Finding and Using a CMS - The Best Content Management System

There's no such thing as the best or perfect Content Management System.

I've designed/written a few websites and webpages, they were all entirely written by hand, hand-written html and php and javascript. No dreamweaver, no CMS (Content Management System), just a plain text editor.

Needless to say, although you get direct control in a hand-written website, the downside is that it can be time consuming, difficult and annoying to update information, and not elegant. Handwriting websites is so 90's.

So I decided to start checking out the CMS world. The problems is, if you are a noob to CMS like me, there are over a hundred of them out there. Technically Blogger is a specialized CMS system in itself. There are so many CMS systems, that it is really hard to pick the one you want to use.

Now if you do a search for the best CMS system, you'll find that no one has a short list of the best CMS systems. The canned answer is "There is no single best CMS. Each CMS is different, and the best one for you depends on your particular needs." Great. No help there.

Finding a CMS right for you is difficult. I installed about 10 different CMS's based on what was the most popular and what seemed best suited to the website I was working on: The People's Climate Pact. After testing them all out, and reading countless reviews on the internet, I went with Textpattern. I highly recommend it if you are a PHP programmer and are building a small to medium-sized website that you want to make easy to update and add to for non-technical people. Textpattern is built on PHP and MySQL, and uses Textile, a very easy to use markup language. There is a bit of a learning curve, as the documentation is spotty and spread out, so that is a disadvantage. But with some hard work and reading, you'll figure out the ropes (it took me about a weekend, although I'm still learning), and trust me, you'll love it. Textpattern is elegant, easy to create plugins for, easy to add code snippets to, and has an easy interface. I highly recommend it.