The Delicious Brains site has kicked off a new series of posts looking at other options besides WordPress for self-hosted content management systems. In this initial article they cover the Craft CMS that's built on top of the Yii framework.

To kick this off, I’ll be taking a look at Craft CMS by Pixel & Tonic, a software development team that was behind some of the best add-ons for ExpressionEngine. They have since moved on from ExpressionEngine to create their own CMS that is built on the popular Yii framework.

Craft bills itself as “a content-first CMS that aims to make life enjoyable for developers and content managers alike”. This is a change in stride from WordPress which appeals to a much wider variety of people, so it should be interesting to see how that change affects Craft CMS as a whole.

The tutorial then walks you through the installation process for Craft and what the interface will look like when everything is set up correctly. He talks about the functionality that's immediately available and some places where he feels Craft "shines" in its features. He then goes through some of the core architecture of the tool, templating, plugins, custom fields, SEO, eCommerce support and the documentation/pricing the project offers.