PHPKitchen has this new post today about an "interesting appeal" from the folks at Adaptive Path concering the question: "Are Open Source CMSs up to scratch?"

From Adaptive Path: I did some research recently at OpenSourceCMS.com - a fantastic site that lets you play with dozens of CMS installations - and left pretty depressed. What I experienced was obtuse and complex software that was packed with gratuitous features at the expense of usability and user experience. It was software written by geeks, for geeks.

The experience cemented a theory of mine: Most open source content management software is useless. The only thing worse is every commercial CMS I've used. But it doesn't have to be that way.

He continues on with a few suggestions as to what could help make a "better CMS" for the general population - things like: "Make it easy to install", "Make it easy to get started", "Users of a public Web site should never, never, be presented with a way to log in to the CMS", "Stop it with the jargon already", and "Why do you insist Web sites have 'columns'?" Definitely some valid points made here - there are some CMSs that come closer than others to the model he's presented here, but most of them are still just too complicated for the average Joe User to work with.