Exponent CMS
I have spent a lot of time playing with Open Source Content Management systems, and have found them all sorely lacking.
This week I tried Exponent, and It looks really good.
Exponent :: An Open Source Content Management System
I have been wanting to install a CMS for my church. Right now we use static pages, and one of their staff folks knows the 2 or 3 places where they can paste in text to make the updates. As a result, 2 or 3 places on the website are up to date, and most of the rest is a year or two dated.
I believe, and the pastors seem to agree, that the church website should be someplace that people are drawn back to frequently to check out the new content.
Most of the Content Management software I have seen so far has been too mechanical looking on the end user's view, or too complicated on the administrative side.
I am pretty impressed with exponent so far. It appears totally intuitive for the staff person who is updating the site. They can just click on the content that they want to change, and it opens up in a wordprocessor in the browser window. It is also just as easy to add new sections of content to the navigation bars or the sidebars on the page.
The downside is that it seems to run a little bit slow on my server. All of the pages are generated by PHP/MySQL each time the page is loaded. It also doesn't offer search engine friendly URLs yet, although it looks like that feature is in the works.
I will be keeping an eye on Exponent. I suspect that their project may become a big player in the Content Management market.
