Ask HN: What is the most modern CMS?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1925170

by lovskogen • 16 years ago

41 108 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I work as a interface designer on a CMS, among other products. In doing some research for further developing our CMS I had a hard time finding systems that were easy to use for a non-techie.

Which CMS would you say is the most modern in terms of end user design? Not accounting for the technical setup of things, just user experience.

Thanks you :)

Edit: Some seems to think I'm looking for good CMSes for web designers, I'm not. I'm after systems that makes it easy for a non-tech crowd to run their - custom - web site.

msacks• 16 years ago

Most CMS systems leave the design up to the developer. The UX components are based on how well you lay over CSS, JavaScript and graphics. Drupal and Wordpress already have rich theming systems and a lot of (out-of-the-box) themes that give a nice UX. For something a bit more advanced you could use something like Apache Lenya.

lovskogen49• 16 years ago

I'm sorry for not specifying more. I'm interested in the part of the system that does the editing, not the theme for the site. The use case where the owner updates his site with new content.

azrealus• 16 years ago

I really like goodie.com and flavors.me. Although they are not full CMS the way they mange content is very impressive.

lovskogen49• 16 years ago

I see them more like services than a full blown CMS, but thanks for the input.

mrj2• 16 years ago

I've been running dotCMS for 1.5 years now, and it's worked great. The templates are almost pure html, so designers will have free reign.

lovskogen49• 16 years ago

I'm sorry for not specifying more. I'm interested in the part of the system that does the editing, not the theme for the site. The use case where the owner updates his site with new content.

knieveltech8• 16 years ago

In that case my vote absolutely goes with Drupal. Having the ability to define new content types and add/remove form fields (link list? add a URL field. Need an event? Add date fields, etc) as needed is huge.

Drupal also handles complex editorial workflows easily with the Workflow module, can support embargoed content, does simple content revisioning and provides limitless ways of organizing content.

mrj2• 16 years ago

Ah, gotcha. Well, I have people in Marketing updating the CMS, if that tells you anything. :-)

Some stuff like "moving" pages confuses them, and I have to keep explaining that a page is really just a thin container for the template and a list of contents. Thankfully, that comes up rarely.

tptacek2• 16 years ago

Plenty of non-technical people set up Wordpress as a CMS.

Squarespace is an extremely popular hosted CMS that aims at nontechnical people.

Drupal seems to be one of the most popular CMS qua CMS's.

lovskogen49• 16 years ago

Wordpress with a theme is more like a service. Squarespace is a valid system, although their 'templates' might just make them a 'richer' service.

Joomla is what I'd call a full blown CMS. But would you say the interaction is worthy a title à Modern CMS?

tptacek2• 16 years ago

Did you ask this question just so you could argue your system is better?

ilamont2• 16 years ago

Drupal and Wordpress can be configured/customized in ways that are easy for users to use (or an absolute nightmare) depending on the template, functionality and design choices made by the site owner.

For blogging and news, Wordpress seems to have the most flexibility in terms of design. There really are some beautiful templates out there (see http://wordpress.org/showcase/ for some examples).

But Drupal goes beyond blogging. There must be thousands of available modules, offering all kinds of functionality, ranging from advertising support to "relevant content" boxes. (search http://drupal.org/project/modules to see some examples).

lovskogen49• 16 years ago

Wordpress with a theme is more like a service if you're not a webdev.

Drupal is too (with Joomla) what I'd call a full blown CMS. But would you say the interaction is worthy a title à Modern CMS? reply

ilamont2• 16 years ago

It's boils down to a tradeoff between design simplicity and functionality.

Honestly, I haven't seen any Drupal designs/UXs that have really bowled me over. But I think the reason for that relates a lot to the fact that the sites that prefer to use Drupal want to take advantage of the additional functionality offered by modules. The modules often add a lot more boxes, navigational options, and other major elements (forums, e-commerce, etc.) that make the UX far more complex than what you might find on a Wordpress blog.

