Joomla developers quickly built on the legacy of Mambo, especially improving administration. What the basic system lacks in functionality can usually be fixed by installing a component. Version 1.5 (which was in Release Candidate 1 stage during testing) appears to address concerns about the complexity of the menu system while injecting more Web 2.0 functions (such as more design latitude in how pages appear).

Plone 3.0

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Plone does one thing -- Web content management -- and does it with aplomb. That's why you'll find well-known U.S. and international organizations in most industries running their Web sites, internets, and extranets with Plone.

This CMS has outstanding multilingual content management (with localized workflow), a powerful page editor, and flexible navigation. Version 3.0 introduces an inline editor, link checking, a portlets engine (for including content from other Web sites), and versioning, supports the search engine Sitemap protocol and wiki markup, and has full-text indexing of Word and PDF documents.

Setting up and customizing Plone isn't taxing. By following the well-done documentation and tutorials, I updated the visual design of my test Plone site in a few hours, all accomplished using the Web Developer Extension for Firefox along with an excellent Plone download, DIYPloneStyle. It's also relatively easy to add more advanced functionality (such as having navigation sections that are automatically generated from the contents of a folder) with a few style sheet changes.

On the administration side, Plone provides a range of enterprise-friendly functions, from authentication using OpenID, Active Directory, or LDAP to granular permissions for groups, roles, and workflows. All this is controlled from the Zope Management Interface, though I wish it was integrated into the rest of the system. That said, individuals can easily control who can view, edit, and approve their content -- without going through an administrator.

With design done, my testing moved to managing content. Again, Plone doesn't demand any extraordinary skills. For example, the folder view and AJAX-based drag-and-drop let me quickly reorder content, which was then reflected in the site's navigation. Site maps are automatically generated and updated. What's more, any collection (a grouping of content that developers create without writing code) or search result can be turned into an RSS feed.

The desktop-style page editor (based on the Kupu editor) is notable for converting Microsoft's text markup into clean XHTML and also for a great asset browser that previews images and links. Plone 3.0's inline editing was a big help for quick updates because you don't have to open a separate interface: Just click on the text area requiring revisions.