Cost: Free

Development: Community

Source: Open Source

Hosting: Your Server

License: GNU GPL

Programming: PHP

Database: MySQL

Our Impressions:

e107 has a really helpful community of users that are active in their development for this system. The system itself boasts a lot of helpful features for enabling someone to create a community-driven site.

Logging into the system presents you with a pageful of settings mixed in with the content creation tools. Because of this, it can be hard to get a grasp on where your content is and what kind of hierarchy it has.

Cost: Free

Development: Community Driven

Hosting: Own Server

Source: Open Source

License: BSD License

Language: PHP

Database: MySQL

Our Experience:

Textpattern strips out all the unnecessary stuff and leaves you with a very straightforward CMS. It functions like a blog, where you can write and edit articles, and then list them in a myriad of ways. Of course, it also has a plethora of great plugins that can extend its base functionality.

The textile syntax is easy to learn, but clients may not want to learn and may prefer a WYSIWYG editor instead. The layout seems a little dated and could use some modernization, new ability to use admin templates helps that though.

Cost: Free

Development: Community Driven

Hosting: Own Server

Source: Open Source

License: MIT License

Language: PHP, XML, XSLT

Database: MySQL

Our Impressions:

The interface is beautifully clean and simple, which makes it easy to use and understand. The underlying structure is powerful and flexible, but might take a little while to learn the XSLT templating language. Like Expression Engine, you can customize what kind of custom fields each page uses.

The program recently underwent a major rewrite which users couldn’t upgrade from their previous versions. For a non-programmer, it might be complicated to learn and understand the various components of this CMS.

Cost: Free

Development: Community

Hosting: Own Server

Source: Open Source

License: LGPL

Language: PHP

Database: MySQL

Our Impressions:

Contao is everything we like about TYPO3 with a more modern interface, easier templating, and fewer options (in a good way). It was made to handle small to medium websites that use varying kinds of content. We really love the way it handles different “content elements” (like regular text, forms, filelinks, multimedia, etc.) and then you can tell it where to go on your site.

Contao still leaves a lot of “layout decisions” up to the editor, like changing where things are placed on a page and what styles they should use. Some designers may not be happy to give up this freedom.

Cost: Free

Development: Community

Specialization: Lite CMS

Hosting: Own Server

Source: Open Source

License: GNU Affero GPL

Programming: PHP

Database: MySQL

Our Impressions:

Frog’s strength is in its simplicity. As soon as you log in you’re brought to the page listing, pages can be in any kind of hierarchy and they’re super easy to reorder and move. “Snippets” are little blocks that can be dropped anywhere in the website you need and give the system its flexibility. It has a small but active community that answers questions quickly and helpfully.

Frog’s development team lately has been mostly absent lately. Use a fork of Frog CMS called Wolf CMS.

Cost: Free

Development: Community

Source: Open Source

Hosting: Own Server

License: GNU General Public License

Programming: PHP

Database: MySQL

Our Impressions:

Our favorite thing about Wolf CMS is the immediate page view hierarchy as soon as you log into the CMS. It makes finding and organizing pages drop-dead simple to do. It can allow a non-technical user to edit pages easily while leaving the developer create pages how they want to. Code can be organized into layouts and snippets. PHP developers will like this the most because templates are mostly made up of pure PHP code with little custom templating language to be learned.

Unfortunately, despite some good tutorials, the templating language being PHP may actually be hard for some designers and non-technical users as soon as they want to do something more complicated than displaying pages/posts.

Cost: Free

Development: Community

Hosting: Own Server

Source: Open Source

License: GNU GPL

Programming: PHP

Database: MySQL

Our Impressions:

CMS Made Simple is kinda like the lighter version of Joomla CMS system. It has all of the basic stuff you want and need in a CMS system without getting too complicated. It has a nice news feature to allow you to keep an updated blog or news section at your website without problems.

CMS Made Simple has come a long way as far as layout and ease of use, but its not fully there yet. It can still feel a little clunky at times, and could use some polish in the design and layout areas.

Cost: Free

Development: Community

Hosting: Your Server

License: GNU GPL

Programming: PHP

Database: MySQL

Our Impressions:

It has the right amount of features for what it aims to do. It would work well for simple websites that may need to be edited by non technical people later. It has great permissions allowing you to customize what your client sees, a nice media uploader, and the ability to add modules if needed.

The admin interface accomplishes what it needs to, but it isn’t pretty and it can get repetitive at times to accomplish tasks. The media uploader is nice, but doesn’t integrate in with when a user wants to put a photo into their page layout.

Cost: Free

Development: Community

Specialization: Web Portal

Hosting: Own Server

Source: Open Source

License: GNU GPL

Programming: PHP

Database: MySQL

Our Impressions:

Because of Drupal’s vastness, it can be made to run almost any kind of website. There is a large community, so finding help or modules should not be a problem. In short order, one can have a very feature-rich site up and running. Drupal also makes it very easy to keep custom modules, themes, and the core Drupal files up-to-date which is a huge bonus. Almost every menu and sidebar and little configuration can be changed without changing the theme. It has thousands of modules that can add on to its functionality.

Drupal can be intimidating to just logon to the system as an administrator. There are so many options and configurations and strange names like taxonomy that you don’t know where to start. Theming Drupal can be a large challenge if you are not a programmer.

Cost: Free

Development: Community Driven

Specialization: Blog

Hosting: Own Server, Free hosting

Source: Open Source

License: GNU GPL

Language: PHP

Database: MySQL

Our Impressions:

Wordpress is best for bloggers, but is certainly capable of much more.  The new administration pages really make managing your site a breeze. The ease of installing and upgrading make it a great fit for non developers. It has everything it needs for what most people want and need for blogging: Posts, comments, media, links, simple pages, users,  etc. The new 2.7 admin interface is slick and very customizable.

Wordpress (like a lot of open source applications) is updated often and is in constant change. It becomes easy to add plugins for functionality that may become outdated or stop working when Wordpress updates. It can handle simple websites splendidly, but has limitations for bigger sites and when there are needs for more complicated kinds of content.