Choosing the best CMS (Content Management System) for a website or web based project can be a daunting task. Take a look at OpenSourceCMS.com and you can see that currently there are over 200+ CMS demos you can try out in the PHP category alone. Faced with this many options, and having to make a decision within a limited time frame, what do you do? The choice can be even more complicated if you are building a site for an important client, as the CMS you choose can have enormous consequences for web design the client further down the road in Toronto .

Here's a quick rundown of my favorite PHP based CMS systems, and why I think they excel.

MODx

MODx considers itself to be an Open Source PHP application framework and although it is a functional CMS out of the box, it is very modular, allowing you to pick and choose the features you want and easily extend it's native compatibilities. It also features a slick AJAX based interface, and web design a modern architecture. Other strong points for MODx incude:

* SEO friendly from the ground up
* Built with Web Standards in mind
* Fairly easy to create custom content using "chunks"

That said, it does take some time to get used to MODx, it's terminology and its templating structure, and it is a bit lacking in pre-built 3rd party plugins and components.

Drupal

Drupal is a classic, one of the most well-known CMS systems, it has been around for a long time and has a huge community behind it. This is both the best thing and the worst thing about it. It's great because there are a huge amount of extensions for this CMS, and there have been numerous high traffic sites built on the platform, but at the same time it has a steep learning curve, and simply wrapping your head around the architecture and various extensions is a job in and of itself.

Wordpress

No CMS roundup would really be complete without mentioning Wordpress. Many people think of Wordpress as simply a blogging platform, but it is actually a very capable CMS system, and can be used for almost any type of site. The advantages of Wordpress are quite obvious, an insane amount of prebuilt components and plugins, excellent documentaion, and a huge community make developing sites with Wordpress lightning fast. Before moving on to other CMS systems I would probably check to see if the site could be built faster with WP.

Depending on the type of development that needs to be done, one of these CMS platforms could be the perfect option for quick development, or you might need a more customized solution, in which case you may want to look at a PHP framework such as Zend, Codeigniter, Kohana, or Symfony, or decide to build your site from the ground up with PHP.