After working with the PHP CMSes that have been around for a while, Joomla, Drupal, phpWebSite, you start to appreciate the power of simplicity. The power of simplicity you wish they had that is. They might be very powerful content management systems but for smaller sites they can be like unwilling donkeys to work with for styles and templates and structure.

That’s why I’m happy to see that there seems to be a new generation of systems sprouting up, built on good MVC principles and with management interfaces that echo modern, standards-compliant and functional, web design. I’m currently doing a small site using WordPress as a CMS, which is working out great, I’ll probably post something about that experience when it’s done.

Other than that I’ve noticed PureEdit that I’m going to have to try out. And lastly Chyrp, another blogging engine that has a very easy to use templating system and is easily extensible.

You’ll notice two of these are blog-engines. I have found that a lot of small-site functionality is perfectly captured in a blog engine. Portfolio sites for example. Entries in your portfolio are represented as categorised blog posts, and the addition of more static content like a bio or contact page are stored as pages. More about that later as I said, for now I’m enjoying the development of alternatives to the old whales. A new generation of CMS