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10 Comments

What is your favorite CMS for creating / maintaining a website?

And, what do you like about it? What are some of your favorite features?

  1. 3

    It depends on what you are looking for. Right now, depending on the client, I recommend three options. Keep in mind; I own a two and a half people design and development studio. I try to stay away from shiny new things because of my clients.

    • WordPress:
      I recommend it for small businesses that have no marketing team. It allows them to do what they need, and in case they need extra functionality, there is a plugin for that. WordPress ecosystem is unbeatable right now, and finding an answer to your problem is quite fast. From drag and drop editors, Gutenberg, WPBakery, Elementor to Advance Custom Fields, WordPress gives you the ability to build a relatively cheap and functional website.

    Oh, maybe you want to test the market? Buy a theme and spend the money on content and advertisements. Get your proof of concept, and you can always upgrade later.

    It has its issues, but using WPEngine, Kinsta, GetFlyWheel as a host can give you significant peace of mind. Oh, you are a solo dev? Look into Local by FlyWheel.

    • Craft CMS
      My favorite CMS at this point. It is a blank canvas and allows you the build the website the way you want it. It is swift, and so far, every customer loves the author's experience.

    Favorite thing about Craft CMS? is the matrix. It is similar to ACF from WordPress but is baked in. It is excellent and always improving. The community is also great. The discord channel is quite active, and the developers from Craft CMS are always there to help you out. On the back end is using Twig, you don't need to write PHP, but if you know PHP, it will help you.

    I know JAMStack is the new favorite baby in the community, and GraphQL is building in. Go headless if that's what you want.

    There are some cons to it. Not as many plugins as WordPress but they are carefully curated. Most of the things you are looking for, there is a plugin already, and if there isn't, you can always build it with the matrix or get your hands into PHP and build your own. As a front end developer, I'm terrible at DevOps. I'm hoping that Craft Cloud will fix the hosting issues that I always run into.

    • Ghost CMS
      I like Ghost, which is simple, effective, and quite powerful. I will not hesitate to recommend them if you are in the business of media. News, Blogs, and everything in between here.

    Favorite feature: Membership. Ghost 3.0 comes with this feature and allows you to turn you, visitors, into a paid subscriber. Similar to what the big news outlets are already doing it.

    I like the fact they have their hosting solution. It helps me tremendously and gives my clients peace of mind.

    In the end, pick the right tool for the right job. All the CMS's out there have their issues.

    1. 1

      Awesome, thanks for the suggestions and the great rundown on each!

    2. 1

      This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

  2. 3

    If you know React, Gatsby + Contentful is, I think, the best solution by far.

    1. 1

      Learnt all of those to build my latest project. It's awesome. Combined with some Netlify hosting, it's just incredible.

  3. 2

    Depends on the project.

    For a custom project I use Django. The Django admin panel is amazing. Django has been around for a long time and has a ton of packages and you connect to the python ecosystem as well.

    For a website with a blog I would use my own project :) https://versoly.com/ at the moment it is focused on SaaS companies but it can be used for any website. I plan on redoing my portfolio/blog in it to dog food the product more.

    1. 1

      Thanks! I tried Django out a bit in the past but ultimately went with Flask. Only because flask is marketed as being a lot lighter and my app didn't need to do much. I'd love to give Django more of a go!

      1. 2

        Unless it is a tiny 2/3 endpoint project I would nearly always use Django.

        I also use fastapi over flask.

  4. 2

    I have lots of issues with WordPress. I still use it often for myself and friends as with the right plugins it is quick to get something up with proper seo.

    I use Netlify (not a cms) for a few as I do like to just build some static sites and netlify is great and cheap or free for that.

  5. 1

    I have set up some websites in Statamic lately. Although it can be weird, the things that are good are REALLY good (fast, easy to develop in, great UI, ...).

    I also saw a vid from Justing Jackson where he published a Statamic site to Netlify in 10 minutes.

  6. 1

    https://forestry.io/ if you prefer git-based workflow. Contentful if you prefer traditional headless. Ghost if you prefer WP like workflow but better.

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