Which CMS for my website?

[graham]

I'm thinking of totally revamping my website. Until now it is all handcoded, with a few simple PHP include files for menus, headers & footers, and some basic CSS for look and feel.

Now I'm thinking of a full blown CMS for my private site, possibly, but not definitely, as a trial run for a business site.

Of course, it might help if Pivot blended in seamlessly

Should I just go for Smarty, to keep things simple? There are some pretty impressive CMS around, with good list and a good incremental feature search CMS chooser at http://www.cmsmatrix.org

Any advice?

- Stick with hand coded (and just fix those darn broken links )
- Use Smarty?
- Use a CMS picked from http://www.cmsmatrix.org
- Use a CMS which you guys recommend?

Please don't tell me that it depends what I want - I know that; I just don't know what I want (in which case I am torn between a feature rich CMS which will probably offer anything I want or might grow into, or handcoded PHP for complete control).

Any advice will be gratefully and diligently considered.

And congrats on PivotX; it is looking awesome!

[Bob]

Not to toot our own horn too much, but you can use PivotX as a half-decent CMS as well. Take a look at this site we built for a client:

http://www.inovativ.nl/

All content is gathered from deeper pages, using the [[ getpage ]] and [[ pagelist ]] tags extensively. All content on all pages is completely editable by the client, and all menus are generated dynamically. the content is either entries (for the News and References sections) or Pages, divided into a few chapters.

If this is something you'd like to try, make sure you get the unofficial alpha 3.5 from here: pivotx.net/files. I'll write up some tips and tricks on how to do these things shortly.

[mcwhitey]

Hi Bob,

I noticed have clean search engine friendly urls on that site. Is that easy to do with pivotx?

I am also considering several CMS's.

Thanks.