Ueland2• 16 years ago

Wordpress, end of story.

knieveltech8• 16 years ago

Brief: There really isn't a single CMS that outshines all the rest. You should carefully tailor your choice of CMS's based on the site specification.

Not so brief: The underlying assumption here is that ongoing maintenance of a modern website is (or even can be) a non-techical task. This is unfortunately unrealistic. As an example consider the needs of a "simple" single user blog.

Any blogging CMS worthy of the name should provide a simple interface for adding, editing and deleting content. It should also provide a simple interface for choosing which content is displayed on the site and most do.

Well and good, but what about related content? Should a user be shown a list of related links when the view a blog post? How is "related" content defined? Is this limited to content on the site or should off-site links be included? Should this list be sorted by date, relevancy, popularity? What about rich text formatting or pasting content from MS Word?

Most blogs also have some mechanism for accepting and displaying reader comments and just about every CMS I've ever come across has some method of handling this. But again we run into problems. Spam is a real issue and spammers have taken to using mechanical turk and other methods to get real live people to post spam for them. This approach completely bypasses captcha and even the best automated anti-spam services (mollum as an example) can't catch all of this, so now you've got to include manual comment moderation (which is a shitload of work on a heavily commented site) into the mix.

Generally blogs also have RSS feeds and social media links. Most CMS's handle these fairly well without a lot of tinkering but it can get interesting if you (for example) want to segregate your content into multiple feeds based on subject matter or whatever.

So even with a "simple" site the end user has a lot of potentially very technical decisions to make regarding how content is displayed, who can see what, who can comment, how comments are moderated, and what (if any) content is syndicated. Note this doesn't even get into SEO or analytics.

The point I'm getting at here is even simple websites can be miserably complicated little beasts and unfortunately only so much of this complexity can be abstracted before you start running into issues where the available feature set isn't a good fit for some/most/any websites.

With that said each CMS I've studied attempts to solve some subset of the problems associated with creating and maintaining a website. Which subset is tackled varies wildly from CMS to CMS.

For example Wordpress does an excellent job of solving most of the problems associated with implementing and maintaining a blog. I wouldn't care to implement a company intranet portal with it though.

Drupal is incredibly flexible, with plugins available for just about any feature set you'd care to implement. It is brilliant when a site has a complicated or fiddly feature set, but can be intimidating to end users due to the steep learning curve involved. As such it's frequently overkill for truly simple websites.

Various other CMS's have their own core competencies and tend to shine in the situations they where developed to work well for.

If you're looking for something to pattern off of my suggestion would be to first figure out which CMS you would reimplement your site in if you had the option and then go from there.

Edit - Full disclosure: I'm a contributing developer for several Drupal modules.

lovskogen49• 16 years ago

Thank you for such a good answer.

To answer your last question first: none. Or, I'd use a more techy system, since I' a geek. But I'm not the target user.

I too would say there is no modern CMS for non-tech users who wants a custom site, but with a good ux for handeling updates and managing their site.

I think the tasks you list is a bit to technical for what I see as essential tasks for a website owner. The modern CMS I'm looking for is good at putting in and editing content, with looks defined by a webdev/designer when the site is implemented.

BenSS2• 16 years ago

Nice answer, there's a vast number of CMS systems out there from the free to the pricey (Interwoven, etc). I'll echo that the choice really depends on what kind of site you are developing. Frankly, for most blogs a CMS system is total overkill.

lovskogen49• 16 years ago

I agree there is a vast number. But the number of ones being fairly usable to a mere mortal is 0. If we're stepping outside theming services.

clistctrl• 16 years ago

As a sitecore certified developer i feel inclined to pimp it :)

If you're looking for a great .net based cms, its the best.

lovskogen49• 16 years ago

If your doing self promotion, please elaborate on why it's great.

jules• 16 years ago

What features are you looking for in the CMS? Just content on pages? -> use a password protected wiki?

lovskogen49• 16 years ago

The feature I'm trying to dig up while doing research is a friendly interface for the people managing the site after delivery from webdev/designer.

