I haven’t posted a fan letter about Conversant in awhile, but since Macrobyte just implemented a number of upgrades/new features this is a good time to re-visit my content management system of choice.
The thing that continues to excite me about Conversant is how it well it balances the power/ease-of-use equation. Over the past six months a friend and I have installed about dozen different CMS systems, with most of those being PHP systems. Some of them are very good.
My favorite was Mambo — its one of thew few open source CMS’s that, with a number of additional modules, would come pretty close to duplicating the features I enjoy in Conversant. The problem is that Mambo and others are much more complex than Conversant. As I told Seth Dillingham, to exploit Conversant to its fullest, you just need to be able to think really logically in order to use Conversant’s macro system to produce whatever results you’re after. With, Mambo and these other systems, you really need to know a lot about PHP (or pay someone who does to help you) to do the sort of things you can easily accomplish on your own with Conversant.
For me, it is important to be able to make complex changes to my site myself, and to be able to do so quickly — I’d prefer to spend my time writing and editing rather than tinkering, and Conversant does an excellent job of providing a lot of power with a minimum of effort.
Anyway, earlier this month Macrobyte upgraded Conversant which resulted in nice speed increase and this week released a new, improved update to the macro processor, which will allow even more complex behaviors to be added (not to mention improving overall performance).
Sound interesting? Get a free personal Conversant site here and give it a whirl.