My first CMS: Simple PHP Blog
Three or four years ago was when I began my exploration into the world of Web content management systems for personal use. It was a period of transition for me. My primary Web language was slowly shifting from Perl to PHP. I also had a strong desire to move away from static HTML pages for my "family" site to something a little more dynamic and evolving. However, while I was ready to take on the CMS I wasn't ready to fork over the extra money my host provider was asking for a single MySQL database. Until my hosting contract was up, I only had one choice...install a CMS that stored the data on the drive as "flat files" instead of an online database.
So I chose Simple PHP Blog as my first CMS via a blog. In a lot of ways, there really isn't much difference between Simple PHP Blog and other blogging applications such as Nucleus CMS and Wordpress. The exception of course is the fact that Simple PHP Blog doesn't need a database. Over time though, I found that data stored in a text files can get corrupted much easier than if the data was stored in an actual database. I also found , for the most part, open source projects and their users prefer the use of an SQL database to store their data. So eventually, I made the inevitable decision of migrating to such Web applications as Wordpress and Drupal.
While it has been a couple years since I have used Simple PHP Blog, I'm glad the project is still alive. There are too many people that have the desire to use a CMS, but for whatever reason are hesitant to leave the "flat files" behind. To be honest, if it wasn't for Simple PHP Blog I wouldn't have had the courage to have taken the next step on my own into using a CMS with a database (though work likely would have kicked me in that direction anyway). One often needs to take baby steps when learning something new and for me Simple PHP Blog was that important first big step. Thank you Simple PHP Blog!
Oh the transition
Hehe reminds me of the transition I made from static HTML pages -> CuteNews (flatfile) -> WordPress -> Drupal. :)
Too bad CuteNews changed its license, and now is more like a shareware.
One to Many
From flat-files I did visit Wordpress and eventually Drupal. However, I never have considered Drupal as a replacement for Wordpress. For the most part I kept my Wordpress sites and used Drupal for new projects. In the past couple years I've also used osCommerce, SMF, eGroupware, Trac, and other open source CMS I can't think of this late at night.
In other words, the entire world of open source CMS opened up for me with Simple PHP Blog...and in that world it is the many choices of CMS that I like so much.
I think WordPress is really
I think WordPress is really only good for blogging, nothing more. I once tried to make a news site with WP, but found its features too limiting, especially for the plans I had for my site. There were some small but annoyingly stupid things, like how the URL for a category has to be in the form of "example.com/categories/apple", any "quick" hacks that removes "categories" would result in other weird bugs. Other features, like getting only a certain category to display on frontpage or create another page (or loop, for WPers) that publishes posts from a certain category, takes way more effort and hacks than necessary (I was able to accomplish the same thing in Drupal very easily).
And yeah, there was also the transition from phpBB2 to SMF (though phpBB3 is looking pretty good). Another CMS I enjoyed playing around with was TextPattern, I would use it more often if not for the somewhat "uncertain" future the software faces at the moment. As for wiki, MediaWiki was overkill for me, but I found DokuWiki to be very interesting :)
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