10 Best Content Management Systems for Designers
There are a lot of content management systems out there, but many of them are overly complicated and require a certain level of technical expertise. However, there are a select few that focus on simplicity and ease-of-use, but still give the designer flexibility in templating features and customization. In this article, we have listed ten of these CMS’s. Some of them are well known, while others you may have never heard of, but deserve a look.
If you have a favorite CMS that we didn’t list here, let us know.
concrete5
Concrete5 is a free open source CMS that focuses on ease of use, which makes it great for designers. Some key features include a file manager with bulk upload, drag-n-drop layout editor, and an open marketplace of add-ons.
ExpressionEngine
ExpressionEngine is a flexible, feature-rich content management system that empowers thousands of individuals, organizations, and companies around the world to easily manage their website. It’s a favorite of famous web designers such as Veerle Pieters.
Textpattern
Textpattern is a flexible, elegant and easy-to-use content management system. It is both free and open source.
Joomla!
Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications.
Movable Type
Movable Type claims to be an “All-in-One Social Publishing Platform”, and it definitely delivers. It powers some pretty big sites including Barack Obama’s site and Serious Eats.
Cushy CMS
CushyCMS is a Content Management Systems (CMS) that is truly simple. There is no software to install and no programming required.
WordPress
WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is probably the most popular CMS and blogging platform out there.
Radiant CMS
Radiant is a no-fluff, open source content management system designed for small teams.
Drupal
Drupal is a free CMS that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Tens of thousands of people and organizations are using Drupal to power tons of different web sites.
SilverStripe
The SilverStripe CMS is a flexible open source Content Management System that gives everyone involved in a web project the tools they need to do their jobs.
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113 comments
sufers
October 19, 2009AWESOME extensive list.. Have always used wordpress as cms and blog but think i will experiment with some of the others and this list makes it easier for me, thank you for your time!
Bariski | TutZone.net
October 20, 2009Dugg for wordpress there!
Jon Wallace
October 20, 2009Can’t believe MODx is not featured here – surely one of the very best out there! – http://modxcms.com/
Danny
October 20, 2009MODx is definitely a CMS that makes designing a website a real pleasure. I say this as a designer and not a developer. I’m constantly blown away by its flexibility.
Admittedly there is a slight learning curve but the MODx forum is great and there’s an extremely helpful community out there on Twitter.
Edwin
October 20, 2009Looking over the above mentioned CMS’es, I noticed that a great deal of them are to be found on the following web site:
http://php.opensourcecms.com/
This site offers great in depth views and user opinions on the subject of ‘which cms to choose’ ?
Hope this is of any help ?
Broadbeach
October 20, 2009Two Words… You Rock! thank you for this
David
October 20, 2009As others have said, a great CMS for designers should easily marry standard, CSS-based design with the content managed by the system! Wolf CMS does exactly this (PHP system, lineal descent from Radiant).
Web 2.0 Tools
October 20, 2009Well I use Joomla and WordPress.. but I learned 3 more CMS from this list, thanks…
Zaigham
October 20, 2009Wonder why MODx (http://modxcms.com) is missing?…
Stephen L
October 20, 2009I’m pretty sure that Barack Obama’s website (http://www.barackobama.com/) is powered by ExpressioneEngine, not Moveable Type, as stated.
Stephen
brinella
October 20, 2009NovusCMS uses Umbraco almost exclusively. After an enormous amount of research we found that this CMS is perfect for public sector. We’ve had to customize a tiny bit, like adding Active Directory itegration, etc. It is much easier to learn and more intuitive for the end user. Also, the majority of our customers use Win Server instead of Linux.
Dennis Powers
October 20, 2009Great article and good info. We are a custom website design and development firm and we have built our own simple cms. It’s a light cms that we use for our own projects, but we are contemplating releasing it to the design community if there is interest. We built it and we support it, our clients love it and I would be interested in your thoughts. If your interested you can take .cms for a test drive.
http://dotcommediainc.com/solutions_dotcms.html.
email. dennis (at) dotcommediainc.com
skype. dennis_powers
Alex
October 20, 2009We use Joomla and Viart CMS
Luke
October 21, 2009If you’re talking from a designers perspective, you can’t go passed CMSMS. Best and most powerful templating. How you can even mention Joomla is beyond me – its a good CMS, but not for designers.
