CMS recommendations

tammy

Howdy,

I need to set up and skin an open source CMS for an organisation. They are not technical so usability is very important as they'll be managing all the content. I'll need to add a straightforward database also, so the integration of this should not be to painful. Does anyone have any recommendations, from the options out there and indication of learning curves that would be involved in customising a system. I've no experience with CMS but have worked with eCommerce systems so hopefully that'll ease the pain.

Thanks

alphasolutions

Hi Tammy,

i use Joomla and find it easy enough to install and get up and running. there is plenty of mods and components for it also which are easy to plug in and use. There are a few other CMS out there which others might prefer but that would be my choice

Rollo Tamasi

You're going to get countless of posts on here saying Wordpress.....

And there is good reason for that. It is simple to use, easier to setup, functional, built with SEO in mind, extensible via plugins and easy to modify the style.

There are plenty of pro designers out there who will design custom blog themes for your company at a reasonable price too.

Joomla/Mambo is very bloaty and hard to use, imo of course.

smcelhinney

What about Contribute? From Macromedia (Adobe).

Works like a browser, pre-configure it for users, you can manage templates and items with Dreamweaver so they cant reformat etc. Then all they do is use the "browser" to navigate to a page, click edit, then it saves a draft for approval.

I find this a VERY cost effective way of managing content. Best thing is, you're left with pure HTML, apart from a bit of DW markup, nothing proprietary, so easy to port, and very clean. Also saves on download time, as you're not interacting with a database server each time.

Check it out.

axer

I second Joomla as an option. It is very easy to use and is very powerful.
Install Joomla then install JCE as your WYSIWYG editor.

Do you need to setup access control? i.e. allow some users to be allowed update some parts of the site only? If yes, then Joomla is probably not the solution. There is a plugin that does this but it is not available for the newest version of joomla yet.

If you are looking for the above then check out Drupal or Typo3.

Is this site for an intranet or the Internet? Will there be many content pages? What do you mean by adding a straight forward database? Do you want to display information for an existing database?

If you use Wordpress you will need to do a fair bit of customising to get it to be a CMS rather than blogging system. Joomla is easy to use as an end user, easy to setup as the webmaster and has many add-ons/plugins. It is what I mainly use but there is no access control at the moment. Drupal is a great system and would be more flexible if you had a developer working on the project with you. Typo3 likewise but Typo3 requires a steep learning curve to do anything special with it.

tammy

Thanks for the tips. I spent some time here http://opensourcecms.com demo-ing some systems with your advice in mind. For my purposes I think joomla is the winner though elxis looks good. The reason for joomla is that the main users will be non technical and it provides a handy gui for formatting code. It looks very user friendly all in all. I'll have to delve deeper but think I'm sold.

I don't fancy wordpress as it seems more geared to blogging which is not what I'm after.

If the site were for me I'd go for typoLight as it is very simple and uncluttered, but documentation is in german only at the moment.