http://www.diigo.com/annotated/0b287e9ac349c7888628d19e50fc318a

After managing a Drupal site for a while, I settled into Plone 3 and never looked back.

We still have the Drupal site but it’s rarely used. So much more is achieved, achievable with Plone. Keywords ’rounded’ and ‘cohesive’ come to mind.

http://www.diigo.com/annotated/0b287e9ac349c7888628d19e50fc318a if you wish to see those keywords in context.

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by Graham Perrin

Since you tagged ASP use DotNetNuke. There are CMS’ written in every language you can think of. But let me plug the grand-daddy, Zope (python).

Also Wordpress is not a CMS. it’s a blogging framework that has some CMS features. But if your need isn’t enterprise level, then Wordpress might be fine.

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by Stephen Cox

If you don’t want a complicated CMS, but rather a blog (which is a simple CMS in a way) you could try the Byteflow blog engine. It’s written in Django – a Python based web framework.

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by Cristian Ciupitu

Umbraco was suggested in one of the answers. We’ve had experience with it and many other CMS systems and I can safley recommend you to go that path, it’s both easy to learn and simple to use while remaining a powerful tool to base your sites on.

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by joeysim

If you’re looking for a cms in asp.net, you should consider DotNetNuke or if your looking for a blog CMs, you should consider Subtext

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by norbertB

I have had a bit of pain using blog engines like expression engine to make more static type sites, you end up working around a whole lot of features that you don’t really need, and hacking things together for the things that you do. If your client is just your average small business type, they don’t always relate to blogging terminology or concepts. They just want to update their interweb thingy, with something that works much like everything else they use on their computer.

Writing your own is certainly a large learning experience, and Hofstadter’s Law will kick in like you wouldn’t believe.

In the realm of asp.net, have heard very good things about graffiti, but not used it, was generally impressed by umbraco, have done a few sites with that, you get total control over the output, the ui is great, and clients understand it very easily.

I tried dotnetnuke a few years ago, but found that I had to work very hard to control the output, which (at the time anyway) was deeply rooted in the webforms paradigm, with all the markup horror that entails, although it does offer a huge number of addin modules, and has a massive user base.

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by seanb

I would avoid Wordpress as a CMS in a professional environment. As stated earlier, it’s a great blogging platform, but doesn’t generally offer the robustness that most professional environments require. I’m a fan of Concrete5 so far as I’ve seen, although you may have to get into a little code to better control some of the formatting errors I’ve seen.

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by lush

Well many of these answers are fine, but if you are talking ASP.Net, then you really should look at DotNetNuke. It is far and away the most popular .Net CMS with thousands of available modules and skins and one of the most active communities on .Net.

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by Joe Brinkman

I thought about using Drupal, then I was frustrated with how difficult it was to “bend” it to everything I needed. Them someone mentioned ExpressionEngine. It was a solid choice.

You can make a simple blog page with EE, or setup a forum, document library, photogallery, setup custom forms for users to enter info to be stored.

The possibilities are endless. I would recommend EE, because I thought about developing my own custom CMS until I stumbled upon this.

Check out some of the tutorials, it will show you how to load content from the database to the template, just by using tags like: {title} and {body}: http://expressionengine.com/tutorials/

It is made in PHP, but with this, it takes the coding out of development.

After the initial learning curve, it’s all down hill. Good luck!

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by Brad

Graffiti from Telligent is marketed as a CMS. I use it as a blog engine, and it is tightly linked to the structure/concepts of a blog: chronological list of articles, articles are called posts, comments…

But their blog/site has shown some sites that use Graffiti but are far from looking like blogs.

http://graffiticms.com/

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by postback

I would go with Graffiti. You have full control over html, and it can be regular blogging platform and CMS.

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by Hrvoje

Plone
django
joomla
.. and I’m sure lots of others, too 🙂

I personally like Plone, and use it for some things. I also use Wordpress, and I do manual content management (depending on the site).

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by warren

Wordpress is NO CMS.

Wordpress is a very good blog platform, but it’s by no means a CMS – although it can be used as one and the latest versions facilitate that.

Rolling your own is imo a very bad idea. There are plenty of CMS frameworks and tools out there, just try them.

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by Tigraine

Another option, if you do want to sit back and not waste too much time: Concrete5. It’s PHP based and quite new but it’s quite a nice layout and it’s really natural for new CMS users. You can go from a paper-based sitemap and PSD to a full site structure, ready for data entry, within a day, two at a push.

It’s quite heavy though. Give their demo a look in.

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by Oli

I think WordPress is perfectly suited for a CMS.

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by Ryan Rodemoyer

Can you guys give any specific
examples of what you don’t like about
it, or what you would have programmed
differently?

I would have added more comments.

On a separate note, the most recent version of Wordpress introduced a labyrinthine piece of code that denies access to pages that:
1. Aren’t in a menu or submenu
2. Aren’t in the $_registered_pages variable.

A lot of plugins for earlier versions of Wordpress have been broken by this new security measure.

Finally, sessions. Wordpress does its very best to get out of your way by handling all its session data in a separate manner from PHP’s built-in $_SESSION variable, but it doesn’t give you the option of starting the PHP session, you have to add that to the core program yourself. I haven’t found documentation that would allow us WP hackers and plugin writers to take advantage of the pre-existing WP session yet, either.

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by Matt Costa

When you have to be sure of a statement that is made by “everyone”, if you can, is trying to check it for yourself.

And you can do something in your statement: just read Wordpress source code. Some modules are good, some are a mess, some others are just normal. But all of them compose a great blog system that are used by thousand of people around the world that are more interested in writing good stuff instead of complaining about “how ugly” is a particular source code. In summary, the Wordpress creators have a shippable product that is useful.

In the end, it doesn’t matter. If you want a perfect blog system, you can always write one yourself.

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by GmonC

Apart from what’s been mentioned already:

No sane templating system. All those years and they still have PHP code intertwined with HTML, and default templates that have no support for i18n or l10n whatsoever (hard-coded strings, hard-coded date formats, etc.).

Multiple entry points – maybe it’s just me, but it’s annoying. Especially when some of those are way too big.

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by Cat Plus Plus

I’ve written many custom applications in PHP/MySQL over the years – from tiny to huge. Not having taken the time to learn the details of WordPress, I find it very frustrating to work with (under the hood).

Subjectively:

• Very poor naming conventions
• Execution flow is bizarre
• General lack of organization
• Hard to audit what happens when
• etc…

Their concepts of usability is great, and support for plugins is also great. I’d just love to see the system re-engineered with those principles, but with a disciplined and clear development methodology.

I’m sure the next guy would say “no it isn’t, bla bla bla”, but that is just my opinion after bumping into it (hosting, modifying) about 3 times.

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by gahooa