Wordpress, Drupal, Concrete5 or other Content Management System?

winston · #1 12-01-2011, 02:40 PM

I'm about to start a student website for the art program I'm in.
Would like to know peoples' experiences with Wordpress, Drupal, Concrete5, Joomla, Zope/Plone and other Content Management Systems (CMS).

I have a little bit of general programming knowledge + a wee bit of web programming experience. I'm particularly interested in finding a flexible platform that's easy to learn...open source is appealing but not essential.

A lot of sites I've seen based on say, Drupal or Plone have a sameness to them and a less than stellar visual appeal, kind of like the difference between an orthopedic shoe and a fancy pair of sneakers. Is this inherent to a CMS or just a reflection of the (lack of) design sense of the person using it?

Again, this is for an art program so I need it to look beautiful. I have a very talented graphic designer to help me out. This will be used as an online gallery and needs social media/calendar functionality.

Thanks!

chicago_mike · #2 12-01-2011, 03:43 PM

Ahh...I'm actually learning this stuff now.

Drupal is actually pretty cool and so far makes complete sence. Reminds me of earlier wysiwyg editors, like...( dating myself here ) ..Frontpage.

BUT....

Make sure what you are going to build /develop actually can stand to be done in Drupal. Its not a one size fits all cms. Are you going to be doing any e-commerce or serious social dev work?

As far as themes...cms themeing does seem to be a little.."limited" but thats going to change...to a point, what happens is everybody likes someone elses theme, then there you go...

I'm also learning C# for Mango ( including xml and silverlight ) and its cool stuff.

MakiSupaStar · #3 12-01-2011, 03:57 PM

Subbed. Been looking into Drupal myself lately.

Selta · #4 12-01-2011, 04:17 PM

Don't forget Joomla, which is one I've used in the past. Keep in mind, while they come packaged with their built in templates, if you want to really use a CMS well, you're going to want to toss all of those out anyway.

chicago_mike · #5 12-01-2011, 04:31 PM

+1 with tossing of templates. They can do you good starting out, but templates can become a crutch. Im using a template for now for a basic e-commerce site, but will change it soon enough. But for my own personal site, I'll be working in Expression 4..Since Blend lets me code for the windows phone...

Lynda.com has some good video tutorials on Drupal / wamp mamp setup and they get into the basics of development.

I would also see if there are any MEETUP..uhh..meetups in your area dealing with drupal, Joomla, and even Javascript and or html5.

L-A · #6 12-01-2011, 06:04 PM

Learn HTML/CSS/Javascript. Once this is done, let Stacey do the heavy lifting

Learning a CMS first means you never understand how to make the page look and behave well in the first place.

winston · #7 12-02-2011, 11:00 AM

Yeah, I can see it's like using tabs instead of learning to read/write music. I want to learn how to do it for real later, but I'm going to be making a documentary at the same time and need to go with a ready-made solution for now.

Dirk Diggler · #8 12-02-2011, 11:10 AM

+1 L-A,
Do it right, HTML5 and CSS is how things will go in the future. You can't have complete control if you let CMS do the "magic" for you. Also for anything art-like, you don't use templates for your art do you?

That's my 2 cents.
Dirk

MakiSupaStar · #9 12-02-2011, 12:19 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by L-A

Learn HTML/CSS/Javascript. Once this is done, let Stacey do the heavy lifting

Learning a CMS first means you never understand how to make the page look and behave well in the first place.

I understand HTML, CSS, Javascript, and even LESS which is a flavor of CSS often used on platforms like Ning, but when coming to developing a social network, companies like Ning drive me nuts with their templates lack of ability to set up a local environment for design and code build. This is why I'm looking into Drupal. I can design stuff all day, but if I have to contort it into another template what's the point. I want something that will work on the backend, but with my design and basic code on the front end. So is Drupal my solution? Or is Stacey?

Selta · #10 12-02-2011, 12:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MakiSupaStar

I understand HTML, CSS, Javascript, and even LESS which is a flavor of CSS often used on platforms like Ning, but when coming to developing a social network, companies like Ning drive me nuts with their templates lack of ability to set up a local environment for design and code build. This is why I'm looking into Drupal. I can design stuff all day, but if I have to contort it into another template what's the point. I want something that will work on the backend, but with my design and basic code on the front end. So is Drupal my solution? Or is Stacey?

Depends on what you want to do really. For the most part, I've moved beyond CMSes... if I need to tie into a DB, I've learned how to do that myself now. The rest is just code. If you're a good coder and can make your own designs, just build up what you need from the ground - unless there's something specific that appeals to you about CMSes.

MakiSupaStar · #11 12-02-2011, 12:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ray Salamon

Depends on what you want to do really. For the most part, I've moved beyond CMSes... if I need to tie into a DB, I've learned how to do that myself now. The rest is just code. If you're a good coder and can make your own designs, just build up what you need from the ground - unless there's something specific that appeals to you about CMSes.

Well, I don't particularly want to get involved in backend management (

), or learn more code. What's CMS? Content Management Systems? I'm developing a social network. I want the account management, and user content to be fairly straightforward

Selta · #12 12-02-2011, 12:42 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MakiSupaStar

Well, I don't particularly want to get involved in backend management (

), or learn more code. What's CMS? Content Management Systems? I'm developing a social network. I want the account management, and user content to be fairly straightforward

What do you mean by "Backend management"? DB work?
CMS sounds like it could be a good start for you, or it could be the exact wrong thing to do, too. Without knowing the real plans for the "social network", it's hard to say. If you just want like a forum for posts and simple user profiles, I could see a CMS being the way to go. If you want something like FaceBook or G+, I would avoid CMSes all together.
CMS does = Content Management System.

