I've just started a consulting gig for a charity helping them to setup a website. Today we had our second meeting and I've pretty well convinced them to go with an Open Source Content Management System. All the candidate CMS's run on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). Well, ok, sometimes the database and script language differs but close enough.
Yep, an ex-Microsoft Consultant pushing LAMP. Guess I've lost my religion!
It's just that the best free Open Source CMS solutions are all on LAMP and it's very rare you can find it on Windows. And if they do support IIS/SQL Server, you quickly find the web hosting is always more expensive. Of course you find commerical CMS's for Windows but a charity can't afford them. So LAMP it is.
I'm very impressed with Mambo Server. Great community support, lots of templates, easy to use and creates a good website. It's a winner. Try this demo server if you want to check it out. It was great opening the eye's of the people at the charity to what is possible and available to them.
There a huge number of CMS's out there and I've been spending quite a bit of time looking at them. I'm starting to get an idea of what the best ones are. It's a long process since the feature sets of each one can be very extensive. Meanwhile, I'm now thinking of trying to get one of them running under my Virtual PC Mandrake installation.
Uggghhh! Configuring LAMP. Gotta remember all my Unix stuff!