Best CMS’s in 2009

As a Web Engineer for the last 3 years and now as a Web Architect, I have  been through a lot of different CMS’s (Content Management Systems).  Mainly I like to stick to a couple key CMS’s but now and again I have to stray based on clients needs, budget, and deadline.  I figured I would do a brief summary on the CMS’s I have implemented and think are some of the best based on programming language (I’m only doing .net, and php).  Hopefully I will share some of the advantages and disadvantages each has.

.NET CMS’s

Kentico

Kentico in my opinion is one of the best CMS’s in 2009.  Kentico is well built, updated regularly and can offer many solutions for little modification. Kentico has great out of the box features like its Blog, Calendar, Newletters, Event Calendar, Forums, and easy to create forms.  The year of 2009 has surely pushed Kentico’s platform into the social marketing age.  With new upgrades to Kentico several new features have been developed to add more social networking aspects. Polling, Groups, Friends and Private Messaging are all contained within Kentico.

Kentico has its weaknesses though.  The challenge is to understand how Kentico works, and this can take a while digging around .NET code.  They do have a large collection of documentation but it seems that they rushed it and they do not give the detailed information that you would like.  The cost of Kentico is also a downfall.  I understand the need for cost with an application this size but I think they would be able to make even more money if they put this software in the Open Source market.

Their support is descent.  Better than most companies.  You can email them and they will usually give you a good answer or push in the right direction within a day.  I have even Tweated about Kentico once, complaining about how difficult some things are and shouldn’t be, and they actually called me that day to ask if I needed any specific help.

Kentico is a great CMS’s if you can afford it, don’t need to customized it much, and have clients with above average internet technology knowledge to manage it.  This CMS’s is not for you if you have a small budget, will need to program against the framework, have clients who don’t know what Google Chrome is, and need a good E-Commerce engine.  The Kentico site itself has big knowledge base, forums, blog posts but is hard to search for anything in detail.

Umbraco

Umbraco is another .net CMS that is worth checking out.  But again just like Kentico this CMS has a verticle learning curve.  This is not for average developers.  This is for seasoned veterans.  I do not have as much knowledge in Umbraco as I do Kentico, but from what I can see and what has shown through my web development years anything written in .NET is going to have a steep learning curve.

One plus with Umbraco over Kentico is that is free, and the Umbraco site is pretty nice and has a bunch of information.

PHP

CmsMadeSimple

In my mind CmsMadeSimple has the quickest turn around time in putting a template, includes files together and implementation out of all CMS’s.  Not only that, it has a large amount of modules to download.  This is also Open Source and free to download and use.  The ease of updates and learning curve can be handled by most novice computer users.

This CMS does have some issues though.  Many modules are incomplete, and most are not very pretty (which doesn’t mean you can’t go in and make them pretty) out of the box.  Finding modules on CmsMadeSimple isn’t the easiest either, the search isn’t very helpful and the only filtering going on for modules is alphabetical.

WordPress

The best Blog engine, and a damn good CMS added on.  The modules are robust, and written well.  They even look great usually.  So many easy to intall plugins and widgets to name.  WordPress is not the easiest to skin around but if you learn the framework its not to bad, and if you didn’t want to get creative you could always find a template that’s all ready for you.  If you need to build a site in a small amount of time and have a bunch of features that your clients could administer on their own then WordPress is the CMS engine for you.