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How can you tell if a website uses a CMS?

I want to design my own website based on anothe website. But looking at the website I want to mimic, It looks like it used a CMS. I can't be too sure. So is there a way for me to tell if a website uses a CMS by looking at its' source code?

Public Comments

1. Possibly. Or by recognizing the CMS it uses, just from the look (and the copyright notice). Maybe if you posted a link here ...
2. it depends. i usually develop custom CMS's so if you looked at any of mine you wouldn't be able to tell. however, most Open Source CMS's have some tell-tale signs. what's the URL?
3. It depends on the CMS they are using. The best way I have found is to try to locate the admin login page. Most CMSs use www.yoursite.com/ADMIN try admin, administrator, e107_admin or wp-admin at the end. If you can locate the page it will normally tell you what they are using. If you post the site I will check and see if I can get it for you. Good luck.
4. A lot of CMS's leave tell tale source comments. If you copy/paste parts of these comments in google, you might be able to figure it out. But if you want to mimic a website, your best bet is to take a look at the most popular CMS's and their features and decide for yourself which one to use. Just because the site you're mimicking uses CMS X doesn't mean that's the best one for that particular application, nor does it guarantee that it will be the best CMS for you personally. Take a look at the available CMS's and decide for yourself. You can even ask detailed questions to yahoo answers regarding a particular CMS and the end result you're looking for. That's what I would do. Hope this helps! JMK http://realjobdescriptions.com
5. Depends what CMS, If its a custom written CMS, you'll never know. Take a look at my site http://www.esemdesign.com The games/tutorials/news are all in a CMS i wrote in php. But then my site http://www.vanmitchell.com is a typical wordpress CMS, Anyone can notice it :) So theres really no way unless its something like wordpress or some other run of the mill CMS