Andaith4• 16 years ago

We use expression engine(http://expressionengine.com/) where I work mainly because the back end interface is highly configurable for us and very easy to use for our clients. Everything is laid out quite consistently and it has everything our clients need(with a few extensions).

It's also really easy to create extensions for any functionality a client would want that isn't provided out of the box.

lovskogen49• 16 years ago

I wrote this in a comment to Drupal, how does it hold up to EE?

"As a rule, if the CMS puts you away from your page and to a list of "posts" to edit with TinyMCE, it's not modern. Atleast in my book."

Andaith4• 16 years ago

I've never used Drupal, but EE gives you more than just a TinyMCE field. You can create as many fields as you want. The four defaults are text input, text area, date field, and file field, but you can add new fields through extensions to get WYSIWYG, table fields, etc etc.

These can then be ordered on the publish page how you want, made required fields, searchable, enable or disable HTML, etc, so it gives a lot of control.

chopsueyar3• 16 years ago

What version do you use? I read that many of the plugins are not compatible with the new version of EE. Has that been your experience?

Also, is it easy for a single client to manage multiple sites?

I'm also curious how EE compares to Django ( I know it is not an apples to apples comparison)?

Andaith4• 16 years ago

The backend is much better for clients than Django in my opinion, though personally I prefer Django.

As for multiple sites, there's an extension called the multi-site manager that allows you to control multiple sites through the one admin interface, which makes it much easier for our clients, all the different sites appear in a list and they can select which one to edit, then move on to the next.

We use the latest version and yes it means a few plugins aren't compatible, but they're catching up quickly and they're actually easy to update yourself if it's necessary and legal.

pierrefar• 16 years ago

I think most CMSes are a balance: how general are they so that they can be useful to many different use cases vs how complicated that makes them.

All these CMSes bring their own terminology too. WordPress keeps it simple: it's a page or a post. Leaves it up to you to interpret what that means.

Drupal takes that a few steps further with content blocks.

Joomla, when I last used it, was like having pages ripped from a book, shredded into tiny pieces, and jumbled into a pile.

So when judging end user design, I'd also mention the context and the use case: Do I simply want to produce content that is sorted in reverse chronological order? Do I want to be able to handle all types of content imaginable or just text? And what kind of meta data are you keeping track of in conjunction with the content? Meta data is the author, category(ies), various timestamps, etc.

lovskogen49• 16 years ago

I'm also interested in propietary CMSes by web bureaus. Wordpress, Dupal and Joomla does not make for a good custom site experience. Either too generic or having a gui that is too complex and hacky for mere mortals.

knieveltech8• 16 years ago

You raise an excellent point here. Any custom site implementation is going to require some custom code to nail down the user interaction. This is a fact of life regardless of what CMS you're using.

mattsouth• 16 years ago

I find it somewhat comforting that folks are talking about drupal which I've found excellent for creating sites, adding features and keeping them updated and have been advocating strongly in my organisation, having had fairly poor experiences with other CMS products. But my non-technical colleagues seem to find it simultaneously overwhelming and too restrictive for adding and maintaining their content. Those same colleagues are currently keener on a slightly more modern CMS called modx, which seems to be both more configurable and provide a better non-technical experience. However, modx is being championed by a technical colleague of mine, and I havent had the the opportunity to properly compare the installation, configuration and maintenance experience to drupal.

lovskogen49• 16 years ago

It's those mere mortals favorite CMS I'm after. The ones suggesting WP, Drupal and Joomla seems to do so because of the tech side, not so much the ux for the client getting the system after delivery.

te_chris2• 16 years ago

Silverstripe. Open source BSD licensed built ontop of a quite nice MVC php framework that takes a lot of influence from RoR.

