Lightweight open source CMS - current situation

Question

Hello, It happened that I need to pick up PHP based open source CMS. I did a small research and found many candidates. CMS made simple seems to be right choice, but I am not sure what's the current state, I know it was widely used time ago. I need it to be fully compliant with web standarts, lightweight (especially interface). It needs to be as simple as possible - basically just style and page content editing (news, maybe some image gallery) is enough. Sure content and style have to be separated from each other since content will be edited by non-programmer. One of the main goals is SEO so I'd like it to have friendly URLs. I think CMSes like Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress are too big for this project. Are there any recommendations ?

Answer 1

Have you searched Stack Overflow for similar threads?

You could look into ModX or, if you speak German (or aren't afraid of Google Translate and friends), you can look into redaxo.

Answer 2

Frog CMS is a small CMS that I've been very happy with, but it's extremely bare-bones. You'd probably need to tack on almost everything you'd like by hand. It's definitely tiny, though.

Answer 3

Textpattern is also another small CMS that I have used in the past. It is very easy to implement, works with PHP and MySQL, and is pretty simple to customize.

Answer 4

I'd recommend modx which is a simple cms to install and setup.

• It has friendly URLS
• It can keep style and content separate.
• It has a "user manager" permissions system so you can control exactly which documents are editted by registered users. Bob's guide has full details on permissions.

I'm not sure about the term "lightweight" which could imply limited features or some sort of restrictions. modx is compact and easy to install and you can get it running very quickly out of the box using the supplied defaults. However it's very flexible so it's possible to tweak or add extra features as required.

Answer 5

I don't think Wordpress is too small even for a really small project. Plus you never know if down the road you want to expand. While WP does seem to start becoming a bit bloated, it's still quite light and with the easy SEO settings/plugins and sitemaps plus easy templating it's hard to go wrong with it.