Freelancers, what CMS do you use?

Associate
Joined
11 Feb 2004
Posts
703
Location
UK
I want to start doing some freelance work and have been looking for a nice CMS to use. I want something that is simple, easy and preferably free. Oh and either PHP or NodeJS as they're the only one's I know.

I've used Wordpress before and it's clearly the most popular, but I want to explore some alternatives. If I can't find a suitable alternative i'll just default to Wordpress.

Also used Joomla a good few years ago but it seems a bit overkill for the sites i'll be building I think. Same with Drupal maybe.

Perch was looking just the thing until I found it wasn't free. :(

Also briefly looked at Concrete5, Modx, Bolt and October, which all look good but if anyone's used these or others similar I'd like to hear your thoughts.
 
Soldato
Joined
20 Dec 2004
Posts
15,765
I use Joomla, the other half uses Wordpress.

Joomla is definitely more customisable and powerful imo, but it's not friendly to use for non-technical people (or technical people for that matter). Works great once you get it set up just so though.
 
Associate
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
404
I'm a Modx user, the sites I use it for are mainly personal sites. below are some thoughts:

- The learning curve can be a bit steep at first, well it was when I first started.
- If you know PHP (I don't) then you can write your own snippets.
- The back end can feel a little sluggish I find sometimes (modx revo).
- I like that you make the template in html and just add placeholders.
- The forums can be a bit hit and miss at times.

I haven't used any other CMS in recent year though, as I kept just using Modx EVO then REVO.

Tim
 

fez

fez

Caporegime
Joined
22 Aug 2008
Posts
25,023
Location
Tunbridge Wells
I built my own for when we need something easy to develop on top of and fast but if its just simple websites I would stick with wordpress personally. Its quite easy to use, loads of stuff out there and you can do things cheaply with it.
 

Dup

Dup

Soldato
Joined
10 Mar 2006
Posts
11,225
Location
East Lancs
What is the advantage of MODx? Their website is a little obtuse in saying what it actually does differently. The programming curve has me intrigued.

I use CMS Made simple which uses Smarty and has some trick modules such as Listit2 and Formbuilder etc. The back end isn't the most friendly and is not the prettiest but is nice and lightweight compared to Wordpress.
 
Associate
Joined
16 Jun 2003
Posts
1,858
MODx there are some core modules you can use, forms, navigation menus, list engines, blog modules. Anything interesting and you probably have to write it yourself using PHP, MODx template variables and MODx API calls. Speed of web sites in MODx are magnitudes quicker than anything WP. WP CMS is slow I find, all the site loading is slow, you need Supercache to get it to work reasonably. MODx already has cacheing buit in .. and when you update a page it flushes the cache (very handy) automatically.

MODx Evo and Revo (more notably) tend to be suitable for running big sites I find, e.g. 200 pages and upwards. It's a lot more secure than WP. WP relies a lot on plugins, and they can be written by anyone with security checks or not, so the quality is a bit patchy at best.
 
Associate
Joined
4 Aug 2008
Posts
653
Location
North East
Used Joomla but there is also Drupal which I have used in the past, I need to start looking at Umbraco too as that has a good write up but its is ASP.NET based so not perfect for everything.
 
Associate
Joined
25 Jun 2009
Posts
1,260
Location
Guernsey
I need to start looking at Umbraco too as that has a good write up but its is ASP.NET based so not perfect for everything.

I'd not describe Umbraco as "not perfect for everything", more as "good for nothing", based on the implementation of it we were given by the design agency that made the website for the company that I work for. We just have to fix it and support it... :eek:

While it could be mostly down to the designers (our sister company's site also has Umbraco issues, leading us to christen it Umblackhole...), the (lack of) support we received from Umbraco on a paid for add in product was appalling.
 
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