My New Favorite CMS – Exponent

“What on earth is a CMS??” you may ask…  CMS stands for Content Management System.  In other words, it’s a fancy, easy way to update, add and edit content on a web site.

First, let me start by explaining why I’m looking at CMS’ in the first place.  (Well, besides the fact that I’m a geek and I like that kinda stuff anyway.)  The church that Becky and I recently joined has asked me to try to do some work on the church’s web site.  The existing one isn’t bad, but some of it is a little outdated and could do with a little bit of a facelift.

So, I set out on the easy (yeah, right!) task of selecting the best CMS for the job.  My first idea was to use WordPress to do the job.  Done deal, right?  Not quite…  It wouldn’t quite handle some of the pieces of the site the way I’d have liked for it to.  So I said goodbye to WordPress for this particular job.

I tried Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, dotCMS, PHP-Nuke, MODx, Plone, and probably 2 or 3 others that I can’t remember.  Now, don’t get me wrong, all of these systems are great systems.  Some of them were just simply too complicated for me to figure out and to be able to administer efficiently.  Others either didn’t have the modules I needed to be able to do certain things, or the modules I did find didn’t work as promised.

Enter Exponent CMS.  I skipped over this one on my first run through possible choices, although I’m not entirely sure why.  Probably mostly because I’d never heard of it.  Anyway, this one has all of the trinkets I needed to be able to include everything the old system has, and more:

• Standard HTML pages are supported (You don’t know how hard that is to come by in some systems)
• An Events Calendar is included
• Blogging ability is included (Great for, say, new prayer requests, etc.  It posts the new ones at the top automatically rather than having to edit an entire page by hand.)
• A News mechanism for site-wide news feeds.
• Forum software is included for an interactive area of the site – great for a Bible Question area on the old site.

So I’m excited about finally finding the software that is a perfect fit for this site.  I was asked about a week ago if I was working on the site.  I replied that I was, but not a word about how much difficulty I was having with choosing some good software.  Now that I’ve found it, migrating content has been a fairly easy task.  We’ll see how the rest of it goes.