1. WordPress

What is there left to say about WordPress that hasn’t already been said? The PHP blogging platform is far and away the most popular CMS for blogging, and probably the most popular CMS overall. It’s a great platform for beginners, thanks to their excellent documentation
and super-quick installation wizard. Five minutes to a running CMS is pretty good. Not to mention the fact that the newest versions auto-update the core and plugins from within the backend, without having to download a single file.

For those users not familiar with HTML or other markup language, a WYSIWYG editor is provided straight out of the box. The backend layout is streamlined and intuitive, and a new user should be able to easily find their way around the administration section. Wordpres also comes with built-in image and multimedia uploading support.

For developers, the theming language is fairly simple and straightforward, as well the Plugin API.

The WordPress Community is a faithful and zealous bunch. Wordpress probably has the widest base of plugins and themes to choose from. A great part about the Wordpress community is the amount of help and documentation online you can find on nearly every aspect of customizing WordPress. If you can dream it, chances are it’s already been done with WordPress and documented somewhere.

2. Drupal

Drupal is another CMS that has a very large, active community. Instead of focusing on blogging as a platform, Drupal is more of a pure CMS. A plain installation comes with a ton of optional modules that can add lots of interesting features like forums, user blogs, OpenID, profiles and more. It’s trivial to create a site with social features with a simple install of Drupal. In fact, with a few 3rd party modules you can create some interesting site clones with little effort.

One of Drupal’s most popular features is the Taxonomy module, a feature that allows for multiple levels and types of categories for content types.

Drupal also has a very active community powering it, and has excellent support for plugins and other general questions.

3. Joomla!

Joomla is a very advanced CMS in terms of functionality. That said, getting started with Joomla is fairly easy, thanks to Joomla’s installer. Joomla’s installer is meant to work on common shared hosting packages, and is a very straightforward considering how configurable the software is.

Joomla is very similar to Drupal in that it’s a complete CMS, and might be a bit much for a simple portfolio site. It comes with an attractive administration interface, complete with intuitive drop-down menus and other features. The CMS also has great support for access control protocols like LDAP, OpenID and even Gmail.com.

The Joomla site hosts more than 3,200 extensions, so you know the developer community behind the popular CMS is alive and kicking. Like Wordpress, you can add just about any needed functionality with an extension. However, the Joomla theme and extension community relies more on paid plugins and themes, so if you’re looking for customizations, be ready to pay.

4. ExpressionEngine

ExpressionEngine (EE) is an elegant, flexible CMS solution for any type of project. Designed to be extensible and easy to modify, EE sets itself apart in how clean and intuitive their user administration area is. It takes only a matter of minutes to understand the layout of the backend and to start creating content or modify the look. It’s fantastic for creating websites for less-than-savvy clients that need to use the backend without getting confused.

ExpressionEngine is packed with helpful features like the ability to have multiple sites with one installation of software. For designers, EE has a powerful templating engine that has custom global variables, custom SQL queries and a built in versioning system. Template caching, query caching and tag caching keep the site running quickly too.

One of my favorite features of EE that is the global search and replace functionality. Anyone who’s ever managed a site or blog knows how useful it is to change lots of data without having to manually search and open each page or post to modify it.

ExpresssionEngine is quite different than other previously-mentioned CMS in that it’s paid software. The personal license costs $99.95, and the commercial license costs $249.99.

5. TextPattern

Textpattern is a popular choice for designers because of its simple elegance. Textpattern isn’t a CMS that throws in every feature it can think of. The code base is svelte and minimal. The main goal of Textpattern is to provide an excellent CMS that creates well-structured, standards-compliant pages. Instead of providing a WYSIWYG editor, Textpattern uses textile markup in the textareas to create HTML elements within the pages. The pages that are generated are extremely lightweight and fast-loading.

Even though Textpattern is deliberately simple in design, the backend is surprisingly easy to use and intuitive. New users should be able to find their way around the administration section easily.

