The most popular php cms are:

CMS Made Simple provides a fast and easy way to create a web site and manage its contents. Use it to make a home page for your family -- or your multinational corporation! To get a site up with CMS Made Simple is just that, simple. For those with more advanced ambitions there are plenty of addons to download. And there is an excellent community always at your service. No question is too stupid to be asked!

It's very easy to add content and addons wherever you want them to appear on the site. Design your website in whatever way or style you want and just load it into CMSMS to get it in the air. Easy as that!

The CMSMS official site describes its content management as, "CMS Made Simple is an open source (GPL) package, built using PHP that provides website developers with a simple, easy to use utility to allow building small-ish (dozens to hundreds of pages), semi-static websites. Typically our tool is used for corporate websites, or the website promoting a team or organization, etc. This is where we shine. There are other content management packages that specialize in building portals, or blogs, or article based content, etc. CMS Made Simple can do much of this, but it is not our area of focus.

The Core package provides the ability to manage news articles, search functionality a contact form, a WYSIWYG editor (for your customers or editors) and numerous other built in functions. Additionally, there are hundreds of third party add-on tools that are quickly and easily installable to allow building websites with many different capabilities."

Back in 2000, permanent Internet connections were at a premium for University of Antwerp students, so Dries Buytaert and Hans Snijder setup a wireless bridge between their student dorms to share Hans's ADSL modem connection among eight students. While this was an extremely luxurious situation at that time, something was missing. There was no means to discuss or share simple things.

This inspired Dries to work on a small news site with a built-in webboard, allowing the group of friends to leave each other notes about the status of the network, to announce where they were having dinner, or to share some noteworthy news items.

The software did not have a name until the day after Dries moved out after graduation. The group decided to put the internal website online so that they could stay in touch, continue to share interesting findings, and narrate snippets of their personal lives. While looking for an appropriate domain name, Dries settled for 'drop.org' after he made a typo to see if the the name 'dorp.org' was still available. Dorp is the Dutch word for 'village', which was considered an appropriate name for the small community.

Once established on the Web, drop.org's audience changed as the members began talking about new web technologies such as moderation, syndication, rating, and distributed authentication. Drop.org slowly turned into a personal experimentation environment, driven by the discussions and flow of ideas. The discussions about these web technologies were tried out on drop.org itself as new additions to the software running the site.

It was only later, in January 2001, that Dries decided to release the software behind drop.org as "Drupal." The motivating factor was to enable others to use and extend the experimentation platform so that more people could explore new paths for development. The name Drupal, pronounced "droo-puhl," is derived from the English pronunciation of the Dutch word "druppel" which stands for "drop."

eZ Publish supports the development of professional, customized web applications. Typical applications range from a personal homepage to a multilingual corporate website including role-based multi-user access, e-commerce functions and online communities.

According to eZ Systems, eZ Publish is used for tens of thousands of web applications of varying type and size worldwide, among them MIT (specifically the controller's office), Vogue magazine, NASA, the US Navy DASN and the Swiss public broadcasting organisation Schweizer Fernsehen. Further examples eZ Publish-based projects are listed on the eZ Publish reference page.

eZ Publish is written in PHP. The recommended web server is Apache. The database abstraction layer enables the use of nearly any common database by using drivers, thus rendering changes to the core system unnecessary. MySQL is recommended, but drivers for PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle are also available. eZ Publish is cluster-ready and enforces the separation of content and presentation via XML storage of all content.

Joomla! is a continuation of the work of the Development Team which unanimously resigned from the Mambo project in August 2005. Celebrating its first birthday in September 2006, Joomla! has received 2.5 million downloads and is currently supported by a team of 19 developers. The name was chosen from thousands of recommendations by the community, and even went through an arduous review session by branding and marketing professionals who also felt that Joomla was the best choice of the lot. Joomla is a phonetic spelling for the Swahili word "Jumla", which means "all together" or "as a whole".

The Joomla! project has several Working Groups that have been created to utilise the wealth of knowledge our community provides. Each of these groups focuses on a specific aspect of Joomla! essential to the project's growth and development.

As it is neither possible or healthy for the core team to be involved in every discussion and conversation regarding Joomla! development and growth, these working groups are essential. With a leader or co-leader on the core team they have a built-in method of communication directly with the core team.

These working groups provide an essential communication channel between the community and the core team to bring concerns to light, advocate changes, and disseminate information.

XOOPS is an acronym of eXtensible Object Oriented Portal System. The standard pronunciation of XOOPS should follow English rules, and you should pronounce it as [zoo'ps].

Though started as a portal system, XOOPS is in fact striving steadily on the track of Content Management System. It can serve as a web framework for use by small, medium and large sites.

A lite XOOPS can be used as a personal weblog or journal. For this purpose, you can do a standard install, and use its News module only. For a medium site, you can use modules like News, Forum, Download, Web Links etc to form a community to interact with your members and visitors. For a large site as an enterprise one, you can develop your own modules such as eShop, and use XOOP's uniform user management system to seamlessly integrate your modules with the whole system.