New site from Xanity Design goes live: International Children's Fund Germany

I am pleased to announce the launch of a new site for the International Children's Fund Germany gGmbH, which is a Christian charity based in Berlin focusing on supporting children in Africa with various development programs. You can see the site at www.childrens-fund.de – enjoy!

Xanity Design site prominently listed on Extensis WebINK Showcase

I am pleased to announce that Extensis has listed my Xanity Design website on their WebINK Showcase, currently third on their page, which you can see at www.extensis.com/en/WebINK/showcase/.

Web design links: Content management systems

As a Web designer, I have to work with content management systems (CMS) quite often, and am always on the lookout for new and interesting comparisons of the CMS tools on the bleeding edge. Whereas older ones like WordPress or Joomla! will usually do the trick for smaller sites, they still tend to be stuck in their blog origins and are harder to customize or extend than the more powerful ones like Typo3, Silverstripe, or Fork.

So this blog entry is as much for my own information as for you, dear reader. Here are some links with current comparisons of CMS tools that use PHP (an open source scripting language) and MySQL (an open source database) as their technical underpinnings. I'm most familiar with PHP and MySQL, hence my focus on that area.

In the last couple of years, I have focused on Silverstripe, which has done me fine for the things I need, but I'm always on the lookout for new and improved CMSes elsewhere. A few sites I've built with Silverstripe:

• bund alt-katholischer frauen (baf)
  Association of Old Catholic Women
• Alt-Katholisch Hannover
  Old Catholic parish in Hannover
• GB Cars
  Mechanic specializing in British cars, especially Minis
• fuchs und hase GbR
  A small design agency in Hannover

And one built in Typo3 where I assisted:

• Katholisches Bistum der Alt-Katholiken in Deutschland
  Diocese of Old Catholics in Germany

So, here are the comparisons:

• Roundup of 17 Best Template Engines
  A "template engine" is not quite the same thing as a CMS. The template engine simply helps control the appearance of pages globally, without having to edit each page. A CMS will normally have its own template engine built-in. In cases where templates are useful, but a full-blown CMS is not, these tools can come in quite handy.
• Enterprise CMS Comparison
  Enterprise-level CMSes have nothing to do with Star Trek and everything to do with websites that have hundreds, or even thousands or millions, of pages and many administrators, users, and especially visitors.
• 20+1 lesser-known open source CMSes
  This is a roundup of up-and-coming CMS tools that are more specialized.

Feel free to post comments with your experiences with various CMS tools.