General Support: Etomite Content Management System, its cool!!

Would suggest anyone looking for an open source solution for content management look at Joomla.org. It is administered by the "Open Source Matters" group, formerly of Miro and Mambo fame. In my experience, it's the most well-supported, maintained, accessible (CSS & XHTML -- they will shortly abandon tables altogether -- this is why I chose Plogger in the first place, because the tables were easy to remove), and extensible (the 3PD community is enormous) CMS solutions I've tried, and I have used a number (including, but not limited to, phpWebSite, postNuke, phpNuke, e107, etc). I don't count MoveableType or Wordpress, because they aren't really fully-fledged CMS, IMO.

Plogger isn't yet painless to integrate, but when Beta 3 is released I might take a look at writing an installer for Joomla. Remember, no CMS is perfect (Joomla is awfully close), so you should always examine which solution is right for you / your website / your business / your cat / your RV.

Regards,
Derek

We are / I am using a lot of different things; and it depends on the need and amount of integration.

First, why am I using Plogger? Because it's compact, extensible, powerful, and doesn't generate a lot of the garbage markup of other galleries and scripts I've used. Though there were a few layout tables in Plogger, I was able to remove them without any detriment to the presentation and am able to modify the code, which at present is light and well coded (huge cudos to Mike for this one). Anybody with experience with CMS knows they generate horrendous, extraneous markup and are often ridiculously hard to strip out the inline CSS and layout tables -- there's a good Section 508 patch for Joomla that goes a long way, but the first actual Accessible Joomla release will not be until Fall 06.

Wordpress is really a blogging platform. It's got features like comments, trackbacks, etc, but it's meant to be lightweight and usually personal. It really has a sole function, blogging, with a few secondary features.

A CMS is different; it allows for the generation of webpages (not posts, but categories, sections, pages, etc), hosting of forums, use of banner ads, news aggregators, image galleries, download areas, polls, articles, news, form handling, etc. So, it's much easier for a CMS to emulate a blog (like Wordpress) than vice-versa, though it is sometimes accomplished by stitching various components together (like a blog, image gallery script, and forums). A CMS provides the benefit of a single userbase and seamless component integration.

Using one versus the other depends largely on your needs -- which and how many features do you need? If you're going to handle user registrations and profile management, conference registrations, e-commerce, or forums, then you should think about a CMS. However, if your intent is really to publish your thoughts and vacation pictures in the hopes that someone else will read them, it's best to go with a blog.

Very quick summary, hope that helps.
Derek