People Get Touchy When You Talk CMS

Recently Glen Stansberry did a post on the popular Nettuts website about the 10 most usable Content Management Solutions.  In his post he chose WordPress as the top CMS, which wasn’t a huge surprise to me because I love WordPress already, but it wasn’t the CMS’s that he mentioned or how he ranked them in terms of usability that generated the most commentary, it was the CMS that he excluded that raised the biggest stink…

In case you didn’t see the post, you can read it here, be sure to checkout the comments below mentioning the exclusion of MODx.  Also, here’s how the CMS’s were ranked according to usability:

There are plenty of options when it comes to picking a content management system for a development project. Depending on how advanced you need the CMS to be, what language it’s built in, and who is going to be using it, it can be a nightmare trying to find the "perfect" CMS for a project.

However, some CMSs have a slight edge over the rest of the competition because of the usability of the software. Some are just easier to install, use and extend, thanks to some thoughtful planning by the lead developers. Here are 10 of the most usable CMSs on the web to use in your next project.

1. WordPress
2. Drupal
3. Joomla
4. ExpressionEngine
5. TextPattern
6. RadiantCMS
7. CushyCMS
8. SilverStripe
9. Alfresco
10. TYPOlight

Personally, I was surprised to see MODx excluded from this list as well, I don’t see it outranking WordPress in terms of usability, I can walk a client through the management of their WordPress site in a few minutes over the phone while watching a football game on television, but I do see MODx as being a more viable solution than some of the CMS’s mentioned. 

In fact, there are a few solutions mentioned here that I have heard very little about.  I hang out with a lot of developers at events like Central Arkansas Refresh and I can honestly say that no one has ever mentioned running some of these solutions.

One thing that I did like from this list was the dominance of PHP/MySQL based solutions.