I stumbled across a new CMS called MODx yesterday. I've been wary of CMSes for years now, and haven't seen any I particularly liked. Many CMSes are just forum, blog, or 'community' style systems like PHP-Nuke, and not a CMS that's useful to keep a regular site up to date.

I quickly read through the features and decided to give it a shot. Here's some of what got my attention:

• XHTML / CSS / standards compliant
• WYSIWYG editing
• SEO friendly URL option
• Extreme flexibility with templates
• Install within 5 minutes on any MySQL / PHP host
• Fast, AJAXed site manager

I downloaded the .tar.gz, unpacked it in a folder on one of my domains, set up a MySQL database, and ran the install script. A few clicks later, bam, I got this:

All well, and good, but how does the admin panel look?

Pretty good, and when you go to editing an individual page?

I've only been playing with it for a total of about thirty minutes so far, but it's fast and really cool. It's basically like WordPress for regular content. Ridiculously easy to install, and will seemingly run almost anywhere. I think this could be one of the next big open source hits, and I can't wait to get some excuse to roll it out.

Give it a look.

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