October

What do you like best?

First off I like how October is based on the Laravel PHP Framework. It's an elegant framework that doesn't put a lot of restrictions on the developers. It has a simple back end that provides extensibility through the use of plugins which can override any behavior you want. The ability to customize other peoples plugins without ever touching their code has been a huge benefit. For the non-programmers, it allows for easy customization of pages and content across their platform. Being a developer myself, documentation and support are very important to me, and OctoberCMS does a great job at making both available.

What do you dislike?

The fact that it is based on Laravel has led to some upgrading issues at times, where Laravel packages are updated that break some of the functionality of October. Though they tend to be fast at providing fixes, it still can cause problems when something unexpected happens during an update.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Spend a little time reading the documentation, grab a machine and install it already!

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I have used OctoberCMS for a large number of projects over the last few years and have found it to be very fast to get a site up and running when I needed it. I have also used it for an internal company site that has over 100 plugins and an even larger number of components that have been created. Everything from sales tracking to e-commerce to a complete manufacturing system. Some of these things would be extremely difficult to achieve using another product.