Is a dream to build both basic and powerful CMS driven sites in. And has a templating language that is like a simpler Erb. No I don't work for them, I just think it is by far the best CMS I've come across

lovskogen49• 16 years ago

You're not a mere mortal, but a techie ;-) I want to know if there is any CMSes that has a great experience for the people managing the site after delivery.

te_chris2• 16 years ago

Ha, fair point. The interface is pretty simple though and with the sites I've worked on the content editors have normally found it pretty nice to work with :) here's a demo site http://demo.silverstripe.com/

scorpion0322• 16 years ago

If cost is no object, you should be looking at: http://www.ellingtoncms.com/

lovskogen49• 16 years ago

Do you care to elaborate?

scorpion0322• 16 years ago

Sure. It is the best CMS out there, the one django was originally carved out of. A few django core developers still work on that and it is the framework used by all the major news companies in the world.

But comes at a high price.

NHQ2• 16 years ago

I'm just entering the world of CMS design, after having tried many. I tried them for myself, and for client websites. Then I started looking into making my own, to solve my own problems. However, based on my experience, I would say there is no CMS that is good n easy for the non-techie. The fact is, you have to become somewhat techie in order to proceed on any of them, unless you just want to blog.

Custom CMSs are the way to go (not customizable, like drupal: custom made). This is, for me, the biggest advantage of document databases. I'm new to software design, and self taught, but not a coder. I've never tangled with a relational database yet. It's incredibly easy to design case-specific CMSs with document databases.

It all boils down to form design.

lovskogen49• 16 years ago

Sad fact, but I'm starting to believe there is none.

NHQ2• 16 years ago

If the CMS has a special Admin page, then it is not a CMS for the non-techie.

Administration can be no more than filling out forms, uploading images, etc, etc. No plugins, no DBs, no hosting, no nuthin'.

lshepstone4• 16 years ago

(Disclosure, I worked on this product in a previous life) So this is an enterprise CMS example, but the UI did get some pretty decent feedback from customers.

Have a look at http://media.vignette.com and you can see some screenshots. This product was targeted towards media companies (Gaming companies, Online media/news sites, video producers etc) so it did allow us to focus on some specific needs. You can imagine that with the volume of content that news sites produce, their requirements can be a little more high-end that your average user as they can spend 6-8hrs a day in the tool.

After designing and implementing quite a few CMS platforms, I think it is pretty hard to come up with a UI that will be appropriate for all users as many of them come to the tool with very different tasks in mind. Think about the legal guy or manager who just needs to approve something, the creative team who needs to upload some assets, someone working on a page or content, a marketing person who just needs to put some promotions on the site. Even within a media company there are people with pretty distinct roles and tasks they own. Therefore in our last UI we built the notion of workspaces...there was: - a Review Workspace which had an optimal layout for reviewing and approving content - an Asset Workspace which was optimised around batch uploading media, resizing it, a filter based UI because the library of images/videos tended to get pretty large - a Marketing Workspace just for the marketing team who is normally responsible for creating new promotions, and then deciding where they go on the site. Not every site needs this, but for those that do it worked pretty well as the marketing team just saw this workspace when logging in and didn't have to learn or care about all the other areas of the CMS. - And of course don't forget the Content Workspace where you can create content and pages :-) - For smaller shops, the workspaces are all accessible to multiple users, it is just the notion of the right UI for the task as opposed to one UI for all roles and tasks.

Not suggestion these are universally appropriate or right for your customer base, but I think on close examination you'd find at least 3-4 profiles of users or common tasks that can be optimised. The result for optimising for the 80% common tasks in this system meant that certain complex tasks could be done in <5 clicks. While I personally rate WordPress very highly for UI, the users we were designing for used this products for many hours a day and they felt WP was too many clicks, especially for media handling.

I've probably droned on for too long already and so there is not enough time to list every UI tweak and feature we created, we spent 2 years on the UI, but here is one example. Dynamic UI Controls based on dataset size: A common problem with a number of CMS tools we found was that the UI designer made a guess about how much data would be in the system for a certain task, and then design a UI control that might work great for 10 items, but would be useless if there ended up being 10,000 of those items in the system. So we built some UI controls that would adapt to data volumes...say you had content type x and there were only 10 of the items in the system, you'd ideally want to present it with a set of radio buttons (assuming select one requirement)....more than 10 but <50, popup/overlay with all items listed alphabetically on a single page for quick selection, 10,000 and you're going to need some type of navigator or set of filter controls.

