maol, I suggest you take a look at OpensourceCMS.com, which is, as odd as it may sound, one of the best things since sliced bread[1]. It allows you to test-drive the most current stable versions of many Open Source CMSes without needing to install them. This saves a lot of time and therefore widens your evaluation matrix. For example, you can easily evaluate several dozens of CMSes in just one day. Select your killer criteria and you’ll end up with a couple of CMSes you’ll want to take a closer look at (e.g. code inspection, estimations about the maintenance effort, performance measurements etc.). Great :)
As I’m looking for an alternative to Moveabletype myself, I’ve evaluated quite many open source CMSes with the help of OpensourceCMS.com (kudos to the people behind that service at this point! :) My current favorite is WordPress as it doesn’t suffer from an amateurish architecture such as MT (tedious rebuilding of static pages, duh!) and it offers some distinct features for bloggers (e.g. a smart editor with the possibility to look up words in dictionary.com on a finger-tip, password protected posts, integrated blogrolling features, standards compliance etc.). Probably the best weblog server-side software at the moment. Last but not least WordPress is open source software (Free Software, GPL) and not covered by a proprietary license like MT :)
If you’re looking for general (not blogging-specific) CMS software, I don’t have a favorite yet. But OpensourceCMS.com will be of valuable help for sure. The best choice probably depends heavily on the intended use and purpose of the CMS (there are quite many CMSes which are well suited for very large sites but an overkill for a more or less personal website).
K, so far. I’ll be off skating as long as the sun is shining down on me that kindly ;) Eventually I’ll take my cam with me to shoot some lousy “action” movies.. hehe ;)
[1] Seriously: Somebody should adopt the idea behind OpensourceCMS.com, a test-drive farm for open source content management systems, to open source (eventually even closed-source, depending on the target group) operating systems. Reason: There are so many different open source operating systems and distributions – it’s virtually impossible to evaluate them all. Having the possibility to quickly compare the different OSes and distros in action would be beneficial for both users and developers as it would intensify competition and reward good projects or good approaches and ideas more quickly. I know there is an OS test-drive farm by HP, but that one just covers a couple of (partly closed source) OSes. I also remember there was a test-farm where you could test-drive RedHat Linux when they presented their unified Gnome/KDE desktop for the first time.
What we need, is a test-drive farm that covers most (if possible all) of the open source distros and OSes out there. One that is well maintained and current. So if somebody picks up this idea, this would be great :)
If I were interested in a lot of work I’d write my own CMS/Blog/whatever. But currently I’m simply looking for a nice and secure blogsoft with a German GUI/Theme/Template. There’s just one pseudo-requirement nothing so far has fulfilled: it should be completely database driven, i.e. no more storing themes files, cache files or RDF files. Why is that so bloody difficult?
That’s a good point. Most CMSes seem to consist of an arbitrary mix of files and databases. I don’t see any rationale for that.
In this regard, MT beats WordPress as MT builds all its data files (indexes, archives, .CSS, .RDF etc.) dynamically. MT can’t serve pages directly from the DB though.