MakiSupaStar · #13 12-02-2011, 02:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ray Salamon

What do you mean by "Backend management"? DB work?
CMS sounds like it could be a good start for you, or it could be the exact wrong thing to do, too. Without knowing the real plans for the "social network", it's hard to say. If you just want like a forum for posts and simple user profiles, I could see a CMS being the way to go. If you want something like FaceBook or G+, I would avoid CMSes all together.
CMS does = Content Management System.

Yeah. DB work. I don't want to deal with housing servers, and too much database code. It would be something like FaceBook.

Selta · #14 12-02-2011, 02:24 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MakiSupaStar

Yeah. DB work. I don't want to deal with housing servers, and too much database code. It would be something like FaceBook.

Like I said in my previous post, I'd avoid a CMS in this case. Either road you go down, you're going to have to code for DB, and maintain it though.

MakiSupaStar · #15 12-02-2011, 03:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ray Salamon

Like I said in my previous post, I'd avoid a CMS in this case. Either road you go down, you're going to have to code for DB, and maintain it though.

Sigh. I'm beginning to come to this realization.

Roscoe East · #16 12-05-2011, 07:40 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by winston

Would like to know peoples' experiences with Wordpress, Drupal, Concrete5, Joomla, Zope/Plone and other Content Management Systems (CMS).

Note that my experience with Drupal is exclusively as an end-user of a site that's built on Drupal, I have no direct experience with what the backend programming is like.

But fwiw, a 2000-member club that I'm a member of completely revamped their website a year ago. The new site is built on Drupal.

It sucks.

This has nothing to do with content; I'm referring to how apparently impossible it has been for the web master to implement seemingly simple, mundane features. It's been suggested rather compellingly that the folks who selected Drupal as the environment of choice were sold a bill of goods by some sweet-talking snake oil salesman, because anyone in the club who does have prior professional experience with Drupal is incredulous that anyone would have selected it for our needs.

So basically the club is stuck with an obtuse backbone that nobody likes and nobody understands and nobody can explain.

sloasdaylight · #17 12-05-2011, 09:15 AM

I'm gonna jump in here with my experience and take on three major cmses, joomla, drupal, and Wordpress.

Wordpress: This is a very easy to learn and manoeuvre in cms with a pretty much idiot proof back end. The limitation to this of course is that any real true custom work that you want to do in it requires some substantial knowledge of php and is also a little cumbersome in my experience. Theming it is fairly straight forward if you use one of the million different themes out there, and know some css. It's a good tool to launch basic sites in my mind, but not too much more.

Joomla: I used joomla for the better part of 2 years to build websites for clients. I hated it. I thought it was clumsy, overstuffed, poorly executed, and just generally not great. I don't really recommend this cms to a lot of people.

Drupal: I spent the last year or so at my web design job working pretty much exclusively with drupal and Wordpress, and the reason is pretty simple, its better than any other cms I've dealt with. The issue many people have with drupal is that its not so much a cms as it is a cmf, content management framework, and as a result its easy to feel overwhelmed.

Drupal is honestly the way I would tell anyone to go if they're thinking about using a cms. It's fast, light weight, powerful, secure, great for SEO with the built in taxonomy, and stable to boot. Whitehouse.gov was created with drupal, so that should tell you something.

sloasdaylight · #18 12-05-2011, 09:24 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Roscoe East

Note that my experience with Drupal is exclusively as an end-user of a site that's built on Drupal, I have no direct experience with what the backend programming is like.

But fwiw, a 2000-member club that I'm a member of completely revamped their website a year ago. The new site is built on Drupal.

It sucks.

This has nothing to do with content; I'm referring to how apparently impossible it has been for the web master to implement seemingly simple, mundane features. It's been suggested rather compellingly that the folks who selected Drupal as the environment of choice were sold a bill of goods by some sweet-talking snake oil salesman, because anyone in the club who does have prior professional experience with Drupal is incredulous that anyone would have selected it for our needs.

So basically the club is stuck with an obtuse backbone that nobody likes and nobody understands and nobody can explain.

What you're describing to me is an incompetent web master, which not a problem of the cms. Changes in drupal are easy to make, and in most cases can be done without any special software other than a web browser.

I also want to add this to the discussion, that I forgot to earlier. If you don't like the way drupal looks on the front end, I highly recommend toy look at both the omega and delta modules. The omega module is a theme that gives you an amazing blank template to begin from that is so easy to customize with just a bit of CSS knowledge its ridiculous. The delta module was developed by the same people, and is a contextual layout module, meaning whenever a rule has been triggered that you've previously specified, then the layout of you website will change, which is useful if you have users that can log in, or a forum, or really any number if things.

Drupal rules so hard.

MakiSupaStar · #19 12-05-2011, 10:24 AM

Excellent guys. This is all great advice. I'm beginning to get a little more encouraged about Drupal.

sloasdaylight · #20 12-05-2011, 10:41 AM

Good, you should, in my opinion. Drupal's very powerful, and fairly easy to navigate in my opinion. It's easily more intuitive than joomla, and at least as much so as Wordpress, while being much more powerful than either.

We're friends on Facebook, hit me up some time if you have any questions or what have you.