opensourceCMS is a really cool idea — you get to "test drive" over 40 different content management systems. That seems like a freaking ton, especially in light of their restricting it to solutions that:

• are open-source
• use MySQL
• use PHP

So that list excludes widely-used products from Movable Type (uses Perl) to Blogger (not open source) to Macromedia Contribute (none of the three).

And, of course, web development companies make millions of dollars by rolling their own content management system and then implementing it for one or more clients' projects. Hell, I've built them — to varying degrees — in five(!) languages: ColdFusion, ASP, PHP, JSP and Python. I've modified a Perl one (this MT installation), and will probably do a FlashMX one soon.

What's a "content management system"? It's software that allows people to add, edit and remove stuff from their website via web-based tools. For example, you might have an online form that allows a person to enter a headline and some text, and then it posts that to their website. Basically, the idea is that you shouldn't need anything other than a browser to update your website. It makes superfluous the error-prone HTML writing, file editing and FTP-ing that was its predecessor.

(link via Taylor)

This blog is no longer active, and comments have been disabled.