MODx is 100% buzzword compliant, and makes child’s play of building content managed sites with validating, accessible CSS layouts – hence Ajax CMS. It empowers its users to build engaging “Web 2.0″ sites today, with its pre-integrated MooTools, Scriptaculous and Prototype libraries. If you’re a CSS designer or Ajax aficionado, this is the CMS for you; and if you like what you see today, you’ll love what’s coming.

Techies call MODx a Content Management Framework (”CMF“): equal parts custom web app builder and Content Management System (”CMS“). With a flexible API and a robust event override system, MODx makes building engaging web projects straightforward — or changing core functionality without hacking the core code possible. Custom tweaks won’t leave you pulling out your hair when it’s time to upgrade.

Not only does MODx help you build sites quickly, but it also is both robust and simple. As far as end-users know, MODx is just an easy-to-use online application; for developers there’s freely available resources and a fantastic end-user community.

Pricing: Free
Source: http://www.modxcms.com/

The Movable Type Open Source Project was announced in conjunction with the launch of the Movable Type 4 Beta on June 5th, 2007. The MTOS Project is a community and Six Apart driven project that will produce an open source version of the Movable Type Publishing Platform that will form the core of all other Movable Type products. Listed below is a comprehensive list of new features that you will find in Movable Type 4.0.

Understanding Your Blogs Better

• A completely reinvented user interface
• Built in reports on blog activity
• Integrated asset manager for uploading, reusing, and finding files like photos, audio, and video
• Blog-style presentation of your recent content is easy to skim and lets you know how your blogs are doing
• Customize MT’s entire user interface using the same MT template language that publishes your blog
• A customizable dashboard to display just the information you find valuable
• Kick-ass documentation — over 100 printed pages’ worth, with an exclusive book-length Business Blogging Guide offering details on exactly how to help your company communicate with blogs
• Powerful listing screens with quick keyboard access keys and the ability to work with multiple selections of entries, comments, or authors
• Quick Filters on every listing screen let you jump to the most-frequently-accessed views of your information

Better Publishing

• Smarter defaults throughout the system, offering more power with fewer configuration settings than MT 3.0
• A powerful and simple re-sizable WYSIWYG Editor, with automatic saving of drafts of entries and templates — never lose a half-written post again
• Built-in cross-blog aggregation: Publish pages that include data from some, all, or just one of your blogs
• The world’s smartest blog template language, with boolean logic for choosing which content to display. (”Show me posts by ‘Jane’ in the category ‘food’ with tags ‘meat NOT fish’.”)
• Live preview shows you your entry before you publish, with full fidelity to your live blog
• Smart controls like auto-complete for tags, a calendar selector for scheduling future-dated entries, and a completely redone UI for selecting and creating categories
• Support for publishing standalone pages that automatically use blog templates and designs
• Better plain-text entry with built-in support for Markdown and Textile, and conversion of MS Word “smart” quotes to HTML entities
• Even more search-engine-friendly with customizable URLs per entry, per-template, or per-page
• A simple IDE for templates, with color highlighting for editing tags and smart error reporting for template typos
• Paginated archives — easily walk your users through posts by date or author or category

Pricing: Free
Source: http://www.movabletype.org

XOOPS is an acronym of eXtensible Object Oriented Portal System. Though started as a portal system, XOOPS is in fact striving steadily on the track of Content Management System. It can serve as a web framework for use by small, medium and large sites.

A lite XOOPS can be used as a personal weblog or journal. For this purpose, you can do a standard install, and use its News module only. For a medium site, you can use modules like News, Forum, Download, Web Links etc to form a community to interact with your members and visitors. For a large site as an enterprise one, you can develop your own modules such as eShop, and use XOOP’s uniform user management system to seamlessly integrate your modules with the whole system.

Key features of XOOPS

- Database-driven
XOOPS uses a relational database (currently MySQL) to store data required for running a web-based content management system.

- Fully Modularized
Modules can be installed/uninstalled/ativated/deactivated with a click using the XOOPS module administration system.

- Personalization
Registered users can edit their profiles, select site themes, upload custom avatars, and much more!

- User Management
The ability to search for users by various criteria, send email and private messages to users through a template-based messaging system.

- Supported World-wide
XOOPS was created and is maintained by a team of several hard-working volunteers working from all over the world. The XOOPS community has more than dozen official support sites around the world for support of non-English speaking users.

- Multi-byte Language Support
Fully supports multi-byte languages, including Japanese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Korean, etc.

- Versatile Group Permissions System
Powerful and user-friendly permissions system which enables administrators to set permissions by group.

- Theme-based skinnable interface
XOOPS is driven by a powerful theme system. Both admins and users can change the look of the entire web site with just a click of a mouse. There are also over 60 themes available for download!

Pricing: Free
Source: http://www.xoops.org

Frog CMS is a PHP version of Radiant CMS, a well known Ruby on Rails application. Frog CMS share the goal to simplify content management, and offer an elegant user interface, flexible templating per page, simple user management and permissions and all what you need for your files management.

Frog requires a MySQL database with InnoDB support, a web server (Apache with mod_rewrite is highly recommended) and is distributed under the MIT software license.

