Hi all,

just wanted to share some experiences.

I have built about a dozen CMSMS websites and was quite satisfied about the simplicity and light weight structure of this CMS that makes it very simple for a casual PHP programmer to change about everything very quickly.

During the last six months things started to go havoc, however. Upgrading to a new minor release caused a complete standstill because CMSMS forgot to mention an unexpected change in PHP dependency, form mailer changed internal database structure rendering my stored user data unusable, the only available video flash player doesn't work on a fresh installation with PHP 5.3, so it seems these guys have run into a serious quality problem.

This led me to look around for an alternative. I didn't want to go into the complexity of typo3 design and have heard horror stories about the internal workings of drupal, so I had a closer look at TypoLight at first.

While having a cute and fresh looking UI I was somewhat disappointed about the incomplete pre-installation check, which was much better in CMSMS. No big deal to tweak some things to get it working, but this could have been handled much better. TypoLight seems to be more actively developed now than CMSMS and most features were there, even though some features were lacking that I took for granted in CMSMS.

Then I had a look at concrete5 and it blew my socks off. While being incredible simple for editors, its management interface is surprisingly powerful and extremely well organized. No more file cluttering thanks to the brilliant DB storage and grouping feature, installation is straightforward and without any hitch, there are a number of usable skins available and the preinstalled set of modules is completely sufficient for small to medium size.

Congratulations to the programmers of concrete5, this CMS is an area of magnitude better than CMSMS and TypoLight, and in terms to overall productivity for part-time webdesigners, superior to any other CMS that I have seen so far.