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Comment by marcosscriven | Hacker News Reader

I have a couple of sites for friends, which I setup ages ago, for which I used Drupal - only because a) My design skills weren't that great, and I could use a package called Artisteer to create the theme b) It was a CMS - so my mates could just add content themselves

Now - turns out that the Drupal interface is still a bit confusing for people that don't care for tech. Plus, I'm having to host it on my own server. Can anyone recommend a really simple CMS I could replace it with, preferably for something I could host for free?

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I'd recommend Processwire[1]. It's really easy to use any HTML template with it and I personally find it much easier to work with than Drupal. The catch is, by using this or Drupal, you are storing your models on the database and you can't version control a model in a database without getting really creative.

[1]: http://processwire.com/

ProcessWire is really great. Some people complain that it doesn't have quite the off-the-shelf setup of pre-made modules for e.g. powerful e-commerce or super easy theming, but I think regardless it's an example of the way a CMS/CMF should be written in the 2010s. In fact I approached a developer of one of the early CMSes that is still hanging around, and he was quite interested in migrating to PW as a content management framework backend rather than using an application framework. The CMS part of ProcessWire is built upon the ProcessWire content management API and it's easy to build your own custom back end if you don't like it.

With a content management framework (such as PW), so much has already been done for you that you start to wonder why you will ever need an application framework. Of course, application frameworks are very useful but CMFs are not to be missed out on. I just finished writing a project management system using ProcessWire and it's been a lot of fun. Like building-with-Legos fun. I hope to see clones or variants appear in other languages as I'd happily give them a try as I expand my CS education.

Any chance you are going to release your project management system in the PW modules directory?

Back in the day, CMS Made Simple (http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/) was pretty excellent, but I haven't used it in a few years. PHP-based (so you can host it pretty much anywhere), and fairly easy to use.

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