Looking for something industrial strength with a big development community. Preferably open source.
I have a bunch of experience with Joomla, and I'm looking into DotNetNuke. But I figured I hurl it out there for you lot to weigh in on.
Time to earn your keep, you filthy wretches!
They all suque.
Drupal. A CMS and so much more.
industrial strength? Check. a big development community? Huge. Possibly the largest. open source? Check.
I was messing with Drupal last week. It's like a CMS for programmers.
WHY, IN GODS NAME, DO PROGRAMMERS NEED A CMS?
It made me and Jesus weep.
Originally posted by: StinkFist They all suque.
So do my clients. Go figure.
I've been working a lot with Joomla, and I have to say it's very robust, easy to use, and components are easy to find.
That's been my experience with Joomla also.
But there are a lot of available components for it that are poorly made, or don't play well with other components. I'm hoping to find something a bit more heavy-duty.
Drupal is pretty flexible if you are comfortable with php thinking of data more as objects and less as pages of a website.
The "out of the box" version and most implementations I have seen have been pretty lacking.
My concern with Drupal is in handing it off to the client. They absolutely have to be able to use it, and Drupal's interface is kind of thick.
Originally posted by: AgentX My concern with Drupal is in handing it off to the client. They absolutely have to be able to use it, and Drupal's interface is kind of thick.
Horse. Shit. Check out the sexy admin theme.
I really like Website Baker for ease of use for the client. It may not have as many developers contributing like Joomla for add-ons but you know the released ones all work well with each other.
CMS Made Simple 1.6.7 seems to get a high ranking. : shrug :
I heard a lot of good things about Concrete5 but haven't played with it yet.
What BH said. You can modify it to be very light and thin. You might have to do some heavy lifting.. but it is very flexible.
As I said.. the out of the box solution is rather shit.
You also have to decide what is really best for the client. Are we talking about a database driven sight with thousands of possible pages(objects)? or like a 5 to 10 page brochure site?
Issues between components will always be there, because of the opensource nature of the system. My only advice is to play around as much as possible. Secondly read the documentation of the components - god knows I hate doing it, but it does help a lot.
Originally posted by: baron ruhstoff [quote]Originally posted by: AgentX My concern with Drupal is in handing it off to the client. They absolutely have to be able to use it, and Drupal's interface is kind of thick.
Horse. Shit. Check out the sexy admin theme.[/quote] OOOOH. BIG ICONS.
That MUST mean it is user-friendy!
As creepy pointed out, you have to be able to deal with the idea of data as objects rather than pages. That doesn't sound like any client I ever heard of, except maybe the programmers I was dealing with last week.
I need to be able to train people, people.
Originally posted by: creepylurker What BH said. You can modify it to be very light and thin. You might have to do some heavy lifting.. but it is very flexible.
As I said.. the out of the box solution is rather shit.
You also have to decide what is really best for the client. Are we talking about a database driven sight with thousands of possible pages(objects)? or like a 5 to 10 page brochure site?
We're talking about a sprawling, corporate, multi-faceted, multi-user web extravaganza.
Originally posted by: AgentX OOOOH. BIG ICONS.
That MUST mean it is user-friendy!
As creepy pointed out, you have to be able to deal with the idea of data as objects rather than pages. That doesn't sound like any client I ever heard of, except maybe the programmers I was dealing with last week.
I need to be able to train people, people.
Well don't call it an object. Use their vernacular. If you are talking to a store owner call the objects products. etc.
If it is a simple brochure type site.. there are some strict page editing cms solutions out there that I would go with.
What about SEO?
One of my biggest concerns is how the CMS will enable the site to perform in search engines.
The DotNetNuke site I've worked on does great in search engines, even up against heavy competition.
I can't claim the same from any of my Joomla builds.
The taxonomy and tagging system in Drupal is super friendly to both Google and Bing. One week after setting it up for a client that was showing up three to four pages back, they were hitting #1 for both.
Originally posted by: AgentX [quote]Originally posted by: creepylurker What BH said. You can modify it to be very light and thin. You might have to do some heavy lifting.. but it is very flexible.
As I said.. the out of the box solution is rather shit.
You also have to decide what is really best for the client. Are we talking about a database driven sight with thousands of possible pages(objects)? or like a 5 to 10 page brochure site?
We're talking about a sprawling, corporate, multi-faceted, multi-user web extravaganza. [/quote]
I don't think you should expect the CMS to take care of the IA issues. You'll need to do that, then find or modify the CMS to suit, but then again I do UML for fun, so others may have different experiences and suggestions.
At least that has been my experience with tons of shit going on, and a marketing dork saying just get our site up.
IA is not my concern. I'm dealing with a client with an existing site, tons of content and an established base.
They were totally ass-raped by their previous IT consultancy, and now we're looking at starting again from scratch. So IA is going to be a fair part of what I do for them.
My principal concerns are for admin usability, extensibility, and for the search engine performance.
Check your pms!
OMG PMS AOK LOL.
i've used silverstripe for one project, which was actually quite easy to use and modify. it also had a fairly civilian friendly interface that looked/behaves a lot like windows xp. without their caching option though it's dog shit slow.
i tried expression engine for another project and hated their templating system, which i think is similar to drupal. so i ditched it completely.
same project i tried rolling my own (a very simple set of needs) with expression engine's php framework (codeigniter) quite easy to use, far better caching than silverstripe and quite a lot of "plug-ins" to add functionality quickly (like advanced session/login management).
i've also used wordpress, mostly on smaller sites, but my experience with it. the plethora of plugins/addons and some recent changes to the ui have me ramping up usage. i'm going to replace the codeigniter custom thing i did with a wordpress install. supercache is a must, but this client sees about 100,000 unique visits a month, but they need to have the site basically packaged up and delivered to regional partners so they can have their own.
Have a look at Concrete5. Its user interface is about as easy as it gets client-side an it's easy to theme, extensible etc. We've been using it for about a year on a dozen or so clients sites and it seems rock solid.
I just started learning to use the OpenAtrium distribution of Drupal. Apparently it addresses a lot of the usability issues of Drupal, but since I started learning how to use Drupal on the same day, I couldn't say, one way or the other.