I’ve tried many CMS’s over the years, and never found them to be very polished packages.  My old favorite, Joomla, was easy to use once you understood it, but so convoluted that only a very technical person could really understand how to use it.

For a side project I’m working on, my wife and I are doing a web site, and need the user interface for creating posts to be super simple so that non technical people can not only create posts, but understand what they are doing.  I installed and tried out the latest Joomla, Drupal, DotNetNuke, Umbraco and found that none of them were up to the task.  I finally decided to give WordPress a try, although I’ve always thought of them as a blogging platform and not a real CMS.  I learned that I was completely wrong, in the years since I last gave it a try, WordPress went from a toy used by people who wanted their own blog to a full-fledged CMS.  The community is massive, with lots of great themes and plugins, as well as a nice user interface.  This web site has been an experiment mostly geared at finding the right tool for this project, but I think based on the result I’m going to leave it up as a place for me to post things I learn while doing software development.  Hopefully a couple of the tips and tricks can help out others when they are googling to try to solve their latest development problem.

Today’s Tip: If you are looking for a CMS, and want it simplicity and ease of use, give WordPress a try. If you are a developer that wants a highly customizable CMS, check out Umbraco.