Open Source Content Management

We've been working on a series of content management system (CMS) projects recently and after looking at a few open source content management systems we decided to use MODx.

I've been consistently impressed with how easy it is to use and as I have experience of a few CMSs it was a real breeze to learn. I read very little in terms of documentation and was able to pretty much assume how various features worked and to my delight I wasn't far wrong. It's great when you think something like "I wonder if a template variable will allow me to do x" and it does!

Another good thing about the MODx CMS is that it's very responsive, I've played around with Umbraco as well which looks really good but I think MODx wins out on speed as Umbraco is very sluggish at times which ultimately slows down the web design process.

The best thing about MODx and Umbraco is the fact that they're open source it's fantastic to be able to offer clients a CMS that doesn't cost them anything, just the implementation costs.

If I could find fault with MODx it would have to be the initial screen that appears when you select a page. It displays a lot of information about the page and also the code view of the cached version. This is useful but I do feel the money page is the edit one so I think it would be better if it opened on that by default rather than the information page. 9 times out of 10 the edit page is probably the one users are looking for anyway.