CMSs

I played around with CMS systems recently for projects at work and for different projects at home and tried to find a system that is easy to use and easy to setup.

the last time i tested CMS systems is some years ago when CMS systems still were portals and nuke and its clones were state of the art. I distinguish between consulting ware and community ware. i tested php based projects as i love the RAM on my server and therefor JAVA was not an option. there are no nice perl based CMS systems though so i went with php.

i started with silverstripe as i know some of the guys and liked to play with a real kiwi product ... i somehow found out the hard way that it is consulting ware. it looks really promising but for a really simple webpage with just a couple of pages and some dynamic elements it was not the tool of choice.

next was the much hyped drupal and i have to admit that some concepts are nice but in the end it was too hard to fiddle a gallery in there and the millions of plugins and add-on projects were way too confusing. i gave up and went for the next one

joomla, well, thats the one i tried next and had a start to finish home run for a first rough version of the page. there are some strange concepts but in the end i was able to set up a page with a small gallery and some sub pages in about 2-3 hours. done that i am now lost in the CSS hell ...

i tested those with the goal to have a small page up in a short time and have to admit that none of them convinced me and in the future i will simply write pages of that size as a small catalyst project or i might have a look at rails again. it really looks like the faster way to simply write the stuff you need for the job.

one last word to JAVA based CMS as i tested some of them for work. i can't get over the fact that a CMS might take up to 10 minutes to start. that is not only bad design that is a nightmare and there is no excuse for it. JAVA programmers seem to assemble every lib they find to a huge monolithic beast and then just blame the slow hardware. hardware is no excuse for bad (missing?) software design.