Thomas Hruska

Worst CMS I've ever used? Well there are thousands of CMS products out there. I'll have to put my vote in for...WordPress. (Excuse me while I dive for cover.) As a blog, it is an okay product, but the "CMS" part has always felt bolted onto the side of the product because it was a blog first, CMS second and the organization of the product is clearly prioritized that way. I'll also put my vote in for any product that doesn't come with an actual caching mechanism out-of-the-box (i.e. without requiring a plugin and therefore caching isn't officially supported or thoroughly tested). Which eliminates 99% of the CMS products out there including WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. I'll also put my vote in for any product that claims it is a CMS but doesn't have good out-of-the-box SEO options. You know the type: A trailing '?' at the end of a URL with some identifier so the page can be found in the database. These things don't make those products bad but they do drive me nuts because it requires a lot of unnecessary work to get them to be functional and ready for real-world use and/or requires a lot of extra training.

It is much more convenient to make quick changes to websites from within the web browser anywhere in the world than to fire up an external editor, a SFTP client, and possibly a VPN interface. I agree with MikeChipshop that a lot of clients don't know how to use (nor want to learn how to use) a CMS. But all my web developer friends use CMS products for even small, static sites even though they know they will end up making all the changes to the content in a lot of cases. This does defeat one of the main purposes of a CMS, which is to allow other people to edit the content. You should check out Barebones CMS because it specifically fills the "small, static website" niche. Wherever I would hand code a static site before, I now use Barebones CMS. It works perfectly for my needs anyway. Some users have described it as Dreamweaver for a web browser. Your mileage may vary. Full disclosure: I might be a smidgeon partial towards Barebones CMS since I'm the author but it is a useful tool to know about.