Hello! Jim here. Working stiff now, not very chatty. ....but I still know where to come to answer life's important questions!

Does anyone have experience with a CMS that meets the following characteristics/criteria:

- free
- Linux
- Apache
- MySQL backend
- PHP preferred

Functionally, we'd be looking for multiple privilege levels, some sort of built-in editor (or ability to plug in a simple editor). A good API would be important, but a bigger priority would be that it be easy to get up and running (I am trying to move an existing web site into CMS in a resonable hurry).

As always, your brilliance is appreciated!

I was managing the (custom) development of just such a system when my budget funding was cut. Obviously, your first requirement (free) is one I have yet to figure out how to meet. I'm (obviously) very interested to see if you do.

Hi,

I use postnuke, its worth checking out. http://www.postnuke.com
I don't know if its a great fit for what you are going to use it for, but I use it on a "medium volume" site without any problems.

I've been looking at drupal. It's got some rough edges, but it seems (at first glance) pretty good. I don't know exactly what your requirements are, though.

Ah, looking further, it meets all of your technology requirements. It does have multiple privilege levels, but they're not particularly fine-grained. There's a project in the works to fix this.

The API looks pretty simple -- I hacked together a quicklinks module in about half an hour.

It's a little biased towards creating a community site, rather than a corporate site, but with the default configuration, it might be a strong base for what you're trying to do.

The notion of "taxonomy" looks quite powerful, but I've not got my head round it fully yet.

The photo album software is a bit poor. There was a hacked-on module for gallery, but the drupal people have decided to replace it. They're not feature-for-feature yet, unfortunately.

Oh, and it's a doddle to install.