Pagekit

For quite some years now, Content Management Systems (CMS) have been on the rise and are growing at a fast pace. Surrounded by very active open source communities or developed by large tech companies, CMS are increasingly used by developers, web agencies and IT companies to improve productivity and simplify the process of developing complex websites. It's also a way to collaborate effectively with your team, take advantage of the community's many resources, helpers, and extensions and give your client access to an advanced administrative interface that is already ready to go. But in this great environment of content management systems, there are multiple solutions: free, open source, paid, with or without databases, with more or less features ... and it can sometimes be difficult to navigate and choose the right tool for your website project showcase, blog, e-commerce website ... In this list, I'll only focus on open source solutions because otherwise there would be too many choices but I'll also talk about paid solutions in another list. So here's a selection of ten content management systems that I think are incredibly powerful and very used nowadays.

By the end of 2016 I felt WordPress was not working for me as a self publisher. I've been creating and maintaining my own sites since 1996, in one format or another. What I want in a CMS is a word processor for the web. Marketing, SEO, and fancy gimmicks are secondary to creating, publishing, and distributing content. I don't want to spend time learning and relearning how to use software. I'm picky about web design and I don't jump on trends just because they are new and flashy. Yes, I want my site to be read, but SEO and marketing are a slippery slope when it comes to ethics and trust. People don't read sites that focus on marketing - the more marketing hype, the less real readers. WordPress is definitely geared to pleasing web developers and marketers, people who offer services like beginning a site, curation, maintenance and running a site for people who don't want to run a site themselves. People want automated sites to sell stuff. But, that's not what I want to do. So I left WordPress. Over most of 2017 I tried alternatives to WordPress. I wanted a CMS (content management software) to be user friendly, rather than having to understand API and REST and other things I don't need or want to learn. I wanted something with the features WordPress keeps eliminating like keeping a list of links, having a bookmarklet to post links and content from other sites via my web browser. Very important was to find a CMS which was not mothballed and not focused on how they can make a buck from me. Also, self hosted. I had a very hard time moving my sites out of WordPress and into anything else. Most other CMS do not have a way to migrate your sites, reliably. I've realized the best way to move sites from WordPress is not to migrate anything. Leave the old site up, just change it to a subdomain and start fresh on the main domain with which ever WordPress alternative you want to start using. You can move posts over manually, one by one. Or, you can use your old post content and create an updated post based on what you had written before. This would be simpler than trying to bring back your entire old site, especially if it was huge. I have tried far more CMS than I am adding to this list. To be honest, I don't remember most of them well enough to give a review. Several were complicated to install which did not seem like a good beginning to use them to publish a site. So this list is mainly the highlights and lowlights of my CMS adventures beginning in 2017 and still ongoing in 2020.