14 Inspiring CMS Showoffs

Posted in GalleriesApr 11, 08 | 12:48 pm

ty.Gossman

Content Management Systems have become common place for website development, custom development saved for the largest and most unique websites.

Before deciding which CMS is best for your next project it is a good idea to see how others have customized the offering to their needs, as a way to evaluate how flexible the software is. Will it stifle your creativity or will it allow you to incorporate your best design and be able to provide a host of other features that would not be possible otherwise.

The popular CMSs all have strong community offerings including forums where you are encouraged to show off your latest creations, a great place to start when evaluating the software. Browse the list below to find some inspiration, some of them have RSS feeds that you can subscribe to, to stay inspired.

ExpressionEngine

Site Introductions

RSS feed
WordPress

Your WordPress

rss feed link
Textpattern

Let’s See Yours, Then

rss feed link
MODx

You and Your Sites

rss feed link
Joomla

Site Showcase
Drupal

Drupal showcase

rss feed link
CMS Made Simple

CMS Show Off

rss feed link
TYPOlight webCMS

Showroom
e107 CMS

Theme Announcement and Releases
Pligg

My Pligg Site
Mambo

Show off your Mambo
Xoops

Website reviews of Xoops Sites
sNews

Site Showcase
SilverStripe

Showcase

Which is your favorite CMS? Is it the one that gets out of your way and lets you design the website you want, or are certain functionalities more important? In the best of both worlds, you design your layout as you normally would, and then serve it up with all the added extra goodies a CMS can offer.

My favorite to date is ExpressionEngine purely on the enthusiasm and etiquette of the community there. I am just adding some of these others to my bloglines feeds, for future reference and design inspiration. There are some amazing sites going unnoticed, I’m sure of it.

Good luck to you in your inspiration hunting and learning/doing with your CMS of choice.

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Author: ty.Gossman
A full-time web designer, long-time contributor to the Stylegala web standards gallery, and a lifetime member of the creative.Planet. Life on the planet is good... !

inspiring commentary

April 11th, 2008 at 1:54 pm» 14 Inspiring CMS Showoffs Webcreatives

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April 11th, 2008 at 3:27 pmJordan

I’m going to have to go with TextPattern.

It gets the hell out of your way to let you build a website. I also love it’s forms system.

April 11th, 2008 at 3:32 pmchest rockwell

Joomla! FTW!

April 11th, 2008 at 3:34 pmphaziz

http://21degrees.com.au/products/symphony/ – awaiting version 2.0….

April 11th, 2008 at 3:53 pmChris

You should really check out liveSite by Camelback Web Architects (camelback.net)

April 11th, 2008 at 4:11 pmty.Gossman

Thanks for the symphony post phaziz, the showcase link would be:
http://overture21.com there is also an Rss feed.

April 11th, 2008 at 4:17 pmcheebur

Try this one for Textpattern inspiration:

http://welovetxp.com/

April 11th, 2008 at 4:50 pmCraig Teel

I’d have to go with http://www.playintraffik.com . Much easier to use than other CMS’s and tons of awesome features.

April 12th, 2008 at 3:42 amDimmy

This site is a showcase site for the incredible flexible cms/cmf modx.
take a look at the designs and get inspired. See that the cms is not in the way of the design all the designs are as unique as there creators

April 12th, 2008 at 4:51 amPHPboost

Un CMS pas mal du tout, c’est PHPBoost qui se développe très rapidement actuellement…

Son slogan “votre site à portée de main!”.

Essayez le, on y décroche plus après…

April 12th, 2008 at 4:56 amVaIt

ModX cms all the way! http;//www.viriko.ru & http://www.viriko.com are examples of pure modx sites.

April 12th, 2008 at 7:25 amArjan

Maybe you should include Umbraco CMS umbraco.org, also open source but based on MS .NET instead of PHP and fully web standards capable.

April 12th, 2008 at 8:03 amJay Gilmore (smashingred)

[Disclosure: I am a member of the MODx Marketing Team]

Great idea to post all the different major CMSs together for people to check out. I think choosing a CMS is a matter of personal choice and project need.

