I’ve been looking for a while now for a Content Management System (CMS) to help me maintain the various web sites that I produce for various folks. I’ve used Dreamweaver and Contribute in the past, but Contribute has the flaw in that 1) its not free, and has gotten expensive, and 2) you need the fat client in order to do the updates. I wanted something that was browser-based, simple to install and administer, and imposed relatively little overhead in terms of managing the site. The CMS should also be PHP-based (for ease of installation), and simple to install. And WYSIWYG editing would be nice (a la HTMLArea or something similar)

There are hundreds of CMS projects out there. Lots of them fall into the groupware category, which is not what I want. I’m not interested in blogging and photo gallerys and wikis. Those are all great, but the groupware systems tend to be really bloated, and get in the way of designing a clean web site that does a few things well. There are projects like Midgard which might do this well, but they’re difficult to install. The full release of Midgard is not possible to deploy in a hosted environment, and even the “lite” version is difficult to deal with and poorly-documented, and like many CMS tools tends to want to “eat” your site in a way that will be difficult to migrate out of. There are systems like Typo3, but it looks like it requires a lot of upfront work to get something useable out of it and it is really targeted at large sites with complex needs. Bricolage is a nice tool, but it has lots of dependencies as well, and a lot of overhead on the back end.

I’ve been trolling various directories and lists, downloading and installing stuff that might be a good candidate. I tried TikiWiki, as it seemed like it could be stripped down a bit. But TikiWiki doesn’t meet the “no bloat” requirement by a long shot. However someone in the support forum pointed me at Etomite. Its easy to install, completely PHP-based, simple to manage, and appears to impose only the necessary amount of overhead. It has a simple template language with only a few options (most of the extra work is tossed into Snippets, which are little executable bits of PHP you can supply to the system). Its a relatively fresh project, but appears to have interest.

I’m going to migrate 2 or 3 smaller sites into it and see what I think.