I just spent a few days trying to get an overview of all the different CMS out there nowadays.
I restricted my search to free OpenSource PHP CMS. Those are still hundreds, but at least that rules out some like ExpressionEngine, CushyCMS (not free) and Plone, dotCMS, Alfresco, Umbraco, Radiant (not PHP) and DokuWiki, WordPress, Serendipity (not a CMS). (I was surprised that, according to several sources, WordPress is the most popular CMS by far! Although I can see how you can include it in your definition of a CMS, I only wanted to concentrate on those which were meant to be used as one.)
- I had a look at about 100 different CMS at opensourceCMS.com. (Their demo for each CMS listed there is a pretty cool feature that let’s you at least see one of the most important parts of a CMS at once: the admin interface.) Then I did a bit of research, i.e. googling what others use and like and don’t like and tried a few others which were not listed at opensourceCMS.com.
A few really popular CMS failed already at that stage: Joomla!, TYPO3, CMS Made Simple, XOOPS, e107 and SilverStripe. (I.e. their admin interface failed to convince me, I haven’t had a look beyond that at that point). - In the end I ended up with 18 different CMS I installed and tested more thoroughly.
- I will go into detail about 7 of them below…