CMS-Search Update: The Longlist

2023-10-11

194 words, ~2min reading time

Note: This was initially published on Scribbles, my previous "micro blog". I discontinued it and moved the contents into this blog on 2023-12-05.

A few days ago I wrote that I'm currently search for a different content management solution for my photography website.

I initially browsed through some list of CMS I found online (e.g. awesome-selfhosted and Wikipedia) and got a list of 40 different solutions that sounded interesting on first sight.

Since then I culled through them to get a shorter list of systems which are worth a closer look. For this, I defined four "deal-breakers":

• The CMS must be self-hostable
• It must feature a blogging solution with an RSS feed (either integrated or using a well-known plugin)
• It must have a least a very basic asset manager (uploading files to in an own module (not just as part of an page/article), creating folders to organise the content)
• The CMS must be under active development (either a release during the last year or some activity in the source code repository; this is a difficult metric, but all projects where either clearly dead or alive)

Whats now left is a long list (or is it a mid list?) of the following CMS (in no particular order):

• Kirby
• Wordpress
• TYPO3
• Craft CMS
• Statamic
• Contao
• Joomla!
• Roadiz
• Strapi
• Exponent
• BigTree
• Concrete CMS
• Neos
• Textpattern
• dotclear
• django CMS
• Tina

Amoung those are some which absolutely cannot see using. But up to this point I'm trying to be as objective as possible to find a solutions that fits my needs perfectly. Perhaps, I even surprise myself.

The next steps - I'm trying to follow Karl Voit's "How to Choose a Tool" articles as close a possible) - is creating a complete list of requirements and determining a methodology of how I intent to use the software.