Rob Sullivan has an article on choosing a content management system with questions to ask to evaluate how search engine friendly resulting pages are. I thought I'd take a moment to evaluate how SyntaxCMS compares to his criteria.
Does the system support unique meta tags?
SyntaxCMS supports unique metadata for each page (section in SyntaxCMS) and they are modifiable. However, SyntaxCMS does not provide unique meta-tags for detail pages.
Does the system support static pages?
By static pages, Rob actually means clean urls with no query strings. SyntaxCMS does use clean urls for the majority of content, specifically for sections (pages). It does not require session variable or other dynamic variable to display a page, a URI is sufficient to access any page (unless its not viewable by the public). However, once you start adding in filtering and pagination of content lists, it will use a query string.
How flexible is the folder structure?
He also suggests that it'd be best if "all pages could reside in the root folder", as he says that pages deep in subfolders are ranked lower in relevancy by search engines. SyntaxCMS uses the "directory" structure in the url to figure out what content to retrieve, so this leads to urls that are longer than his ideal. I don't think this really ranks heavily in search engine relevancy, there are more important factors to optimize. These factors include using good title links, good text for links ( no "Click here" nonsense), and overall good content.
What platform does the CMS need to run on?
SyntaxCMS is intended to run on any platform that supports apache, php4, and mysql. Currently, it is most tested on linux distributions. It does run on windows systems but since mysql on windows doesn't support the ENCRYPT() function in the same way it is not usable. This is something we are looking to address in the future by migrating away from the ENCRYPT function.
What kind of customer service does the CMS company offer?
SyntaxCMS is open source, anyone with decent PHP/MySQL skills could add functionality. Forum One Communications offers commericial development, hosting and support as well.
