[wuug-list] CMS advice

[BJ Blanchard]

On Thursday 01 February 2007 19:20, Matt Draisey wrote:
> Subject: Re: [wuug-list] CMS advice
> To: wuug-list at wuug.org
> Cc: 
>
> > 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.

Thanks Matt & Aaron.  I dug a little more into plone and drupal.  Plone is 
zope/python based (and thus not "LAMP".. LAZP? - so harder to find ISP to 
host) and is more advanced and therefore more complex to manage.  I read a 
post from a plone developer who compared plone with drupal and stated that 
with drupal he had a site up in 2 hours, whereas the same site with plone 
took 8 hours.

I'll give Drupal a go, since I want something I can pass on to non-technical 
people to manage content on a site.

BJ.