I'd recommend using Craft. It doesn't box you in the way that WordPress does. You can build custom content types with the fields you need, not just what's given to you. It uses Twig for it's templates, which means it is pretty human readable and also easy to build out the front-end. I'd suggest checking out their documentation.

Try Kirby CMS. Flat-file CMS as good and flexible as Wordpress.

Kirby for small projects and Craft for big ones.

Perch is probably the best 'little' CMS (recommended for a site with under 20 pages). It is so easy to integrate Perch tags that you can even make the entire static site first and then make it dynamic later. It's about $50 to start.

If you want something more complex, I definitely agree with those recommending Craft. As a developer I have had the best time building sites with it and the dashboard is simple and clean for clients. Not only that, but there is a live preview that actually works, so clients can put together some pretty in depth pages without having to code. They have plans ranging from free to $300.

https://www.designernews.co/stories/58069-grav-is-a-modern-open-source-flatfile-cms

Craft or ExpressionEngine would be my recommendations. Extensibility, stability (in the case of EE. Craft is newish and still has some room to grow, but is a great product and will likely overtake most if not all EE diehards in the next 5 years.) and overall ease of use are all huge factors there.

I won't dive too deep into it, but Craft is my go-to from now on. The community is extremely helpful & growing rapidly, there are a tons of plugins now, the support from them is top-notch, and they are about to release a big update, Craft 2.5, which makes their Control Panel even more user-friendly and easier to navigate for non-developers. It's a no-brainer for me going forward... It's also getting some crazy speed updates here with PHP7 releasing soon (it's already compatible) and Craft 3 which will be out next year.

Hi Norris,

I'm CEO of CloudCannon, a CMS and optimized hosting provider for Jekyll sites. We work with many large organisations to bring all the advantages of static site generators and give non-developers the ability to easily update content. CloudCannon also syncs with GitHub / Bitbucket so you work on the sites locally, rollback changes, branch etc.

Check it out, would love to hear what you think!

Siteleaf for something simple or Webhook for something more custom. They are both static site generators in the cloud and come with an api.

Recently I've grown fond of Kirby CMS for all kinds of client websites. I've been spoiled by its simple nature for both front-end and back-end development.

The only thing I've noticed is that my clients aren't familiar or comfortable using Markdown for submitting their content. Considering most of them use Word to write their content, they lose their formatting when copy-pasting. There is a WYSIWYG plugin though. Haven't tried it yet.

I can highly recommend http://umbraco.com it's .net based and not PHP like Wordpress and drupal, but it is very easy to learn – especially if you have experience from other CMS. The great thing about Umbraco is it's backoffice capabilities, I is very easy to make relative complex layouts and datahandling, and still keeping it userfriendly for editors.

I recommend ProcessWire: http://processwire.com/

It's very intuitive to use as an editor. The API is very powerful, and very well documented. It's fast, the templating logic is straightforward, and best of all: The system doesn't "assume" anything (e.g. in WP, everything is based on the assumption you want to build a blog). You don't need to hack a default "theme" to death, until you get exactly the markup you need.

Also, out of the box, every input field is a "custom field" - no need to install 3rd party plugins or modules. Multilanguage sites? A breeze, due to the in-built features.

I've used Statamic with good luck, and it's pretty fun to develop with as a flat file.

I work for a small agency and we build a lot of client websites. While it's not pretty/glamorous, wordpress is the way to go. It's easy enough and secure enough for government work and you don't have to worry about it losing support anytime soon.

Drupal is way overkill and something like squarespace is too limiting.

Good luck!

http://simpla.io/ Simpla integrates with static site generators and even Wordpress. Suuuuper client friendly. I haven't played around with the developer preview yet, but it seems promising.

I think recommendations should also be based on their community support. Obviously more established platforms have a bigger community.

In the past I did a lot with Wordpress but not so much now, I have also had some exposure to Expression Engine and Drupal both of which seemed easy to follow.

My viewpoint is from a designer who's reasonable at front end development and has had to inherit existing systems in terms of content updates and implementing designs.

I'm a huge fan of Wagtail, a relatively new (but mature enough to use in production) CMS built in Python on top of the Django web framework.

The editor looks nice and is definitely one of the more usable CMS editors, the developer experience of actually building a site on top of it is top notch, but the killer feature for me is something called StreamField.

StreamField lets you define a field that has a bunch of blocks - you might have one that contains paragraphs of formatted text, one that's a header, one that's a pullquote with an author, one that's an image with a caption and attribution field, and so on - you define templates for each of them, then your users can assemble them together. With this you can achieve awesome, nearly print-like layouts, and it's much easier than trying to beat CKEditor (or whatever rich text widget people use these days) into submission.

For me, StreamField gives you a content model that's a happy medium between something like Mezzanine (which just uses simple fields, so you have to yield control of what's inside your rich text fields to CKEditor) and something like DjangoCMS (which is way too flexible in that it allows arbitrary combinations of arbitrary plugins nested arbitrarily deep, which gives users just enough rope to hang themselves with and make their site look like arse) - Wagtail lets you define some fields as StreamFields and others as containing plain text, or a number, or an option chosen from a list, or other simple field types when you need to make that sort of restriction.

The downside is that you need to have someone that knows Python and Django building the site; there's no getting around that. There's no built-in default page types or anything like that. There's not a lot of code to write, and the code you do write feels nice and clean - see what I said above about DX - so all the building blocks are there, but you need a Python programmer to put them together. Plus, because it's written in Python, you need to host it somewhere that supports Python, which means you can't use shared hosting*, the sole exception being WebFaction.

* Some shared hosts say they support Python but they almost always don't really. They usually run a really old version, and they usually don't allow long-running processes so you can't use a WSGI server. It's the same story as with Ruby (just replace WSGI with Rack in the previous sentence).

Commenting for later

For my clients, I either package Wordpress or hook myself together a custom CMS with Firebase.

ExpressionEngine <3