Obviously I have a bias but for instance, if you are going to be a professional blogger, WP is going to win out over the others as it is the right tool for the project.

If you are building a large corporate portal site then Joomla or Drupal is right although the upcoming release of MODx will be able to handle the larger enterprise class sites.

Choose the CMS that works for your project.

Cheers,

Jay

April 12th, 2008 at 8:17 amSarah

I personally love wordpress. This is an amazing (from my point of view) Its easy, strong community to discuss the issues, great list of plugins and themes. Maybe, there is a reason to love wordpress is I never tried anything else.

April 12th, 2008 at 4:25 pmWill

I would say that wordpress is probably my favourite out of this list. For my site though I am trying to develop my own cms with all the features I want, but still simple enough to be natural to use. I think it’s design is influenced by wordpess in some ways. Take a look at http://www.pennd.com

April 12th, 2008 at 5:28 pmDavid Sparks

I use text pattern. Imo its the easiest to learn, has fewest problems, has the simplest user interface and works great

April 13th, 2008 at 2:10 amPai

based on the list, i would go for expression engine..

mtos is on its way to become a most flexible cms..

April 13th, 2008 at 1:18 pmDan Previte

I haven’t used it yet, but I am really looking forward to the next version of Expression Engine since it will be written in CodeIgniter. I’ll be able to drop their CMS right into my existing CI sites which is pretty slick.

April 13th, 2008 at 3:45 pmNemesis Design

See also http://www.joomlashow.it/ for italian sites made with joomla!

April 13th, 2008 at 7:02 pmty.Gossman

There are some notable omissions pointed out so far… I can’t believe I forgot about movableType.org, umbraco.org, and symphony21.com. Thanks for other great link suggestions. MovableType’s forums don’t have a showoff section that I could find, elsewhere on MI http://movablelove.com was mentioned as a MT gallery.

April 14th, 2008 at 1:22 am14 CMS a tener en cuenta » Cosas sencillas

[...] FREAKGROUP hacen referencia a Most Inspired Blog donde hacen una buena recopilación de 14 Sistemas de Gestión de Contenidos (CMS) que podemos [...]

April 14th, 2008 at 7:00 amGabriel Porras

It´ll be better compare them… Compare the valid of the HTML they produce, how accessible are they, the usability….

April 14th, 2008 at 12:55 pmty.Gossman

Another entree for anyone stuck on asp.net here’s another bone: http://graffiticms.com

April 14th, 2008 at 4:06 pmfrehermell

and….texty.com ¿?

April 14th, 2008 at 9:44 pmZac

I would have to go with Expression Engine. I moved to it from Wordpress and in lue of Joomla. Love its flexibility, support, and documentation.

2.0 is going to be even sweeter! It is an additional boost for those who want a control/object/view framework to work with, CodeIgnitor.

April 15th, 2008 at 12:45 amBrian

I’ve tried many of these, and I have to say for my own needs, nothing has been able to touch TypoLight for me so far. I think it has the perfect balance of power and flexibility without being too complex and bloated. If you are looking for a blog or more community-driven site, it can do that as well, but there are better options.

But as a CMS that meets the typical needs of my clients’ sites while allowing me to produce clean, standards-based code, I was blown away immediately, and am not looking back.

April 15th, 2008 at 2:09 amDan

I like the fact that SilverStripe lets you code like Ruby on Rails (but in PHP) and has a much more powerful and intuitive content authoring interface that others I’ve seen around. Plus, even the U.S. Democrats use them — see this video of them on national T.V. from their homepage:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTD_8hBdXz4

April 18th, 2008 at 7:38 amzoel

hmmm..movabletype?

April 18th, 2008 at 12:19 pmty.Gossman

MovableType was noticably omitted, the point of the entries was those CMS forums that offer a specific category for designers and developers to share their new sites. The movableType forum has no such category, or a specific place to start a “showoff your sites” thread. It’s not easy to keep up with a feed for an entire CMS, rather than monitoring feeds for new sites only… the good stuff!