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Comment by CM30 | Hacker News Reader

Quite a lot, considering that some of these brands use (or used to use) WordPress:

http://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/40-most-notable-big-name-...

It's fairly common among large media publications.

That's something that gets overlooked in these discussions of wordpress. Wordpress has the unique ability to use a single install and backend to manage hundreds of sites. If you need content cross posted across multiple sites, wordpress can do that. If you want to pull an entire column of articles from one site to another, wordpress can do that.

Wordpress has spent a ton of time on multisite features and (as far as I know) there's no other CMS in existence that handles this stuff out of the box. That's why large media companies love it and, I suspect, why a quarter of the internet runs it still when there are faster and more secure alternatives out there.

I've never used it professionally, but dotCMS is a Java- and Elasticsearch-based CMS that has very impressive multisite features [1]. From what I can tell, a lot of its capabilities stem from a design that treats absolutely everything (data, content, static assets, "themes") as a node in a virtual filesystem, or rather a filesystem-per-site, so everyday filesystem operations cover a lot of use cases. I believe you can even manipulate your site(s) via WebDAV to some extent, e.g. to develop a theme in your IDE of choice while saving directly to the site or, more realistically, saving to a private staging copy of the site that lives on the same server, which you can then copy into production from within the dotCMS admin.

I gave some consideration recently to adopting dotCMS for client work to replace an in-house PHP CMS, but although Java-the-language isn't particularly intimidating and dotCMS itself looks fairly self-contained and straightforward to deploy -- Elasticsearch is embedded rather than requiring separate setup, for example -- it's still tied up in the Java ecosystem (OSGi, maven, XML configuration) so there's a lot to get used to for someone approaching it from outside that realm.

[1] http://dotcms.com/#anchor1

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