P.S. Don't confuse this with some other previous Vignette products which have a pretty poor UI, this CMS was specifically created with a new UI from the ground up for that reason.

lovskogen49• 16 years ago

Thank you for elaborating. The thing I noticed on the screenshots, and as I've reiterated in alot of comments is putting editing of a site outside, in a seperate admin interface. I did not see the site that was being edited in one of the screenshots. I think placing editing outside of context makes it hard for mere mortals to relate to the editing.

On the topic of different UI for different users I'm on the fence. Modes in interface design is considered bad, but I do see how they can be effective. I think the two mot important roles to seperate is technical and non-technical.

gk47• 16 years ago

Having worked with media organisations and many journalists, writers and content producers, most of them don't care to see the content in context. Content can be used across many different sites or syndicated, making the ultimate destination unknown.

lshepstone4• 16 years ago

Apologies for the delay in reply, quite busy at the moment. A couple important points to address from your comment.

That site only has a few screenshots taken from the UI, so unfortunately not all of the functionality is adequately represented. The product does actually have this capability, but as other have pointed out in the comments, this feature is low down the list of requirements for media customers as wasn't used much by journalists..hard to believe I know, but true. To your point, this is the difference between what we called in-context editing vs a dedicated console.

It is interesting to note that Vignette has a general purpose CMS product and in that case, the in-context editing screens are almost the primary editing mechanism, definitely in the top 3 features for any general corporate users. We found in research this was due to most users on a corporate site are "occasional" users. Corporate sites don't change that much so users just need to edit a few things a week, maybe a few things a day on large sites. But for a Media site, they put out thousands of new content items a day and users log into the CMS at 9am and logout when they go home. In that case, they are dedicated users and they don't need as much hand-holding about what the page will look like, they know what the template looks like and generally the content is being syndicated in 25 different formats so it is kind of pointless to look at just one format. It is also possible to make a more efficient UI for a dedicated console. Think about it..you manage a CMS that has 50 sites in many languages and 100,000 pages or more and you need to edit a page 3-4 levels down in the nav...as an advanced user would you prefer to navigate through the site and wait for each page to load before getting to the page to edit...or do you do a quick search or filter (or navigate by ajax tree if you only know its site location) and then make a quick change? Quite amusingly one of the biggest requests we had from a really large media customer was to put in a search box so the could type in the id of the article (as in article 101995) so they could get straight to an article. I thought it was a bit of a crazy request at first but when you sit with media staff and the editor is shouting across the newsdesk floor to get the story out in 30 seconds, you understand that typing in a 6 digit number is faster than browsing 4 pages or even searching sometimes.

I don't quite agree with the view that the most important roles to separate are the technical and non-technical. It might just be my personal experience but I've never been asked to build a CMS UI for a technical person, technical people are normally the ones implementing templates and are generally capable of learning any UI quickly. Normally I've been asked to design the UI for non-technical users, and the real challenge is optimising for "occasional" users vs "dedicated" users. Generally the UI you would design for one is really different than the best UI for another...for the occasional non-technical user you really need to hand-hold with in-context editing and things like wizards. With dedicated non-technical users they want search or filter based screens and bulk editing. The real trick is to achieve a UI that looks and works simply, but if the user wants can slowly reveal more advanced functionality over time...because user get more competent the more they use the tool.

Regarding different UI for different users, it is certainly not modes which are generally used one at a time. The workspaces are more akin to presenting the best UI for the task you're about to accomplish...so one user role can span across multiple workspaces. One of the biggest things we discovered after observing users closely is that many people act as different roles depending on the context. So the same user goes from creator, to reviewer in one day, then switches to manager when he does the night shift sometimes. This is the real world, certainly for media companies at least. (i.e. Even the editor still contributes sometimes). So the different workspaces are not modes, but rather optimised for a particular common task like "working with media" or "reviewing".

