While remaining fairly lightweight (1027K unpacked) FrogCMS sacrifices no features. Simple user management and permissions, file management, and a great drag and drop hierarchy organization structure. Completely customizable themes, create your own “snippets” and insert into any page easily. Create separate themes to be used with one page over another. The administration interface flaunts it’s bare bones simplicity to allow you to make any changes with a few clicks.

FrogCMS is a great alternative to feature-bloated content management system, and a must for any web developer looking for the next best simple CMS to work with.

Choosing to allow/disallow intro text, enable trackbacks/pings, changing title alias, etc are all things that a dedicated student or full-time publisher should know – not your average Joe. CushyCMS was created for developers and designers to allow what sections their client could safely edit on their website. By simply adding class=”cushycms” to any tag in your document, that area then becomes editable by the client.

You tell CushyCMS which users can edit what from within the user management dashboard of your account. If you find yourself using this program for more than three clients, go ahead and upgrade to the pro plan. This allows you to brand CushyCMS to your liking. And for $28.00 a month, you can have a client login that looks like this.

When modifying your template to allow for CushyCMS editing, I recommend creating additional div’s solely to hold the class=”cushycms” so that you don’t have multiple class attributes properties embedded in one tag and thus breaking XHTML validity. use <div class=”class1 cushycms”> to get a xhtml valid results as opposed to having two attributes like <div class=”class1″ class=”cushycms”>.

CushyCMS is a great web app for any freelancer who wants to give their client control over the content but not control over the entire site.

Debatedly one of the most robust content management systems out there, Joomla 1.5! is used for building websites ranging from social networking to corporate, real-estate to e-commerce, and news to blogs. Want to use Joomla! for something else in mind? Chances are there’s an extension for that.

Its templating/theme system uses simple blocks of code you plug into a single index.php file instead of using multiple files that piece together your design. This makes it drastically simple to create your own custom themes.

Joomla!’s only major drawback is its content organization. You have content items (a document) that are stored in categories (a folder) that are stored in sections (a filing cabinet). Say you have this organizational pattern: Instruments > Woodwinds > Clarinets > Mouthpieces. You could not use a multiple level tree-structure to do this. You would have to have section named Instruments and use a category named Mouthpieces. (Instruments > Mouthpieces).

Built-in search engine friendly URLs, XHTML & CSS valid, user registration, more extensions than you can shake a stick at (3500+), and the peace of mind knowing that you have a highly active community of 205,000 strong behind you, make this web application worth spending time with.