Samuel
October 21, 2009MODX Rules.
Content Management
October 21, 2009We used Infomaxim to build http://www.gadgetguy.com.au. It’s very flexible, handles ecommerce, has built-in analytics and reporting, customer management and a bunch more and not once did it limit anything we wanted to do from a design point of view. Oh, and it uses xStandard so call content mark-up is xHTML strict compliant.
John
October 22, 2009Where was MODx?
Here’s how the templating system works for the designer:
Step 1/ Knock up your sparkly design on your shiny white iMac. No holds barred.
Step 2/ Convert said design to (X)HTML/CSS.
Step 3/ Add the (X)HTML to MODx (or keep it external), drop in the required tags, snippets, etc.
Step 4/ Job done
Alistair
October 27, 2009Have to agree with MODx – am designing two sites a we speak with it, doing exactly what @John describes (even on a shiny white imac ! lol) – client controlled lightbox galleries, blog, editable chunks, all valid – oh joy.
AL
Jose Daniel
October 28, 2009Drupal for programmers and WordPress for designers
Glen German
October 28, 2009CMS are the new OS. Everyone has their favorites and will defend them to the end. Personally, I have tried most on the list, and with most you can tell that they are made by developers.
By that, I mean that they all try to install their own lingo, typical universal terms are flipped on their collective heads, and the designing of them is extremely difficult unless you know PHP.
The one I have yet to try, yet am extremely intrigued by because it is always left off the list, yet people clamor for it to be mentioned is Modx. I just can’t tell how well the extensions work because of the unintelligent UI on it’s home site (although it is better than most CMS homes out there).
Michael Schmidt
October 29, 2009Another great CMS is eSuiteOne – a hosted(Software-As-A-Service)all-in-one system with integrated blog, ecommerce, email marketing, customer database (CRM) and lots of other stuff, http://www.esuiteone.com/
Harmony Steel
October 29, 2009I’ve got to second (or third, fourth or fifth!) the comments about Drupal and Joomla, as a designer they’re among my LEAST favourite CMS’s.
I’ve had good success with Unify for single-user sites – http://unify.unitinteractive.com/
And MiniCMS isn’t bad if you need something a bit more powerful – http://www.minicms.eu/home.html
I’m off to check out Modx now after reading the comments!
Paddy
October 30, 2009I agree that Drupal is a truly complicated CMS for Webdesigners. Plus the Backend is not really logically structured.
My favourites at the moment are:
Concrete5 and Unify (for small projects)
John Marc
October 30, 2009If you are looking for a CMS that focus on simplicity and ease-of-use, but still give the designer flexibility in templating features and customization then I would recommend you the FREE EDITION of Kentico CMS:
http://www.kentico.com/freecms.aspx
Ashlee
October 30, 2009I’m seconding the vote for Textpattern. Designing for Textpattern is as simple as coding the page like you normally would, dropping the code into Textpattern, and popping the Textpattern tags anywhere you’d want dynamic (or static, if that’s the type of site you’re working with) content to go. Done.
The TXP resource center website has a ton of plugins you can choose from to accomplish just about anything you can think of to throw at it. If you know PHP, you can also whip up your own plugin to do whatever it is you want TXP to do. Even if you do get stuck, the community forums are great, and very helpful.
The only time I ever got stuck using TXP was in the very beginning, when I was trying to wrap my head around the Sections and Categories concept that textpattern uses to store information. (It’s actually a lot simpler than it seems– Sections are basically the templates that hold the content, IE categories) Once you figure that out, the rest is a breeze.
I settled on TXP after looking at several other CMS and finding them too heavy or convoluted for what I wanted to do. TXP is quick to learn, did almost everything I wanted it to right out of the box, and all in all works just right.
Chuck G.
October 31, 2009Surreal CMS is by far the best hosted CMS. Period. http://surrealcms.com.
They are well established, have a free account, are in multiple languages, and even have an affilliate program. You can’t get that from any of these other hosted CMS products.
Jeremy
November 4, 2009I’ll go ahead and start by saying, I’m very biased, probably alot like most of the commenters here are.
Drupal rocks! It has the flexibility to provide you the simplest of blogs, or the most complex of sites… IE whitehouse.gov and theonion.com.