I agree that you can't generalise from what is quite a niche audience, the media vertical. I do maintain though that the CMS platforms built for media companies have the most hard core UI's out there for any CMS because media customers have high end requirements and pressures no other CMS users have. So if you're interested in cutting edge UX for CMS tools my extremely round-about responses were meant to convey that you might not find it in general purpose CMS tools but in specific audience focussed systems, especially Media. I maintain that you'll be able to achieve the best UI by closely observing the needs and actions of a defined audience, and that approach will always beat the general purpose targeted UI. Just look at Wordpress, awesome UI for blogging but honestly just average as a CMS (good enough for many cases, but not amazing) when compared to lets say Expression Engine.

I don't know what you're requirements are, but if you have any opportunity to narrow your audience (or tasks covered) I would highly recommend it after I discovered just how much that can improve your UI.

eitland• 16 years ago

Element Fusion, especialy lightcms (http://www.lightcms.com/). Hosted, no worries. Easy to use.

lovskogen49• 16 years ago

I'll look into some of the videos once I've got access to Flash.

lovskogen49• 16 years ago

I looked at the videos, and the editing ux seems simple. But when clicking "Settings" the user gets a boat load of techy stuff to adjust.

chopsueyar3• 16 years ago

Is Django off the mark here?

lovskogen49• 16 years ago

Yeah.

chopsueyar3• 16 years ago

Why?

Athtar• 16 years ago

Sounds like you are looking for something bigger/more capable than a WordPress type of CMS. In that case, try Umbraco. I have never used it myself but it looks very user-friendly: http://umbraco.org/help-and-support/video-tutorials/getting-...

lovskogen49• 16 years ago

It is way to tech centric in terms of updating info and creating. Boxy admin interface. Sorry.

Sizlak• 16 years ago

Django isn't a CMS, but it's a framework that seems designed to build CMSs. I'd much rather build a CMS from scratch in Django than try to bend Drupal to my will.

lovskogen49• 16 years ago

I wouldn't bend Drupal in any way.

You're suggesting there is no modern CMS , and I should build it?

FraaJad• 16 years ago

Plone. Obsessively focussed on being user friendly.

http://plone.org/products/plone/features/

There are many features that are part of core plone, that many other CMSes do not even think exist in a CMS. Anybody suggesting Wordpress as a CMS obviously did not read your requirement for "most modern in terms of ...user experience".

If you hear negative comments about Plone, it is usually from developers who don't actually use the product or opining based on hearsay.

knieveltech8• 16 years ago

Technically I'm not convinced Wordpress is qualified for the term CMS, or at least no more qualified than say PHPbb, Gallery 2, or any other installable purpose built web application with a limited feature scope. Apparently there where sufficient individuals who disagree with this view for Wordpress to win CMS of the Year for 2010.

mg1313• 16 years ago

Wordpress can be customized a lot and can do a lot with those plugins/themes...not just blogging.

beatpanda• 16 years ago

You should check out a more recent version of WordPress.

techtalsky• 16 years ago

I'm hoping you mean hearsay.

mark_l_watson2• 16 years ago

I second the recommendation for Plone. I helped a friend set up Plone for a charity about 5 years ago, and it was really nice to work with and extend. Also about 3 years ago, we used it for technical documents on a customer project.

lovskogen49• 16 years ago

Plone is the brst one so far in the ux department. But I don't see how it could be used for a bigger custom site, with e,g a editable JS-slider.

lovskogen49• 16 years ago

Thank you. Plone is the brst one so far in the ux department. But I don't see how it could be used for a bigger custom site, with e,g a editable JS-slider.

Ueland2• 16 years ago

Edit from my side(since for some stupid reason did not explain why i prefer Wordpress):

I have experience from CMS`es ranging from enterprise solutions to all round platforms like Wordpress, my brief opinion about some of them:

1) Polopoly: A enterprise solution typically used for magazine/news sites. The problem (with many enterprise solutions) is that it is very advanced and not easy to use at all for new users. I would almost say that training is a must for such a solution. I feel pretty sure that with better usability in focus, it could have been almost a killer app for larger sites.

