Before I started Gregladen.com, I went through all of the content management sites that I had available to me in order to consider possibilities for running my blog. I ended up using Wordpress, which is a kind of CMS that specialized in blogs, for a number of reasons. But I did use a couple of different content management systems for private or small scale projects. At the moment, I'm looking again at CMS as a solution for something we need to fix at The U.
But how do you pick one?
When I was trying different systems, I found out right away that no system could be taken out of the box and turned into a functioning solution without considerable messing around. The different things that could go wrong were myriad and largely unpredictable, and probably change over time. The most useful information for me at the time was in the support forums, where I would occasionally find that some function I was really hoping would work in fact did not work, and the developers had no clear intention of making it work. When you run into that, it is a good idea to back off.
But ultimately, I think what makes a content management system work is the documentation. Given two systems, one 'better' than the other but with less adequate documentation, you can actually do more with the better documented but otherwise inferior system. Depending. Depending mostly on unknowns. For this reason, Drupal became one of my preferred choices back then. I had a Drupal book (Building Online Communities With Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress
Now, just as I'm considering messing around with this new project using a CMS, a new book has come out on one of the more widely used packages. Joomla! A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website
Joomia! has two other books of which I'm aware: Beginning Joomla!: From Novice to Professional (Beginning from Novice to Professional)
Indeed, the very production of a book about an OpenSource CMS system is a kind of endorsement. It is a reasonable assumption that some thought goes into the process of what systems to write and publish books about. A totally crappy CMS is not going to get a book by one of the major publishers. Then when it does, it gets more use, and as an OpenSource product, more use means more development. An interesting analysis would be to count (with some care ... paying attention to publication date and sales?) the CMS after market publications.
Which reminds me. Joomla! may be cool, but Drupal has about ten English Language books that are still current. So Drupal must be good too.
My upcoming project requires a complex form linked to a database with each user having a different and secured form (invisible to other users, most likely). I have not looked under the hood of any CMS in at least six months so I don't know yet what I'm going to do. But I'll let you know.
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With my extent of programming knowledge (or lack thereof), usually the deciding factor for me is simply how well I can grok the system. For some reason certain CMS packages just seem to make more sense to me than others.
It's true that strong documentation and an active user base are huge benefits as well.
I've toyed with both Drupal and Joomla, and for some reason I just prefer Joomla at this time. Somewhat perversely, I feel like Drupal is the better software package, but I just tend to have a harder time bending it to my will.
Where on Earth do they dig up these names?!!
This won't be very helpful, probably, but I've often been tempted to go with Plone (I prefer the underlying technology - Python instead of Php). Last time I seriously looked was probably two years ago when I did a proof-of-concept for our Dept. web site -- mimiced current look and feel and also started to re-implement the faculty/grad student databases. The project did not go forward, for other reasons, but I thought it showed promise. I haven't actively compared Plone with other alternatives.
The first google result for 'plone drupal joomla' is this:
http://www.idealware.org/articles/joomla_drupal_plone.php
and I thinks its Plone comments are pretty sound.
cheers and good luck
I learned MYSQL so that I can make my own CMS's from scratch. This really comes in handy when I make websites for other people because I can custom tailor the backend to perfectly fit the needs and (most importantly) the skill level of the person I am making it for so he/she can easily make edits of their own.
Popularity is not necessarily equal to Good. It's in the interest of publishers to pursue the popular. Maybe popular -- like Microsoft, for example -- is what you're really after; maybe not.
In the same vein as mlf, if you want a CMS that does what you want and *just* what you want without a lot of needless complexity, roll your own. Chances are you're pretty familiar with the data model for the project and defining the ui shouldn't be too problematic. My preference is for Django + MySQL. I learned Django well enough to write a new website in about 10 hours (granted I was already pretty familiar with Python). And that was before 3-4 books on django came out in the past few months.
That doesn't really sound like a CMS problem to me. Sounds like a bespoke web app...
To clarify: the ten hours to build the site included learning django.
As you say, the documentation really separates the tools, especially for Open Source packages. However, rather than struggle with the setup part, take a look at http://www.opensourcecms.com/. They have quite a broad selection installed, and you can view both the client-side and admin-side of each. They reset them hourly, so they tend to stay fairly clean.
Wow, I am out of the loop. So there is a category called CMS now?
MySQL (or postgresql if you are cool), Apache, php, and python are sufficient. But I guess there is a good case that you shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel continually.
Your limited book theory doesn't amount to much: A couple of years ago, Joomla came into existence through an internal shakeup, a change of leadership and a name change of an existing project. It began as a fork of Mambo, a CMS project which has been around a long time.
Website owners ought not to worry just about not high ranking because the blog posting service can offer blog posting issues , which increase PR!