Frog is unique because of is simple templating code, that does not need to learn a other scripting language, because it use directly PHP. I have found this approach interesting for 2 reasons:

• In general, it is not use in article pages, so it does not scared the writer that does not want to learn PHP.
• The webmaster of the site, the one that will code some basic condition or loop to add more dynamic on is website generally know a little PHP. Just enough to add some dynamic latest news part, latest articles or photo gallery.

Pricing: Free
Source: http://www.madebyfrog.com/

Radiant is a no-fluff, open source content management system designed for small teams with the following main features.

Simple Admin Interface

Built from the ground up to be as simple as possible, Radiant features an elegant administrative interface that centers around three key components: pages, snippets, and layouts.

Pages

Pages contain the meat of the content for a Web site and may use Markdown, Textile, or plain HTML. Pages are composed of multiple parts such as a body and sidebar.

Snippets

Content that is used in multiple places can be stored in a snippet. Snippets are very similar to PHP includes or Rails partials.

Layouts

Layouts generally contain most of the HTML for a page’s design. Layouts can render pages parts in any way they choose. One layout could choose to render the body and sidebar of a page, while another layout (a print layout) could render only the body.

Flexible Site Structure

Unlike many other blogging engines Radiant allows you to arrange pages according to any hierarchy. A Weblog in Radiant can be as simple as a collection of child pages underneath a parent page.

Radius Template Language

Radiant has a special macro language (similar to HTML) called Radius which makes it easy to include content from other pages, iterate over page children, and display content conditionally. Radius tags are available in pages, snippets, and layouts.

Custom Text Filters

Radiant ships with support for Markdown and Textile, but developers can easily create text filters for any markup language such as RDoc, BBCode, or Structured Text.

Intelligent Page Caching

Radiant includes an intelligent caching mechanism which allows content to be cached for a maximum of 5 minutes. This ensures that content is always fresh and provides an optimal level of performance.

Built with Ruby on Rails

Radiant is built using Ruby on Rails. This means it’s easy for developers to extend Radiant because it’s built on a widely accepted (and understood) Web application development platform.

Licensed Under the MIT License

Radiant is licensed under the MIT License. This means that Radiant is free for commercial and non-profit use. It also means that you are free to modify and distribute Radiant as long as you don’t remove the appropriate notices from the source code.

Pricing: Free
Source: http://radiantcms.org/

Textpattern is a flexible, elegant and easy-to-use content management system and it is both free and open source.

When it comes to publishing on the internet, beginners and experts alike are met with a bothersome paradox: word processors and graphics applications allow anyone to do a pretty good job of managing text and images on a personal computer, but to make these available to the worldwide web – a seemingly similar environment of documents and destinations – ease of use vanishes behind sudden requirements for multilingual programming skills, proficiency in computer-based graphic design, and, ultimately, the patience of a saint.

Those who soldier on anyway may find themselves further held back by the web’s purported inflexibility with written language, with its reluctance to cope with all but the plainest of text, or by the unpredictable results brought about by using “WYSIWYG“ web editors.

Textpattern is a web application designed to help overcome these and other hurdles to publishing online, and to simplify the production of well-structured, standards-compliant web pages.

Pricing: Free
Source: http://www.textpattern.com/

Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Tens of thousands of people and organizations have used Drupal to power scores of different web sites, including

• Community web portals
• Discussion sites
• Corporate web sites
• Intranet applications
• Personal web sites or blogs
• Aficionado sites
• E-commerce applications
• Resource directories
• Social Networking sites

Drupal is open-source software distributed under the GPL (”General Public License”) and is maintained and developed by a community of thousands of users and developers. Drupal is free to download and use. If you like what Drupal promises for you, please work with us to expand and refine Drupal to suit your specific needs.

Pricing: Free
Source: http://drupal.org/

WordPress is a powerful personal publishing platform, and it comes with a great set of features designed to make your experience as a publisher on the Internet as easy, pleasant and appealing as possible. We are proud to offer you a freely distributed, standards-compliant, fast, light and free personal publishing platform, with sensible default settings and features, and an extremely customizable core.

More simply, WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it. WordPress is publishing software with a focus on ease of use, speed and a great user experience. WordPress is blessed with an active community, which is the heart of open source software. It has the following excellent main features.

Locally Installed

WordPress is designed to be installed on your own web server, or shared hosting account, which gives you complete control over the weblog. Unlike third-party hosted services, you can be sure of being able to access and modify everything related to your weblog, in case you need to. This also means that you can install WordPress on your desktop or home computer, or even on an Intranet.

User management

WordPress uses user-levels to control user-access to different features, so you can restrict the ability of individual users to create or modify content in your weblog, by changing their user-level.

Dynamic page generation

No rebuilding of all your pages each time you update your weblog, or any aspect of it. All pages are generated using the database and the templates each time a page from your weblog is requested by a viewer. This means that updating your weblog, or its design is as fast as possible, and required server storage space usage is minimal.

Template Driven Design

WordPress uses templates to generate the pages dynamically. You can control the presentation of content by editing the templates using the Template Editor tool and the Template Tags.

Moderation

For the control freak in all of us, WordPress provides an array of moderation options. You can moderate

• all comments before they appear on the blog
• comments with specific words in them
• comments posted from specific IP addresses
• comments containing more than some specified number of links.

All these moderation options keep spammers and vandals in check.

Pricing: Free
Source: http://wordpress.org