at number one.
No mention of PIVOTX? Shame…
Habari is still around..? Thought that project died a long while ago.
wow nice collection. I haven’t even heard of some of the CMS that’s on this list, like frog, silverstrip, typolight …
Yeah, these are in my top list too. WordPress outweighs the others by far when it comes to blogging considering all the free tools you get with Social media. Great stuff!
How about RefineryCMS – http://www.refinerycms.com. The demo’s at http://demo.refinerycms.com/admin.
Yes. WordPress, Drupal and Joomla are my favourites.
I’ve used both Wordpress and Joomla and been pretty happy with those two. I need to get out there and explore some of these others though. Thanks for presenting all of these options.
People who can spend a little extra for superior quality and UI can try Gyankosh LMS here:
http://www.careermantra.com/learning-management-system.php
Wow, nice collections. I love Rails however my wife enforce me to use Drupal.
Hmm…looks funny. Both of you are web developers?
This is a pretty good list just some extra meta-data to add.
Mambo is pretty much a dead duck, Joomla is it’s logical replacement. Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla and Symphony are probably the top CMS’s out there in open-source php the others, some I’ve heard of and many I have not on this list. That shouldn’t be a negative mark against the others on the list but is probably a sign that these others do not have a large enough community behind them and thusly less available components and support.
You’re free to choose your own poison here but if you’re looking for the most robust solution for your business it’s probably best to stay away from the niche products and stick to the ones with the larger communities unless you would enjoy taking a more active roll in open-source development.
I believe that Drupal is the best CMS out there…It is very powerful and robust and with all the modules that you can add you can extend its power even more..Customising a drupal site is not that difficult too…Drupal 6 is even more amazing I just cant wait for Drupal 7.
Thanks for sharing. I personally like the best ones – Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal.
My favourite is Joomla, although I have worked on quite a few of them, didnt like concrete but thats me, think joomla is very flexible and the support is awesome with a extremely good forum where you can find almost every solution.
Nice roundup- there are several CMS’s here that I haven’t seen. I agree that wordpress is indeed a CMS. Sure it’s a blog platform, but a blog platform is just a type of CMS. A dedicated photo gallery manager could also be considered a CMS. Anyway, thanks for the post!
Jim
Computer Programming Schools
Thanks for the article it is well done. Our CMS of choice is website baker (www.websitebaker.com). After reviewing over 80 CMS we chose WB because of easy of use (my mom can use it) and extendability (in less than an hour I was writing significant modules for it). The CMS world is growing day by day so articles like this help a lot.
Hello, you don’t know eZ Publish?
Hi Wei Dai,
I never heard of it before. And thanks for introducing it to our readers!
My personal favorite is e107, which I am missing in all the above.
The advantage of e107 is the capability of balancing between offering a lot of functionality out of the box, but still remain light weight.
Of course that means that e107 CMS is not suitable for very demanding users. There are also (at least) around 300 plugins available, and there are several theming websites offering all kinds of flavors in design. So it must be really awkward to not find what one is looking for. For some reason a lot of e107 themes have been designed for gaming websites.
Check it out at http://e107.org
Also interesting is the development blog at http://blogs.e107.org/news.php
good stuff, my choice is joomla because it’s the most powerful and flexible cms .
Helpful article, thanks!
Just for some feedback if would have been more helpful to discuss the flexibility and maybe give some example websites. Or give screen shots of the different things done with the CMS, but the screen shots of the front pages were not too helpful.
Hi Paul,
Thanks for your feedback. I appreciated what you said, and will try to do it in future. Thanks!
Nice to see you included SilverStripe. It’s my choice for OS CMS. As a developer, it’s some of the cleanest, most readable PHP OOP code I’ve seen. As a designer, creating templates is very straight-forward. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of a Drupal or Joomla, but most of my client don’t need all that those products offer.
Hi denbear,
You are right, Drupal and Joomla are suitable for advanced and feature rich websites. For small business websites, SilverStripe is more than enough. But anyway, it is depends on your designer’s preference, right?
My favorite in the list is the CMS made simple, mostly because it is so easy to teach to non-informaticians.
I almost never receive support request, so it’s really OK for me to see all inclusive yearly support to my clients.
But if my client just as 2-3 pages and mostly need a blog, Wordpress is really the easiest of all.
Awesome post Dicky!!
Very helpful.My choice is joomla.
Thx.
ExpressionEngine should definitely be on your list. It is available in both free-for-personal use and paid, supported versions. It is much more themeable and logical than some of the competitors.
Be good to get people’s thoughts on Halogy which is a new CMS that has lots of modules – its hosted though.
and what about spip (http://www.spip.net/) ?
Nice list. My choice is Drupal because of its robust list of modules and functionality.
The best of all in Drupal is its community support. It’s fantastic. Hardly can you leave a task unresolved.
The good thing about Drupal is that once you learn how to write modules (the use of PHP array to the fullest), you will find it hard to use any other PHP CMS.
Drupal is a great CMS!
I use Wordpress for most of my sites, anyway thank you again for your post, i found some new and useful things browsing your blog.
where is the lightweight cms made specifically for coders, i thought that wouldve gotten more love on here since thats the general audience
nice list of of open cms and also very helpful
This white paper from Oshyn shares info on selecting the “Right” CMS:
http://www.oshyn.com/landingpages/selecting-right-cms
Very nice list .. very helpful
there are a lot of clever people commenting on this page, so maybe someone can help with an opinion or two….
I am looking for a CMS that is very simple and lightweight to just create content feeds (text, video, images) to syndication clients. Must be OpenSource (php/mysql).
Joomla, drupal and the usual suspects are too heavy and are geared towards driving websites – not syndication type feeds.
I am looking for simple way to manage content in…and content out….via XML/ATOM/RSS push/pull – per customer.
hope you don’t mind me crowdsourcing this idea on this platform. Thanks.
I use Joomla almost exclusivly because of its open source and ease of use. It is must learn for web designers. Ease of use for my customers make it a great choice
Personally, I love Drupal. I’ve chosen exactly this CMS when I had to create a website urgently and had no time to read the documentation. Drupal is mostly intuitive.
But you should also keep in mind that any content management system should also provide SEO options for easy search engine optimization. And now CMSs that provide deep linking, 301 reditects, google analytics integration and other important features have more advantages over simple website control panel.
nice listed the CMS.
thanks for the information.
I Think you forget the Redaxo CMS (http://www.redaxo.de). It is a very Simple but powerfull CMS System.