Preferred/Best PHP Content Management System?

[LightningCrash]

For the past day or so I've been evaluating several open source CMS systems for a website project of mine. I'm basically wanting to use an existing CMS system to do most of my user and permission management, as well as give me good framework to put site design into (advertising, themes, etc). I want to add a community-based contribution system (without divulging the content of the site publicly, let's say it will be much like a user-contrib case mod site) to whatever CMS I choose, and this contrib system will be the focal point of the site.

I've looked into the following so far, and here are my comments.

XOOPS - XOOPs seems pretty good, and now that I actually found some documentation I might have a better opinion of it in a while

PHPNuke - Great docs, but the SQL code seems to be a bit limiting. Plus, the bad rap it has in the security arena makes me wary of putting it up on anything other than a local box.

PostNuke - PostNuke seems to be ok, but I'm not all that impressed with it or the documentation on their site.

Maybe I'm a bit of a minimalist, but all of these seem pretty well too bulky for what I need to do. I'm a bit discouraged by the selections out there and I will probably end up just writing everything from scratch if I don't find one I like.

I'm sure that some of you have good/bad experiences with various CMS systems, so let's hear it. :)

[matt9669]

Lestat will be writing something from scratch for the front page. The current back end is postnuke and we all officially hate it :lol:

Storyteller is a good system, we considered using it here but it didn't suit Lestat's needs - it's not free however, you can take a look here: http://www.esselbach.com

I would ask Lestat, but if you have the expertise to create your own and know exactly what you want in it, I would go that route. Best solution in the long run.

[Lestat HWL]

Here's my opinion...Postnuke is garbage, forget that. MD-Pro isnt too bad. e107 is great. If you aren't doing reviews, use Mambo...Mambo/e107 are two of the better free CMS's, along with MD-Pro.

[LightningCrash]

Thanks for the input. I'll be testing out Mambo locally in a little while.

Any comments on Mambo vs e107 when it comes to writing your own modules?

[bh2k]

You'd be seriously better of writing your own, it's a lot better for your own personalization. Nuke is terrible, it's so easy to hack...

[kopeah]

Stay away from PHPNuke .. too many security holes. I would go with Mambo since its modular and I think its more powerful than any Nukes.

[masterofpuppets]

I prefer e107 to be honest. But if it was my site, I would make my own CMS, much more flexible.

[Entity_Razer]

With CMS do you mean a sysytem of login where you can set reviews, news etc? or am I misunderstanding?

If i'm correct, build your own. We did also for our sites
www.entity-project.be
www.entity-project.be/gameyard
www.entity-project.be/flantic_world

it's not that difficult (at least not what we builth) unless you need very specialized features or something like scripts or something but I don't know why you'd need that for content.

So build your own, defenitly!