While Textpattern may be very minimal at the core level, you can always extend the functionality by 3rd party extensions, mods or plugins. Textpattern has an active developer community with lots of help and resources at their Textpattern.org site.

6. Radiant CMS

The content management systems that we’ve listed so far are all PHP programs. PHP is the most popular language for web development, but that doesn’t mean we should overlook other popular web languages like Ruby. Radiant CMS is a fast, minimal CMS that might be compared to Textpattern. Radiant is built on the popular Ruby framework Rails, and the developers behind Radiant have done their best to make the software as simple and elegant as possible, with just the right amount of functionality. Like Textpattern, Radiant doesn’t come with a WYSIWYG editor and relies on Textile markup to create rich HTML. Radiant also has it’s own templating language Radius which is very similar to HTML for intuitive template creation.

7. Cushy CMS

Cushy CMS is a different type of CMS altogether. Sure, it has all the basic functionality of a regular content management system, but it doesn’t rely on a specific language. In fact, the CMS is a hosted solution. There are no downloads or future upgrades to worry about.

How Cushy works is it takes FTP info and uploads content on to the server, which in turn the developer or the designer can modify the layout, as well as the posting fields in the backend, just by changing the style classes of the styles. Very, very simple.

Cushy CMS is free for anyone, even for professional use. There is an option to upgrade to a pro account to use your own logo and color scheme, as well as other fine-grain customizations in the way Cushy CMS functions.

8. SilverStripe

SilverStripe is another PHP CMS that behaves much like Wordpress, except has many more configurable options and is tailored towards content management, and not blogging. SilverStripe is unique because it was built upon its very own PHP framework Saphire. It also provides its own templating language to help with the design process.

SilverStripe also has some interesting features built in to the base, like content version control and native SEO support. What’s really unique with SilverStripe is that developers and designers can customize the administration area for their clients, if need be. While the development community isn’t as large as other projects there are some modules, themes and widgets to add functionality. Also, you’ll want to modify the theme for each site, as SilverStripe doesn’t provide much in terms of style, to give the designer more freedom.

9. Alfresco

Alfresco is a JSP is a beefy enterprise content management solution that is surprisingly easy to install. A really useful feature of Alfresco is the ability to drop files into folders and turn them into web documents. Alfresco might be a little bit more work than some of the other CMS and isn’t as beginner-friendly, it certainly is quite usable given the massive power of the system. The administration backend is clean and well-designed.

While Alfresco might not be a great choice for most simple sites, it’s an excellent choice for enterprise needs.

10. TYPOlight

TYPOlight seems to have the perfect balance of features built into the CMS. In terms of functionality, TYPOlight ranks with Drupal and ExpressionEngine, and even offers some unique bundled modules like newsletters and calendars. Developers can save time with the built-in CSS generator, and there are plenty of resources for learning more about the CMS.

If there is a downside to TYPOlight, it’s that it has so many features and configurable options. Even though the backend is thoughtfully organized, there are still a lot of options to consider. But if you’re wanting to build a site with advanced functionality and little extra programming, TYPOlight could be a great fit.

Big news for developers out there: Google has just announced the release of a new, open sourced programming language called Go. The company says that Go is experimental, and that it combines the performance and security benefits associated with using a compiled language like C++ with the speed of a dynamic language like Python. Go’s official mascot is Gordon the gopher, seen here.

Here’s how Google describes Go in its blog post:

Go attempts to combine the development speed of working in a dynamic language like Python with the performance and safety of a compiled language like C or C++. In our experiments with Go to date, typical builds feel instantaneous; even large binaries compile in just a few seconds. And the compiled code runs close to the speed of C. Go is designed to let you move fast.

We’re hoping Go turns out to be a great language for systems programming with support for multi-processing and a fresh and lightweight take on object-oriented design, with some cool features like true closures and reflection.

