Comments on: Content Management Systems

By: Demopoly

Demopoly — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:23:56 +0000

I use Drupal. Since lunarpages doesn’t include it in the cpanel, I added it myself. Nothing beats it. It’s fast, simple, powerful, and ultimately configurable.

I have built large commercial services on top of Drupal, and now I’m using it to publish a NATIONAL dive magazine.

There is a dating service in development that I’m working on which uses 100% drupal. It rocks. I wish everything worked this well in the software world.

By: Nancy

Nancy — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 16:09:18 +0000

I am looking at CMS systems, for some volunteer sites I do.

I am a professional standards and 508 webdesigner/developer I build my own stylesheets. Drupal looked overwhelming, but I didn’t try it out.

Any recommendations?

By: Kaanon MacFarlane

Kaanon MacFarlane — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 19:31:24 +0000

http://www.silverstripe.com/ is a new kid on the block, but it’s got potential

By: W. Anderson

W. Anderson — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 16:25:34 +0000

Content Management Systems have some fundamental advantages over bloggers like WordPress, with features greater and more powerful user controls, document management and other functions.

I have Joomla! site on LunarPages, but use Zope/Plone a Python based CMS for more powerful portals,
which bloggers certainly cannot do and is difficult in Joomla.

By: Rafael

Rafael — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 16:18:52 +0000

For those lucky enough to use a Mac there is a truly EASY “personal” CMS called RapidWeaver. This slick, beautiful little web package combines the features of a CMS with the ease-of-use of a next generation interface. The templates easily equal or surpass those found in Joomla or similar CMSs. The cost is extraordinarily low: $59 for the app (which includes a handful of built in page-types like a blog, photo gallery, movie page, and basic text/photo, plus automated navigation (!), and a couple dozen themes. Additional plug-ins that provide slick little applets (including an ecommerce plugin for PayPal) are typically about $10-$20 each. For less than $100 you can have a tool set that delivers very professional sites rivaling what Dreamweaver or Joomla type apps can do.

And the kicker? It’s drop-dead easy, no coding required. But if you are comfortable with fiddling with HTML/CSS, then RapidWeaver allows you to customize “under the hood” quite easily. The only major limitation is that it’s “personal” and not “enterprise,” which means it doesn’t generally support 3rd party connections for editing. But it does support limited external editing through a couple of plug-ins. Still, for prototyping and for clients who only want occasional updates, RapidWeaver is well worth investigating. It’s the best kept secret on the Mac platform.

Check it out! http://www.realmacsoftware.com
It’s worth buying a Mac for, IMHO.

By: Marc

Marc — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 12:21:46 +0000

Joomla is NOT web standards compliant and as such completely uninteresting for me. Just looking at the code coming out of Joomla makes me shudder. Brrrrr…. If you at all care about web standards and accessibility then Joomla is a terrible choice. Joomla is sooooo last century…

Drupal is an excellent choice, as mentioned above, with it’s large community and tons of modules available. Drupal is extremely powerful but it might be an overkill for some people, who has no need for all the goodies that Drupal has to offer.

I suggest that you first try to determine what you actually need your CMS to do. Both at present but also features and function you might need in the future. Armed with this info, it’s time to start looking at the alternatives and believe me, there are many, many alternatives out there.
The CMS Matrix (http://www.cmsmatrix.org/) is a great resource to compare alternatives.

For those of you who are looking for an extremely easy (although very limited in function) to use CMS, you might want to check out CushyCMS (http://www.cushycms.com/).