A quick review of web content management systems suggests that there are three free systems that have substantially more market share than others. We may want to think if it would be appropriate for us to limit our consideration to these three systems: WordPress, Drupal and Joomla. A very recent comparison with some graphical statistics is at:
http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/drupal-joomla-wordpress-smackdown
A PDF which compares the 'top' 20 open CMS systems is available at:
http://www.waterandstone.com/sites/default/files/2010%20OSCMS%20Report.pdf
There are plenty of other CMS systems out there, including just the free ones. However unless we have some strong advocate for a particular system, I don't see any other natural dividing line and my inclination would be to start with these to see if one of them can meet our requirements. Sarah's listed many of the requirements in here previous post (I think a choice of mayo or mustard on the sandwich is needed too) but we'll want to delineate these more completely and clearly and see how these tools match up.
I did a bit of searching on how difficult it is to copy web sites from one of these systems to another. Generally it seems to be non-trivial but not a horrible task so there is some ability to transition.
The overall impression I get in reading many discussions of these is:
Similarities:
All have a free core system but significatn use of any of these typically involves getting plugins that address specific needs. Some of these plugins may be commercial, but are typically not very expensive.
Differences:
WordPress, Joomla and Drupal go from easiest/least powerful to hardest/most powerful. However new releases in all of these systems are reducing the differences on all sides. WordPress has moved from being primarily a blogging platform to a full-featured CMS. Drupal is providing more out of the box capability to users.
If there are members of the team that can comment from experience on comparisons of these systems that would be very helpful. Since these are evolving rapidly mentioning when you used them would be helpful.
That is interesting that WP is counted as a full CMS, i would be interested to know more about what features it has as a CMS. I have used it quite a bit for very small websites, and also sites that are primarily a blog - so learning how to use it would be less of a mountain climb. But can it do the other things on our list?
ReplyDeleteMy sense (and this is from reading a dozen or so reviews not from personal experience) is that we can do anything in any of these with the appropriate plugins. For WP static pages and anything that can look like a blog is really easy and other things are harder. For Drupal any kind of page requires a certain amount of work, but it's far easier to adapt.
ReplyDeleteIf most of what we want to do falls into the kind of things WP will support, it's likely that will be easier for us to use. I'd like to write down a list of the kinds of web pages we anticipate writing and evaluate these CM systems against them. You did a bit of that. I'll try to put up a post today so that you can comment on it before you leave (not with evaluations but just the kinds of pages).
Here is an example of a page I made with WP that is not a blog:
ReplyDeletehttp://sandbox.psaap.cacr.caltech.edu/main/
and another
http://pasadenamentalhealthday.org/
Your examples certainly don't look perfectly reasonable to me and I don't think they particularly look like they come from WordPress.
ReplyDeleteI don't understand your comment, Tom.
ReplyDeleteI also think we should keep this pretty simple and focus on WP vs Drupal. Joomla is a medium coke option that votes itself out due to the pay for play for a lot of its functionality.
ReplyDeleteGus... One of the things that I've seen mentioned by some reviews of WP is that all WP sites look alike. Sarah's examples suggest that we could get to decide how we want things to look and then get WP to render it, rather than having to make something that's identifiably WP.
ReplyDeleteWhile I still say that Joomla is a medium soft drink and has issues with pay for play plugins, Profhacker has a few kind words:
ReplyDeletehttp://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/building-with-joomla/35148
http://open.nasa.gov/
ReplyDeleteentirely built on wp
it sort of shows.