FarCry CMS
I am no CMS expert, but considering its free, FarCry does seem to offer a lot of bang for the buck.
The installation instructions could be tweaked a bit to better explain some of the steps, and to explain what information is being asked for in the web based forms. All in all, I think it installed pretty easily.
One of the coolest things about FarCry is that the default install actually gives you a template based on Aura from Leorex. Using the Aura Fireworks template, I was able to quickly and easily change the default colors and images. Though I didn't do much more tooling wth the template. This is more to show FarCry than my pitiful design skills. Take a look if you like, but no snickering....
So far there seem to be some pretty cool features, and it is somewhat more intuitive than other CMSs I have used.
I will blog about some of the features as I discover them.
In the meantime, would you mind sharing any experiences you have with FarCry. Good, bad or indifferent.
Basically you have to decide if Farcry is right for you and your project. What I tell people is that Farcry (like most successful CMS packages) is useful for content-rich sites that rely mostly on static content (where it offers the ease to add/edit content through a decent publishing system).
It does allow you to extend the core and add your own tools (which most developers add custom types and containers). This functionality alone makes the tool very useful.
I agree that the installation instructions could use a little more work (remember though that these guys do what they can, when they can). The tutorials they offer are a great starting point for newcomers to Farcry (but they could use some updating).
If its any help to anyone starting out in Farcry I created a few training tutorials (videos) a while back. They are aimed at beginner developers using the CMS. I get emails almost daily thanking me for them and asking me to make more (soon, I promise :)), however Daemon doesn't offer links to them from their site. I am told that most people find out about them from googling or from crawling through previous posts in the Farcry mailing lists (dev list).
For more info on the video training tutorials, please go to http://www.jeffcoughlin.com/ and click on Tutorials.