I’ve been playing with a few open source CMSs for my new book. And I am actually surprised! Most of them are just so darn difficult to use! Not only they are jargon filled, but they are also unintuivie!
I am looking at both user side and the admin side.
I think WordPress excels in usability. The design is good, and it’s easy to figure out how things are laid. It follows task-centered approach to design. Which is great.
Joomla is confusing. The action buttons are above the form where you fill in the information. That’s very sad. The content adding interface is overly complicated and difficult for an intermediate user too.
Drupal makes me feel I have landed in wonderland! The taxonomy and nodes tangle me! And where is the WYSIWYG interface? That should be on by default!
What’s been your experience? Which CMS is best in terms of usability?
7 comments ↓
Try Dokuwiki with a few plugins like TOC for helping you write a book. Additionally, you dont need a database backend, all articles/pages are stored in flat files (txt)!
I have worked on 2 drupal projects.. Drupal is very good but for any first time users drupal is very confusing.
I referred this book called ‘ Pro Drupal Development’ by John VanDyk & Matt Westgate
Well - wp maybe excels in usability but i think from a certain project scope and complexity you go much better with Drupal. The WYSIWYG editor is easy to install - just get the FCKeditor module and untar it into sites/all/modules - done.
well, most of the clients (not talking about HUGE companies) need small website and easy to update interface. They are not tech savvy and I think wordpress, if bend right could be the choicest CMS. Not to mention, it is still a blog system though.
Take a look at http://wpremix.com/ that I created. Makes the things easy in wordpress but again, it depends on the requirements.
Plone beats all of the above by a large margin. Plone has very good usability experts and takes accessibility very seriously. It passes a lot of the standard tests that most other CMSes wont. Plone is a darling of many a NGO and gov orgs just because of these reasons.
WP is not a CMS, though you can beat it to fit your definition of ‘CMS’.
If you are looking for a PHP CMS, textpattern is a good fit. It gives very good raw materials to start with. The layout etc is done using a XML-like tagging system, without having to haggle with php+markup mix.
I have used Ingeniux forever, there new version 6 is amazing!
I have worked with Drupal, Wordpress and Joomla.
I found that they all are bit difficult to manage at admin side, specially for non-technical administrator ( and bit for technical administrator too ).
Even I was looking for some simple to manage CMS.
I got two and those are :
1 - Website Baker ( http://start.websitebaker2.org/en/introduction.html )
2 - V2 CMS ( http://www.codewalkers.com/c/a/Content-Management-Code/V2-CMS-Content-Management-System/ )
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