Monday February 24, 2003
High-End Web Site Magic: Free!
by Jay F. Davis, www.acsoft.biz
For the past year or longer I've been trying out various flavours of open-source content management solutions in a quest for the power to build beautiful, flexible and easy-to-manage enterprise-strength web sites. If you've been watching the open-source CM space at all, you know that there are dozens of candidates. Check out this site for a list of currently available free solutions in various states of maturity from brand-new to mature. I count 68 choices as of today.
My personal criteria for an open-source CMS include the following:
- Must have web-based administration.
- Prefer PHP or Perl as programming language since I know these.
- Must output xhtml/css and be compliant with standards for disabled access.
- Must have a professional appearance so that I feel good recommending it to clients.
Well, I've finally found something I like. It's called phpWebSite. Appalachian State University, the project's sponsor, has some professional-looking sites running it.
Before I talk further about it, however, I thought I'd list the runners-up, because there are several good ones, if you're looking for an open-source CM tool.
These seem to be the most mature that meet my criteria of a php or perl-based tool. I ended up with phpWebSite because one of it's main goals is the xhtml/css accessibility triumvirate. If you've been reading my weblog recently, you know that I think xhtml/css is the wave of the near future on the web. PhpWebSite seems a little ahead of the curve.