2) EZ: Taken from the name, EZ should be easy to use, it`s not. This is just another solution fallen into the "Enterprise" trap, instead of focusing on the users that actually have to work with it, they focus on the bosses and persons with the money, in order to sell in the system. The solution itself is relatively plain but you can not simply log in a place and select "new article", instead it is typically creating objects here and there.

3) Wordpress: Finally a system that has the user in focus, the system is designed for people NOT being geeks. Anybody will without any training be able to login and create some content. It is plain and simple but in the same time it gives the user the needed information and not everything else.

There is a good reason Microsoft has decided to close their blogging services and rather move all their users over to Wordpress.

So to conclude: I put Wordpress on first place, with the possibility of Polopoly going to first place for larger solutions if they could get their user interface in order.

* I guess some of you would say that Wordpress is not a CMS,in that case i do wonder... What is the difference between Wordpress and a "real" CMS? :)

lovskogen49• 16 years ago

Wordpress moves editing to a place away from your site. A non techie might be confused on what content he is editing, and where it is. I don't see Wordpress as a modern CMS because this kind of editing has been done in the last 20 years.

I'll look into the ux of Polopoly, thanks.

Edit: had a really hard time getting info out of the PP website, could you show me some screenshots?

jordanlev• 16 years ago

Definitely check out concrete5 (http://concrete5.org). As others have mentioned, different systems are better for different situations, but if you're talking about easy to use by non-tech people to manage an informational website, I have found Concrete5 to be better than the rest by leaps and bounds.

The reason it works well for these kinds of sites is that it aligns with non-technical users' mental model of their website. Non-tech users don't think of their site as a template that displays content from a database, but rather as a bunch of pages with stuff on the pages. Most CMS's require users to go to an administrative back-end which shows a hierarchical sitemap of pages -- an abstract representation of their site -- and this is VERY confusing to most people. Concrete5, on the other hand, is based on the concept of content blocks on a page. So to edit a page, you GO to the page and add/edit blocks of content there. The blocks thing is great because it allows for different "mini-UI's" for different kinds of content. For example, to edit regular text, a standard WYSIWYG editor works fine, but if you want to add an image or a youtube video or a navigation list or a google map, it doesn't work as gracefully -- the block system means that different kinds of content can get different editing UI's specifically tailored for that type of content (for example, a youtube video just gets a textbox to paste in the URL, or a google map block presents fields for addresses, marker options, etc.).

There are many web-based CMS's that utilize this approach -- Weebly (a YC company), WebVanta, SnapPages, Yola, etc. -- but I haven't come across an open-source install-yourself CMS other than Concrete5 which works this way.

lovskogen49• 16 years ago

Thank you. This is a modern approach. I'll look more into it, and the other CMSes you list. I totally agree on the non tech mindset of blocks, and not templates.

lovskogen49• 16 years ago

SnapPages seems to get alot of stuff right in terms of ux.

bergie• 16 years ago

Two things I wouldn't want to see in a modern CMS:

- IDE-like administeation UI with fifty buttons in the toolbar

- Forms for content editing

lovskogen49• 16 years ago

Totally agree!

notahacker• 16 years ago

Last time I looked at it (about a year ago) ModX struck a nice balance between extensibility and administrative power, designer/developer friendliness and simple in-page edits for content editors. You'd probably need someone with some degree of technical competence to get it started though.

lovskogen49• 16 years ago

I'll check it out in the morning. Thank you for your feedback.

RoyG• 16 years ago

Having hacked my way through Joomla, I think the answer to your question would be a wrapper that hides the CMS.

lovskogen49• 16 years ago

What kind of wrapper?

agarfors• 16 years ago

Apostrophe Now is modern, and their homepage describing it is modern as well: A screencast. Not like certain others expecting you to look elsewhere to be shown how it looks like.

http://www.apostrophenow.com/

Won't mention techy stuff like the framework it's built on, (Symfony).

lovskogen49• 16 years ago

Looks good, but basic - wonder how it handles more custom 'modules'.

Ask HN: What is the most modern CMS?

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