Presentation

Nice is a new programming language. It extends the ideas behind object-orientation in order to better support modular programming and static type safety. It also incorporates features from functional programming, and puts into practice state-of-the-art results from academic research. This results in more expressivity, modularity and safety.

Safety

Nice detects more errors during compilation than existing object-oriented languages (null pointer accesses, casts exceptions). This means that programs written in Nice never throw the infamous NullPointerException nor ClassCastException. This aspect is developed in more details in this article.
Modularity

In object-oriented languages, it is possible to add a new class to an existing class hierarchy. In Nice, it is also possible to add methods to existing classes without modifying their source file. This is a special case of multi-methods.
Expressivity

Many repetitive programming tasks can be avoided by using Nice’s advanced features. Ever got bored of writing tons of loops, casts, overloaded methods with default values, anonymous classes, … ?

Advanced features

In addition to traditional object-oriented features, Nice offers:

Parametric types

This is especially useful for containers (lists, hash-tables) and allows for shorter and safer code. Values of primitive type (int, float, …) can be used in polymorphic code, in which case the wrapping and unwrapping is done automatically by the compiler.
Anonymous functions

Functions can be created and manipulated as first-class expressions, just like in Lisp and ML. This is much lighter than Java’s anonymous classes in many situations, for instance with listeners in a GUI.
Multi-methods

They allow methods to be defined outside classes. This means that new methods can be defined on classes that belong to a different package (even in java.*). This allows for a more modular style: you don’t need to pack classes with all possibly useful methods, but you can split them into several packages dealing with different aspects. Development can then happen independently if each package.

Multi-methods also extend usual methods with the possibility to dispatch on every argument, instead of only the receiver class. This article shows why using multi-methods is preferable to applying the Visitor pattern.
Tuples

This allows in particular methods to return several values.
Optional parameters to methods

Optional parameters have a default value that is used when the parameter is not present in the call. This is much simpler than in Java, where one has to write several versions of the method for each combination of parameters. The names of the arguments can also be specified at the call site, improving readability and making argument order irrelevant.
Contracts and assertions

Contracts can be attached to methods, to better describe their specification and detect illegal uses automatically at runtime, in debug mode. Contracts and assertions can be disabled, in which case they cause no slow down of the running program. Furthermore, they can be used on any version of the JVM, even prior to 1.4.

Integration with Java

The current implementation is tightly integrated with the Java environment, which offers several advantages. The huge amount of Java libraries can be used directly in Nice programs. Libraries can also be written in Nice and called from a Java program. The Nice compiler produces java bytecode, which means Nice programs can be executed on virtually any platform, with any Java Virtual Machine. Or they can be compiled to native programs with a native Java compiler. The compiler is itself written in Java and in Nice. The compiler needs a JVM version 1.2 or higher to run.
Availability

Nice is freely available under the GPL. The runtime classes are licensed under the “GPL + linking exception” license, which means that libraries and programs written in Nice can be licensed under any terms.

Wondering why Ruby is so popular? Its fans call it a beautiful, artful language. And yet, they say it’s handy and practical. What gives?
The Ideals of Ruby’s Creator

Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

He has often said that he is “trying to make Ruby natural, not simple,” in a way that mirrors life.

Building on this, he adds:

Ruby is simple in appearance, but is very complex inside, just like our human body1.

About Ruby’s Growth

Since its public release in 1995, Ruby has drawn devoted coders worldwide. In 2006, Ruby achieved mass acceptance. With active user groups formed in the world’s major cities and Ruby-related conferences filled to capacity.

Ruby-Talk, the primary mailing list for discussion of the Ruby language has climbed to an average of 200 messages per day.

The TIOBE index, which measures the growth of programming languages, ranks Ruby as #9 among programming languages worldwide. Much of the growth is attributed to the popularity of software written in Ruby, particularly the Ruby on Rails web framework2.

