Originally our CMS platform was mostly based on the fantastic Bricolage CMS, which provided an amazing flexibility as an advanced CMS. We eventually became frustrated with the mismatch between the careful efforts we put into development of Bricolage workflows for clients, and the clients’ constant attempts to just use a tiny fraction of the platform’s features to basically edit pages like it was Microsoft Word.

For internal projects, including document workflows besides websites, since around 2005 we have been using a combination of tools, mostly revolving around TextFlow, a minimalist static site generator powered by Git, released under the GNU AGPLv3 license.

TextFlow’s feature list is short and sweet:

• XML source
• XSLT templates
• YAML metadata
• CLI-based micro-pipeline
• completely based on Git
• written in Perl + Bash
• extensible to use any source and destination format
• extensible in any language

After the Bricolage era, for client projects we quickly switched to using WordPress, and basically that became our CMS platform.