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Content management solution for a small software site?

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tranglos:
Thanks for all the replies! I spent last night checking out the various CMSs and playing with WordPress and Drupal locally. They're nice, with a really impressive range of themes and plugins, but in the end they really get in the way of what I need. The same with TextPattern, really - it provides none of the automation I'd like to have, and I would end up copying and pasting code to get a number of identically structured sections, while at the same time it won't even do download stats. I need to spend so much time on KeyNote that I can't devote any to coding php on top of that.

I've checked out a number of sharware vendors, small and large, and while I've seen a couple that use heavily customized CMS, most of them fall into one of two groups: professionally designed corporate websites on the one hand, and simple, handmade HTML on the other. And I guess there's no disgrace in the latter - you can have a pretty unimpressive site and still a fantastically successful product (Total Commander, TextPad, EditPad Pro). But I could't find anything in between the two extremes.

Perhaps I should be looking for php templating systems instead, just so that I could do $appname = 'this'; $version= 2 and then refer to $appname and $version throughout the site. That by itself would be a great time saver. I have seven freeware downloads on my site, and making sure all the pages are updated and consistent is really tedious. And in the end, they're not even very functional, e.g. there's no search in the FAQ pages. As mouser very nearly predicted last night, I'll postpone the decision :)

urlwolf:
I'll throw my hat in:
http://radiantcms.org/

Radiant is ruby, so it doesn't get any easier to modify.

http://www.alfresco.com/
This seems to be an up-and-coming one. But it's kind of enterprise stuff, maybe not worth checking.

I'm actually facing similar problems to chose a CMS for an academic home page. I'mroght now thinking on using WP + a bunch of static pages. New publications will be posts under the category "papers" or a more detailed "topic" category. Then, a link that filters by that tag will show all papers. The advantage of using WP is that you can add content  fast using editors such as windows live writer... but I'm curious to hear about alternatives...

dk70:
One of those I would have prefered to Serendipity was MODx http://modxcms.com/ but good example of why some love this and others hate that. I can see it is "cool", I can see it offers all most would want from cms/blog/whatever but I just hate interface and find it confusing to modify - even after testing properly on local Xampp. That is how I "evaluate", get it on Xampp then look for learning curve - if neck has to go all the way back to see it Im out. Room for misunderstandings and wrong judgement of course but a lot better than reading feature pages and trying demo sites on internet.

Advantage of WP is also you can pick and chose among a gazillions of themes and extensions. So many some will be buggy, not so compatible but still selection is biggest benefit to smaller project where you have to settle with whats available, may be even wait for things to come. Does not speak of quality in code or other featues regular enduser dont notice at first. I know some of those people at s9y shake head at WPs security and general code quality - yeah well but who is no. 1? ;) Same with Drupal, Joomla - perhaps a handful more. Popular gets more popular then - but if you, as an enduser with no intention of hacking, go crazy on Xampp testing (there is much more to test than what is on Opensourcecms) I think you will find popularity is mostly earned.

Changelog for all these project will be full of security fixes - again turns you to the most updated, most supported project. Smaller projects might not be able to close all holes just like that - or is slow at releasing fixes. For sites that matters security fixes should be regarded a "feature" - also why to avoid those not updated for months. Can be long time in world of server/php exploitations. If SMF went out of business I think you would see a change of forum software here very quickly.

I once almost got kicked out of a web space after experimenting with an upload script - as part of amateur SMF hacking :) Worked ok but also for those uploading files to site, phishing away, heh. Barcleys Bank or whoever it was in UK did not like it, neither did server ADM. Got loads of traffic from Israel I think, like 1000s of hits within hours. They blaimed SMF security completely but failed to notice it was upload script I found at HotScripts living inside SMF, not related to it at all. Possible it could have been an extension/plugin to SMF, was in a way. And how many phpBB forums have not been taken down because of their so so security? Even the locale/national support site here got hit once they waited few days to upgrade with latest crucial patch. Secuirty is important.

tranglos:
Very good points all. It's the first I've heard of Xampp, but all the components run on my machine all the time, and local testing is the first thing I do.

Popularity of a package cuts both ways, I suppose: bugs are eliminated faster, but widely used products also get hacked more. But I would definitely feel safer with a widely used version 2 of something than with a 1.x release that's hardly seen mass use yet.

iphigenie:
That is one of my areas of expertise. I have written quite a few CMSes (6 different ones over the years, i think), and used/adapted at least a dozen different ones for different project. I ended up writing a CMS so many times because most only look good in the surface and are either unfriendly to developers, designers, or end users... And I have literally tested hundreds from red dot (costing millions) to open source ones.

I found out that there are many good CMS-es on the front end but almost all fall down rather badly in the admin interface - it is confusing, complicated, heavy, often slow or ugly. And before people jump in saying the one they use is good, imagine trying to explain to your mother or grandmother how to use the admin to add articles, organise the navigation etc. (The other area of weakness is often templating, making it very slow and difficult to adapt or greatly modify a site). Incidentally the best interface i found so far for a simple CMS (outside internal products which i can't show) is website baker. I think it's so simple a client given a website on it would actually update his site often. It's not a tool for what you are trying to do.

What I did was try the online demos of the admin of dozens and dozens of systems to find one that was intuitive. Surprisingly a lot of popular ones actually have very quirky non intuitive interfaces - people learn them and put up with them...

http://www.opensourcecms.com/

Has demos of a lot of those, and you can in a few minutes have a look and rule out quite a few.

Anyway on to a few which were mentioned

Expression engine is actually quite easy to admin, although I don't like their templating when you try to do something complex like cross referencing blogs etc. It has a slight modular nature so you could possibly write an extension for your software downloads etc. It is more a blog than a CMS, in that it is heavily biased towards the "chronological" side of things, alhtough you can give more structure to things. Expression engine does have publish-on-a-date so it might help you, but it doesnt have the files support, you'd have to kind of do that via links or something.

Plone - I have worked on some plone projects and I must say plone is a good choice if you are pretty happy to stick to the way it works and looks. Try to do modifications of plone - whether to make it look wildly different or to add complex functionality and you will get huge headaches. We sure did. You are talking literally hundreds and hundreds of files in multiple versions with very complex "override" rules etc. Just Zope might be enough for what you need and that makes it already a lot simpler, but it is still an extremely complex system to debug and figure out. Plone does a few things right though, multi-lingual content is one of them, the use of TAL is another (once our designers tasted TAL we have had to use it on all subsequent versions of our own CMSes, finding or writing TAL libraries in whatever language we used...)

I recently used ezpublish and it's a bit quirky but it does support the kind of things you would need for your site - the ability to have custom content types, the ability to schedule release of new versions of the document, uploading files within the cms (so they too can have a release date). It is quite a heavy system, and needs php4, so probably problematic on your host. But if they have a "fantastico" style panel they might have it on there. It's heavily CSS based so playing with layout is quite nice. I found the templating quite hard to get my head around (works on combining lots of snippets, with context based overrides etc., so chasing problems reminded me of plone) but the html is actually very clean.

spips and typo3 are two more i looked at recently for a project and spip especially seems quite extensible, but i didnt like the way the templates worked.

I suggest you pick one which is clean and simple, where you can see how you could build the content on your site on and clearly see how the database fits together etc. Then you can add the automation yourself behind it.

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