Ruby is also totally free. Not only free of charge, but also free to use, copy, modify, and distribute.
Seeing Everything as an Object

Initially, Matz looked at other languages to find an ideal syntax. Recalling his search, he said, “I wanted a scripting language that was more powerful than Perl, and more object-oriented than Python3.”

In Ruby, everything is an object. Every bit of information and code can be given their own properties and actions. Object-oriented programming calls properties by the name instance variables and actions are known as methods. Ruby’s pure object-oriented approach is most commonly demonstrated by a bit of code which applies an action to a number.

5.times { print “We *love* Ruby — it’s outrageous!” }

In many languages, numbers and other primitive types are not objects. Ruby follows the influence of the Smalltalk language by giving methods and instance variables to all of its types. This eases one’s use of Ruby, since rules applying to objects apply to all of Ruby.
Ruby’s Flexibility

Ruby is seen as a flexible language, since it allows its users to freely alter its parts. Essential parts of Ruby can be removed or redefined, at will. Existing parts can be added upon. Ruby tries not to restrict the coder.

For example, addition is performed with the plus (+) operator. But, if you’d rather use the readable word plus, you could add such a method to Ruby’s builtin Numeric class.

class Numeric
def plus(x)
self.+(x)
end
end

y = 5.plus 6
# y is now equal to 11

Ruby’s operators are syntactic sugar for methods. You can redefine them as well.
Blocks, a Truly Expressive Feature

Ruby’s block are also seen as a source of great flexibility. A programmer can attach a closure to any method, describing how that method should act. The closure is called a block and has become one of the most popular features for newcomers to Ruby from other imperative languages like PHP or Visual Basic.

Blocks are inspired by functional languages. Matz said, “in Ruby closures, I wanted to respect the Lisp culture4.”

search_engines =
%w[Google Yahoo MSN].map do |engine|
“http://www.” + engine.downcase + “.com”
end

In the above code, the block is described inside the do … end construct. The map method applies the block to the provided list of words. Many other methods in Ruby leave a hole open for a coder to write their own block to fill in the details of what that method should do.
Ruby and the Mixin

Unlike many object-oriented languages, Ruby features single inheritance only, on purpose. But Ruby knows the concept of modules (called Categories in Objective-C). Modules are collections of methods.

Classes can mixin a module and receive all its methods for free. For example, any class which implements the each method can mixin the Enumerable module, which adds a pile of methods that use each for looping.

class MyArray
include Enumerable
end

Generally, Rubyists see this as a much clearer way than multiple inheritance, which is complex and can be too restrictive.
Ruby’s Visual Appearance

While Ruby often uses very limited punctuation and usually prefers English keywords, some punctuation is used to decorate Ruby. Ruby needs no variable declarations. It uses simple naming conventions to denote the scope of variables.

* var could be a local variable.
* @var is an instance variable.
* $var is a global variable.

These sigils enhance readability by allowing the programmer to easily identify the roles of each variable. It also becomes unnecessary to use a tiresome self. prepended to every instance member.
Beyond the Basics

Ruby has a wealth of other features, among which are the following:

* Ruby has exception handling features, like Java or Python, to make it easy to handle errors.

* Ruby features a true mark-and-sweep garbage collector for all Ruby objects. No need to maintain reference counts in extension libraries. As Matz says, “This is better for your health.”

* Writing C extensions in Ruby is easier than in Perl or Python, with a very elegant API for calling Ruby from C. This includes calls for embedding Ruby in software, for use as a scripting language. A SWIG interface is also available.

* Ruby can load extension libraries dynamically if an OS allows.

* Ruby features OS independent threading. Thus, for all platforms on which Ruby runs, you also have multithreading, regardless of if the OS supports it or not, even on MS-DOS!

* Ruby is highly portable: it is developed mostly on GNU/Linux, but works on many types of UNIX, Mac OS X, Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP, DOS, BeOS, OS/2, etc.