If you're going to include PMachine's Expression engine (which is very nice but costly compared to some alternatives), you might as well then include free alternatives like Joomla! (
http://www.joomla.org)/Mambo (
http://www.mamboserver.com), Xaraya (
http://www.xaraya.org), PHPwcms (
http://www.phpwcms.de), or any of the myriad of free PHP CMS/Blog and/or Bulletin board-style programs available for preview at
http://www.opensourcecms.com. Many of these are as full-featured as Expression Engine out of the box, and some are even more extensible with a hefty wealth of modules, bots, and plugins... and even some cross-pollenation (i.e. Punbo for Joomla/Mambo is an integrated PunBB board; which is similar to the Simplemachines Forum
SMF bridge module for Joomla/Mambo as well).
To expect
Macworld to cover all of the options in the course of an article like this is daunting at best... but I would love to see
MacWorld do a comprehensive review and make it known that stuff like this exists out there. Much as NVU was news to me, it was through
MacWorld that I learned of other web apps. and other tools that I'd not known of prior. After the reviews of Blogspot, Blogger, Wordpress, and awhile back... PMachine/PMachine Pro/Expression Engine in the past; et al... it'd be nice to take it that extra level by knowing even more of what is out there.
Oh and on Composer... NVU is actually an off-chute of Netscape Composer that was taken much further and is more full-featured from what I've read. I wasn't aware of this until I did some further research into NVU after it was shown in
MacWorld. Composer has kind of languished and I almost feel like the NVU project has taken it into the future after Netscape works on the transition from the old roadmap and branched everything off towards Firefox/Thunderbird/Sunbird, et al.
It's for particular situations like this that I believe these boards are so important as they help people like you Jeff, myself, and the countless others out there add additional incite and fill in gaps and present awareness to tools that otherwise would go unknown by many and perhaps even the people that bring us
MacWorld magazine. I was talking to some peers of mine at work (K-6th school) and we were discussing how the internet has really changed things in so many ways that we take for granted. Having a resource such as
MacWorld's/MacCentral's forum is definitely not to be underestimated for the synergies it provides the subscribers, as well as the authors who bring us the magazine every month.
