In a new post to his blog Michael Maclean looks at the current CMS ecosystem and wonders "where are all the decent CMSes?" He's been having trouble finding one and really wants to know.

I've been recently asked to check out some CMSes for someone, and try to find a recommendation. What I've been finding hasn't really been encouraging. Out of the several CMSes I've tried, they've all failed for various reasons. I admit that I might be looking at this from a slightly different perspective than most - that of admining it and coding against it, rather than as a user - but it's still rather disappointing.

He briefly looks at a few of the more popular offerings - Silverstripe, Concrete5, CMS Made Simple, Joomla! and the old standby - WordPress.

What's going on? This is what PHP is supposed to be good at. Where are the simple, lightweight CMSes with modern code?

There's plenty of comments so be sure and read them - everything from suggesting that the net should be cast wider to "PHP applications" versus just CMSes out to suggestions for other CMSes to try out (quite a few of those).