# Recommend a free webpage content-management system (geeky!)
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recommend-a-free-webpage-content-management-system-geeky/305408
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion
**Created:** [May 25, 2005, 7:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recommend-a-free-webpage-content-management-system-geeky/305408 "2005-05-25T07:23:41Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@rjung](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rjung)
#### Post date: [May 25, 2005, 7:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recommend-a-free-webpage-content-management-system-geeky/305408/1 "2005-05-25T07:23:41Z")
(total geek mode ON)
Just wondering if any of the web-geek-oriented Dopers out there can throw out some recommendations for a free content management system. A brief search of the field turns up hundreds of stuff, _way_ too much for me to sift through, so I thought asking the SDMB hivemind might be a more productive approach.
Currently, I’m looking for something with the following features:
[ul]
[li]Free (natch)[/li][li]Not restricted in page layout/design[/li][li]Works with PHP, JSP, or some other language that works well with HTML[/li][li]Plays nice with CSS[/li][li]Doesn’t require cryptic URLs[/li][li]Doesn’t require extensive SQL expertise[/li][/ul]
Basically, I’m envisioning some sort of CMS that will let me upload/enter content via a web-based interface, where I can then write web pages and scripts to access/manipulate/display that content as I see fit.
I looked briefly at PHP-Nuke, but rejected it because everything is built around the same three-column layout. PHPcms also seems promising, but I don’t know if its lack of a database limits it to text-only content.
But again, I’m barely getting into this area right now; what do you recommend?
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### Author:  [@Lars\_Aruns](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lars_Aruns)
#### Post date: [May 25, 2005, 8:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recommend-a-free-webpage-content-management-system-geeky/305408/2 "2005-05-25T08:15:25Z")
I tried [Drupal](http://www.drupal.org) for the website of my research group and found myself quite comfortable. You can customize lots of things through the web interface in a simple way, it does play nice with CSS and well, it is open source.
It does restrict you a little when it comes to structure of the web pages, so you might want to have a look at various Drupal-based sites first; they have a set of links on their site that they use as a sort of portfolio.
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### Author:  [@SiouxChief](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SiouxChief)
#### Post date: [May 25, 2005, 2:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recommend-a-free-webpage-content-management-system-geeky/305408/3 "2005-05-25T14:33:01Z")
[Linux Magazine](http://www.linuxmagazine.com/) just [redid](http://forum.mamboserver.com/showthread.php?t=33891) their entire site using [Mambo](http://www.mamboserver.com/). I haven’t installed it yet, but looked into it briefly. Looks like a pretty good CMS.
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### Author:  [@Ms2001](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ms2001)
#### Post date: [May 26, 2005, 1:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recommend-a-free-webpage-content-management-system-geeky/305408/4 "2005-05-26T01:12:21Z")
I’m using Mambo for a new site still in development. Open source, works with Apache/PHP/MySQL. Looks like you can do a lot to tweak the layout with CSS, but I haven’t gotten into any of that yet.
I briefly tried Sitellite, but the installation seems totally broken. I couldn’t get it to work for more than a couple hours before all the control panel pages started turning into error messages.