The 10 most end-user friendly non-hosted free CMS Softwares
Article created on: May 22nd, 2010 - Latest update: October 11th, 2010
This is a great list of free Content Management Softwares (CMS’s) that you download to your server, install and use at no charge mainly under the Creative Commons License.
We have seen many great lists like this around, but never one that focused only on the best and simplest options for “non-hosted” CMS’s that are really easy to handle by the end user, usually a non-techie person in charge of creating/updating information on the website.
If you know some other great easy to use (not Drupal, Joomla or Movable Type – we will approach those – more robust CMS’s – in another post) and quick/painless to install free Content Management Softwares (not hosted, please), share it with us by commenting below.
PS – Useful tip: to test any open source CMS’s before installing it, go to http://php.opensourcecms.com/, choose your CMS and have fun!
WordPress is the most obvious yet powerful free Content Management System around. It’s popularity has gown into an awesome and active community that creates very useful plugins (10.000+ by the time of this article) that range from entire e-commerce applications to whole community websites.
Designed originally to be mainly a blog tool, WordPress has also become a major source of regular Content Management Systems for many important websites. Because of it’s ability to be tweaked and adjusted to specific needs, you can achieve almost everything with it if you have some PHP knowledge and understand the plugin logic.
For last but not least, this is, by far, the easiest backend system, making it easy for “non techies” to get along with updating and creating content quite well.
We’ve worked with the PHP based CMS Made Simple for many years and simply LOVE this application! It easy very easy to use both for the developer and mainly for the end-user, the client that will have to create and update pages after the project is delivered.
Some of the lead developers aren’t very polite with users in the forums, but it has a thriving and very active community that always helps if you have a question or can’t figure something out.
The large number of modules like “Blog”, “News”, “Section Image”, “Cataloger”, “Newsletter” – also makes this CMS suitable for almost any CMS project you or your clients might need.
We’ve tested Conrete5 CMS once and were impressed by the power and flexibility it offers, and the content administrators won’t have a hard time figuring out how to use the software – it’s very simple and intuitive.
Its huge community offers many add-ons, the only downside being that many of them are paid, but the prices are quite fair.
One of the few CMS’s that work without the need of a MySQL database, all data in Get Simple CMS is handled using the XML language, giving the website more speed and security.
Both the backend and the templating system for layout are very friendly and although not having many fancy add-ons or modules, this is definitely an option to look into when creating a simple, content driven website.
Radiant, a CMS based on the well known and broadly used programming language Ruby on Rails, has great back end usability and is very flexible. Its main structure consists of pages with snippets inside, which you can adapt to whatever you want. You can check out a demo here. Radiant also has a good list of extensions that you can download into your project.
sNews CMS is a CMS based in only one core file, written in PHP with MySQL, seriously, it only has one main core file! Great for simple websites that don’t need many extensions or fancy features, sNews can be installed very easily (needs some very basic technical knowledge) and will be up and running in only a few minutes.
Templating is also great and easy and besides being so simple, it also offers a quite descent number of modules and addons.
The user interface of Wolf CMS reminds us a lot Radiant CMS, but coded in PHP with MySQL or SQLite.
With the ability of applying different layouts for each page or even create new “parts” (content blocks), this CMS is simple yet very powerful and turns out being a great option for simple or even more complex websites, it’s all about you diving into it and learning how to tweak the software to get what you want.
Symphony CMS is a rather new, awesome and very flexible PHP based free CMS designed to let developers program exclusively in the XSLT templating language. Symphony’s ideal is that nothing should be sacrificed for flexibility – developers should have full control over their website’s markup, URLs and data structures – and this is achieved with Symphony.
With a community with 8000+ members and many modules (they call them “ensembles”) and add-ons to download, Symphony can definitely be used to create all kinds of websitesn – simple to complex – without being too complicated for end-users to edit!
Founded originally in 2001, Textpattern is one of the oldest, most well known free PHP CMS’s around. Web designers, developers, publishers and bloggers love its flexibility and extensibility. It has a powerful, sophisticated engine that can be infinitely tuned to suit whatever type of web site you can imagine.
In our opinion the back-end is still a little cluttered and some who updates the contents needs to get used to it. On the other side, because of its age and developers know-how, this is a great solution for complex websites because of the module and add-on options it provides.
Silverstripe is a simplistic, yet extensible, open-source CMS, developed on top of the object oriented Sapphire PHP framework. Template driven and editor oriented, Silverstripe is a great option to build easy to use websites and even applications.
The software seems to have been founded in 2007 and since then its community is growing and new modules like “newsletter”, “flickr” and “blogs” added to it. The out-of-the-box backend editor is great for non-techies to update the content, while developers can extend the software as they wish by using the Sapphire PHP Framework, but you’ll come across a quite steep learning curve.
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hy there this is a great stuff thanks for the great info kind regards
Should the title have said PHP-only CMS’s? What about N2, Orchard, Umbraco, Orchard, etc?
Good point there Anthony, we might add some of those ASP.NET CMS’s in the future. Maybe we went too much after open source languages as well (PHP and Ruby), tks for your comment!