• Links - PHP Content Management Systems

Update Nov 1 2008: ImpressCMS 1.1 released.

For most web applications, I assume PHP and mySQL as the CMS environment. Excluding big commercial C++ and Java systems, the ratio of PHP-based CMSs to all other languages combined must be at least four to one, maybe more. Slow perhaps, but PHP CMSs are easy to customize and virtually zero-configuration to deploy ( in sharp contrast to C++ and Java ).

Basic requirements for a small, general purpose CMS could be:

• Simple administrative interface, fast learning curves
• Large, mainstream, well-established developer community. Open Source.
• Well-written, well-documented code base. Less code is better than more code.
• Extensible via API, good bells and whistles and the ability to uninstall them if not needed.
• Simple interface for content development. Good templates, Smarty for example.
• General resource efficiency, in term of CPU, memory and disk consumption.

Note that comments in source code can make up a significant percentage of the total file size, so the 'smaller is better' metric may not be a good measure of the efficiency of the code base, except in a gross sense.

There can also be a trade off between the simplicity of the administrative interface and configurability of the content layout. The interface may be simple, but you must go directly to PHP templates to do anything constructive. Often, it's not a good trade off.