When I first began creating the website for minning.de in 2001, I was working for a small web design company as a code monkey producing PHP scripts. Naturally, I wanted to employ all that nifty coding for my personal site as well, so the site started out on a custom content management system dubbed Mirai. Mirai was PHP and XML-based, cludgy, and didn’t scale very well. Still it was pretty lean and didn’t suffer from any kind of bloat, as it was custom-tailored to my personal needs.
These days, I don’t have the motivation to write a custom CMS for my little personal portfolio website, which is the reason why I am currently using WordPress. However I always like to play with new toys; since I’m already planning a new design for the site, I’m currently evaluating several different open source alternatives to power minning.de.
Most of those trendy blogging and complex CMS features I couldn’t care less about. What I want is a simple system that lets me post notes to my journal, present my portfolio in an aesthetically pleasing fashion and stays out of my way the rest of the time. Few things irritate me more than software that’s in your face. Especially the hip AJAXy kind…
Drupal
For my company website The Plausible Impossible I chose to use Drupal. This system, while a little intimidating at first, is quite flexible and offers a plethora of modules for any conceivable purpose. The main things I dislike about Drupal are that it doesn’t offer a totally separate Admin area and that most of its features are geared towards a multi-user environment. I can see how that might be useful for large community driven sites, but for a personal portfolio website like mine it’s just overkill.
The Acidfree media management system was easily the best solution I found for a gallery, though. It’s simple and doesn’t make any presumptions as to the look of your gallery. Definitely a plus!
Joomla/Mambo
Stupid name jokes aside, my test of Joomla didn’t last very long. The default Admin area’s style reminded me way too much of the abomination that is the Windows Luna theme, complete with cutesy candy coated icons and colorful text. Don’t get me wrong, I do like colors – but in a user interface I prefer soothing greys and other non-intrusive colors…
TextPattern
The install was simple enough and the simplicity of the default administration area is a joy to behold, at least compared to the ugliness of the aforementioned Joomla.
The Textpattern web site itself is well designed and they seem to have a pretty active user community. In terms of features it appears to have everything I need, expect for a decent gallery system.
WordPress
WordPress is probably the most simple to use of the scripts I tested – then again, it’s not a full featured CMS but just a blogging system with some extras that can be “misused” in a CMS-like manner.
But that simplicity is what I most enjoy about it… stripping out features such as the calendar or the ridiculous META area in the theme is simple enough and adding features is even easier through their clever plug-in system. The admin area is neat and well organized.
Not much to dislike here, and considering that the site is already running on WordPress 2 right now, I might as well just stick with it – unless I find something much better very soon.
Unfortunately, all the gallery systems I tried were either too complex or otherwise not quite what I was looking for. The gallery is however the main reason this website exists, so I will need to come up with a custom solution, no matter which CMS I choose eventually. Systems like Coppermine or Gallery 2 are huge and have more features than I’d ever use, so they are out of the question.