If I had to pick right now which CMS is best, the answer would come from two questions. The first is, “Is it Windows based or LAMP?” The next question is, “how capable is the person/s managing the content?” There are not many Windows based CMS’s available in the market. Partially, because Sharepoint fills the need and smaller businesses mostly run on LAMP environments at a 30% discount from a Windows platform. However, PHP applications can run on IIS and so most of the emphasis moves to the second question.

How capable is the person/s managing the content? OK, sure Joomla, Sitefinity and others can give a admin the interface with which to change just about everything. These are all fine CMS applications and deployed across the globe. However, what about that start up or small business that needs to target a specific market? The full featured CMS’s will require too much training and or cost to quickly give such a business a specific online presence. As new businesses attack existing markets, they need to stand out from the rest by using responsive design and easy to change content. This gap is filled in nicely with ProcessWire CMS. It is amazing at supporting the concept of creating that custom template and wiring up a content administration pages to it. What clever engineering. Create a template and then insert placeholders for content interfaces that users can log into and make changes as needed. This really supports the idea of market driven development. This is just the sort of principle new businesses and startups are driven by.  It is fast, highly customizable and agile in every sense from the business objective perspective.

Now developers, check this out. The template is straight html. PHP variables are placeholders for dynamic content. Those variables are pointers to predefine Fields, that are also HTML WYSIWYG controls. Actually not much software development is really needed other than for highly customized plugins.

ProcessWire is a CMS that makes highly speialized web design into an easily maintained website.