Dave
November 5, 2009I have just found Website Publisher from a Interspire. I’ve only tried a demo but am REALLY excited about the potential it seems to offers. It’s not cheap, around $365 per license but has awesome modular drag & drop functionality.
Also, PageLime, as a simple content editor is excellent and the support provided has been second to none in my experience.
campuscodi
November 7, 2009I recommend Pixie CMS
robb
November 9, 2009i used joomla and wordpress.
wordpress got my vote.
while i’ve never tested others before, but i remember the reviews are mostly good.
especially drupal.
Gaspard Bucher
November 12, 2009You might be interested in zena. One of its main goals is to plain nice with designers and let them be in total control of the content display:
http://zenadmin.org/321
There is also a video illustrating the process:
http://vimeo.com/1891655
Gaspard (I’m biased, I created the damn thing).
Balaji
November 19, 2009Hi,
I am using silver stripe, i think it is best one.. Nice post.
Liey
December 8, 2009What about Liferay?? anyone heard of it?
Joe
December 8, 2009good to see concrete5 at the top of the list!
Martijn
January 4, 2010What no modX?! http://modxcms.com
justintime
January 7, 2010I like how Drupal screencap is hiding behind someones capture not the typical ugly interface….hahaha
asd
February 18, 2010Silver stripe looks nice.
Pragmatic Design
February 18, 2010We use SilverStripe- lovely to design for and customise, and a simple backend for non-techy users.
We also use WordPress and Joomla. WordPress is great for blogs, we don’t feel it’s the best as a full CMS. The Joomla backend is overcomplicated for non-techy users, and gives us the most support requests.
vampaz
February 18, 2010Modx Rules
jake
February 18, 2010I’ve been using http://pulsecms.com and love it!
Michel Leconte
February 19, 2010I’m bias too but I *truly* believe that you should check out http://www.seotoaster.com ; open source & free like most on the list but also most advanced SEO wise out of the box, including automated deep-links, automated 301, automated JavaScript link sculpting and point and click SEO silo’s.
It’s also super easy to build websites with, requiring 4 standard HTML templates, and 2 CSS per theme only. It ships with Jquery as well. Thanks to content front-end / inline editing, you can edit everything right onto the page, like for instance text inserted in a Jquery slider (try to do this with WordPress..).
On the SEO CMS side of things, we’ve compiled a list of the plug-ins you would need to install, patch, configure and troubleshoot to match only part (some stuff simply don’t exist on WordPress) what’s available with a basic seotoaster install out of the box:
- WordPress Duplicate Content Plugin
- WordPress Sitemaps Plugin
- WordPress Meta tags Plugin
- All in one seo pack wordpress plugin
- WordPress nofollow plugin
- Meta robots wordpress plugin
- Free seo wordpress theme
- seo wordpress template
On the Content Management & Design side of things:
- WordPress php plugin
- WordPress multiple content areas
- Super Transition Slideshow
- Fast and Secure Contact Form
Anyway check it out, you’ll be glad you did. There’s an online demo at http://www.seotoaster.com/demo-seotoaster-cms-free-seo-software.html
Patrik
February 20, 2010I have created page http://www.baldomero.eu, but I would like to implement
a good CMS. I would easily upgrade offer ready made companies.
Chad
March 15, 2010http://www.cmsmadesimple.com is a great open source solution that I use every day. I can take a static site and turn it into a database driven site in less than an hour with this product. Works great!
Andre
April 14, 2010I use business catalyst for run my online business.
Michael
April 19, 2010I also use MODx as my CMS for everything!
Erica
April 19, 2010I’m a designer coming from Dreamweaver. My site is in Joomla, and I find it unintuitive and programmer-centric. I would really like to know what the definition of a “simple” vs. “complex” site is. That would be really helpful in deciding whether to go to one of these other CMSs! My site isn’t exactly a family reunion site, but it isn’t adobe.com either.
biswarup
May 18, 2010Nowdays I am hearing about Jhoomla.. I need to try that out myself
synlag
May 28, 2010Better try out concrete5
Definitely a system to make your clients happy!
Joe
May 28, 2010good to see concrete5 at the top of that list!
Mike
August 16, 2010What about Plone?