CMS Made Simple Forums

-- From http://www.packtpub.com/award:
If you're a fan of a particular CMS or if you're part of a CMS project team, then we're looking for your nominations. We want to compile a list of open source Content Management Systems that will be put forward to win $5,000 and the title of Packt Open Source CMS, 2006. The five CMS's that receive the most nominations will go forward to the final round. First runner-up and second runner-up will not go away empty handed, taking away $3,000 and $2,000 respectively.

-- and from http://www.packtpub.com/article/open_source_cms_award_launched:
The five CMS's that receive the most nominations will go forward to the final round. The final five will then be voted for by a panel of expert judges and visitors to www.PacktPub.com with the winner being announced later this year.

Head over to http://www.packtpub.com/nominations and cast your vote.

here's mine...

I've used numerous CMS and web site development tools in the years that I have been making web sites and when I found this one in march of this year I knew my search was over.

Most of the other ones I tried were too convoluted.

They required you to use check boxes and input areas to set up your templates and CSS or you had to know what the syntax for the content boxes were in order to put them in a template.

Some even generated pages using table based layouts.

With CMSMS you can code just like you did when you were hand coding using Divs and standard CSS style sheets.

Template conversion can take me about an hour and it uses Valid XHTML and CSS markup, leaving all the content and pesentation separated, making it easy to change your whole site in minutes.

With dynamically generated menus it is a webmasters dream come true.

They offer easy to install Modules for most any type of addition you could want for your site.

Another quickly written down reason for nomination:

The most easy-to-use, yet flexible CMS I have found. It's easy for beginners to web design to get a site up in minutes. Yet for an experienced web designer you can create any kind of layout very easily, as the template systems doesn't put any restrictions.

With the Menu Manager you can create any kinds of navigation system and then style it to your liking with CSS.

The default installation is light-weight, not bloating the admin panel with unnecessary features for the beginner. But for other features modules can be downloaded for most of the features you may need. Users also share user defined tags.

In the soon-to-be-released 1.0 version administrators can download and install modules from within the admin panel.

Moreover, the Events Manager makes it possible to steer the workflow, to decide that when a happens, do b.

The community is very friendly and you get quick support in the forums or on IRC.

Much effort is put into accessibility. It's only up to the user if the sites created are living up to accessibility standards, which the default templates provided do.

There's not much more one can ask from a CMS. And still, the simplicity of use makes it open for anyone to use.

I higly recommend this CMS to beginners and experienced web designers alike!