Man, was it a headache looking for a decent open source Content Management System. I knew there were some out there but only knew a local (Czech) one. I wanted to create an English site and did not want to translate the Czech one.

First I found OpenSourceCMS site where you can pretty much access frontend and backend demo installations of the listed CMSs. This is very helpful for the Joe Webmaster. One can quickly touch various scripts without having to install them on your own. However, the OpenSourceCMS is pretty much focused only on the demos and only allows simple comments on each script. The comments are very useful when deciding. The site also contains forums - they were quite poorly designed though but were redesigned recently. Later I created Free CMS Forum as a better place to talk about open source CMSs.

Ok, to move forward - I went on and started to use first Joomla! and than Drupal for my site. Joomla is very much for beginners - it has a fancy dress and very limited basic functionality. Forum or comments modules were a real "pain in the ass" beginning this year - some of it might have changed with the extensions.joomla.org site. However, Joomla!'s strategy is keep the core as simple as possible with the option of various extensions for every other feature. Competing extensions are a normal thing and that's what a webmaster usually does not like (at least me).

Drupal was much better in the terms of a CMS. It has a solid core and treats any content as a "node", which is nice. Blogs are created easily in Drupal, article comments and user forum are default features. Drupal is very flexible and static content is created easily with it. I would probably stick to Drupal if I wasn't fascinated by one thing - a wiki.

Even though Drupal handles static content nicely, it could not offer a true wiki functionality. So my search went forward. I found TikiWiki first and noticed it is listed not under "Wikis" but under "Portals" at OpenSourceCMS. And really, it was not a pure wiki but a really complex CMS system. Maybe too complex, it even offered a WAP content interface - you barely use that.

I remember I came across Bitweaver's forums then while searching at Google's. The site did not attract me at all first, but there was some very interesting contents so I came back again later. I found out bw is Tiki's fork and it was all clear to me - I was feeling lucky realizing my CMS search might end soon. I stopped by at IRC (#bitweaver on irc.freenode.net) popping few questions. The guys seemed to be profis - and my later experience confirmed this.

Well, I am happy to have found Bitweaver CMS and I'll do my best contributing my way too. (:wink:)

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