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Update: Which Content Management System (CMS) should I use? posted to category.

Proposed Question Description:

I have a list of features that I want for my website's Content Management System (CMS) - where can I find a [free] script that includes all of them?

Proposed Answer:

The Webmasters FAQ outlines the nature of acceptable questions for this site: researching available solutions and providing anecdotal advice falls outside the purpose of this StackExchange site, so this type of question would be better-suited to chat or another discussion forum.

That being said, there are a variety of free and open source content management systems, as well as licensed software and paid services, which may meet your requirements.

Some of the most popular content management systems include:

(list of popular content management systems)

All of the content management systems listed are built around the concept of plug-ins which extend the application's functionality - there are many plug-ins, with new plug-ins authored every day.

If you have researched content management systems and available plug-ins but cannot find anything that will meet your needs, you should consult a developer who can build something to your specifications either as a plug-in for an existing content management system or as a stand-alone application.

Will this be useful/any suggestions?

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  • I like most of that answer. However a CMS is much more than just a script. I wonder if we need to cover CMSs in separate questions "I need an add-on to my existing CMS..." and "I need a CMS...".
    – paulmorriss
    Feb 7, 2012 at 14:28
  • @paulmorriss You are correct, a CMS is far more than a script, but my thought is that users are generally searching on functional aspects of CMS software (and may not even be familiar with the acronym "CMS") when creating these questions, so "I need a CMS..." might be too specific.
    – danlefree
    Feb 8, 2012 at 2:50

4 Answers 4

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I think that it is about time that the FAQ proposed in this question actually went into the FAQ.

Today another question was closed without even referencing the the catch all question leaving no indication that this sort of question was considered too localised by the webmasters stack exchange community.

It is rather cheap to close it as an exact duplicate and not leave a link to the question that it is an exact of (I'm surprised it's even possible). Since it appears to be a policy decision not to allow this type of question then a note should be added to the FAQ to remind people of this and questions should be closed as Too Localised, referencing that FAQ entry.

The questioner could have been saved the time and effort of writing quite a long and detailed question, if they'd known that it wasn't going to be accepted here and the community would have been saved from having to read (or at least scan) a question that we apparently don't want here.

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  • My vote was for closing as too localized. A mod's vote/action can presumably overrule that.
    – Su'
    Mar 1, 2012 at 15:53
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According to this question: https://webmasters.meta.stackexchange.com/a/598/6901, we decided that we would create a different community wiki for people looking for forums, cms, etc. I don't think that the questions tagged will be able to be answered in one community wiki: but five or six community wikis should take care of it.

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  • Can you list the five or six community wiki questions (just the questions) that you see as being useful?
    – danlefree
    Feb 8, 2012 at 2:43
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    As I said in that question: CMS, ecommerce package, shopping cart and photo gallery seem to be the top ones.
    – paulmorriss
    Feb 8, 2012 at 9:33
  • @danlefree what paulmorriss said + a forum script (that one is pretty popular too)
    – user6901
    Feb 8, 2012 at 21:56
  • @paulmorriss OK - I should be able to reverse engineer this Q/A pair into a CMS-only draft. (though I'm of the opinion that the functionality of a forum or photo gallery is essentially a subset of CMS functionality)
    – danlefree
    Feb 9, 2012 at 0:00
  • @danlefree can you create catch-alls for forums, ecommerce, shopping carts, and photo galleries?
    – user6901
    Feb 10, 2012 at 22:13
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    #Christofian I can, but it will take me a while to come up with all of them. You are welcome to get one started (starting out as a meta question seems to be the ideal course of action).
    – danlefree
    Feb 10, 2012 at 22:34
  • @danlefree hows this: meta.webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/691/…
    – user6901
    Feb 11, 2012 at 1:29
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Great idea and a decent answer, we do have a lot of n00bs so perhaps we should link out to some of the more common CMS's and popular find-a-script sites. It seems quite a few people are coming here because they're not getting effective results from their country's Google portal.

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I actually like having multiple varying questions with people looking for a script. Things like "What is a good web comic script?" or "What is a good CMS for a photography site?" are good questions that list several viable alternatives.

However, there are 214 questions with that tag, which suggests a lot of duplication and too many fine-grained requests (e.g. "I want something like Wordpress but which does this one tiny extra thing"). These should be closed as duplicates.

Perhaps we could draft up a list of acceptable, broad categories, make those canonical and close other questions as duplicates?

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  • You can see where "what is a good web comic script" is highly subjective, though, right? There are "web comic" plug-ins for a variety of CMS platforms so this line of differentiation would quickly result in hundreds of questions which could each conceivably have multiple answers (and the subjective tone of the questions might lead askers to create new subjective questions under the belief that subjective questions are acceptable).
    – danlefree
    Feb 8, 2012 at 2:46
  • @danlefree I do feel that many of these fall into the "good subjective" category. If we list several of the most popular solutions in on answer, I think that at least gives visitors a starting point to search out what suits their needs. But like I said at in my answer, we don't want hundreds of these.
    – DisgruntledGoat
    Feb 8, 2012 at 21:54
  • No objection to the creation of catch-all questions which are slightly more specific, (so long as they are properly marked as community wiki) - if you want to put one together as a test, the views/upvotes should be a good indicator of whether this is the correct direction to take.
    – danlefree
    Feb 8, 2012 at 23:59

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