[wuug-list] CMS advice

[Matt Draisey]

> Anyway - I have only a little experience with CMS (Content Management
> Systems) and there are a plethora of open-source LAMP-based CMSs out there -
> Drupal, Joomla, ezPublish, Midgard, Drake CMS, Plone, etc.
> 
> Just wondering if anyone has experience with any of these or other CMS
> systems, as its hard to find comprehensive comparisons.
> 
> I'm looking for something that does it all (static/dynamic content, support
> for rss, blogs, forums, polls, file/image galleries, wikis, security, etc)
> and is the most easy to extend or add functionality.  So far I'm quite
> impressed with the latest Drupal 5.0 release - but I don't have time to
> try/invest/learn all the others.
> 
> Any advice?
> 
> BJ.

I've compared three of them: Drupal, Joomla and Plone and found drupal
to be the best of the three.

None of them have good documentation --- extensive perhaps, but not
good.

Plone was far too complicated.  The user interface was fussy and the
administration interface a horror.  I lost interest a week or two into
it.  You can use it as a stand alone product, but it is more of a
framework, and one with an overly steep learning curve for me to bother
with it.

Joomla sets up nicely, but feels restrictive and has the worst
documentation of the lot.  Other than initial installation, it didn't do
anything better than drupal and lacks drupal's flexibility.

Drupal works well for most things, a nice mix of simplicity and
expandability.  You add functionality through separate loaded modules
(and themes) and, provided you choose your modules prudently, quite easy
to administer.  Core code and module code don't keep to the same release
schedule --- keeping the modules working through upgrades is the hardest
task, but that is becoming more automated as drupal matures.  Version
5.0 is nice.  The biggest difficulty is with images; there is no image
handling in core and the almost standard image module seems to be losing
favour with the core developers.

-- 
Matt Draisey <matt at draisey.ca>