On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 9:21 AM, Æleen Frisch <[email protected]> wrote:

> Does anyone have a recommendation for a CMS for use by non-technical folks
> (free or not)?



tl;dr: I recommend none. Or at least none you've heard of.

The most popular CMSs I see are WordPress (PHP), Drupal (PHP), Joolma
(PHP), and Plone (Python). WordPress (the blog software) is rapidly
becoming the most popular CMS for small sites. What to use depends on your
needs.

Most of the PHP CMSs are riddled with security vulnerabilities, partly
because of their popularity. In the last two months there have been 18
security advisories related to WordPress, 15 for Joomla, 11 for Drupal, 0
for Plone [1]. Most of the issues are related to third-party
plugins/modules, though the core products have issues too, and the CMSs are
pretty useless without plugins/modules.

I see very little use for CMSs. Most of the time they are used on small
sites, as if CMSs are the new Dreamweaver. For larger sites the CMSs
require so much customization they might as well be done from scratch in
Django or Rails. No small businesses should be using self-hosted or
self-managed CMSs for outside facing websites, only companies with staff
dedicated to their upkeep should be using them. Small businesses should be
using services like Weebly, Shopify, and WordPress.com.

A lot of sites have almost all static content. So serve static content,
generated with Jekyll [2], Hyde [3], or Octopress [4]. Use a platform like
Blogger, WordPress.com, or Tumblr for the blog part of the site.

Ultimately the software used to generate the site will be chosen by the web
developer, who will be chosen by the Marketing/Business folks. If I got a
say it what CMS was used for a major site, I'd advocate for a lesser know
CMS based on the Django or Rails frameworks, e.g., Django CMS [5] or
Refinery CMS [6]. Mainly because I feel that using Python or Ruby (with a
modern framework) shows a certain dedication to the craft of web
development, so I trust them more.

[1] http://secunia.com/community/advisories/search/
[2] http://jekyllrb.com/
[3] https://github.com/hyde/hyde
[4] http://octopress.org/
[5] https://www.django-cms.org/
[6] http://refinerycms.com/

-Anton
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