Recommend me a Web CMS

Draeger

Draeger

Draeger

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Up till now I've been concentrating on XHTML and CSS. I'm getting reasonably half decent with both. A while back, as in a few years ago, I dabbled with Joomla just for an experiment as I was curious about it. Anyway, I didn't really get into it as I didn't have the time.

Now I fancy getting to grips with some sort of CMS. So what should I be looking at in your opinion?. Joomla?. Wordpress?. Drupal?. My hosting package is Linux based and affords me Fantastico so I have a few options in there. :cool:
 
I'm not sure to be honest!!!. Nothing specific as yet, just looking to pick a decent one to concentrate on and learn it. Since I'm assuming each one has it's own little ins and outs/nuances I figured I would be better concentrating on learning one in particular.

Being slightly more specific, I'd like to be able to use it to create websites that users can log into and update themselves to a certain degree.
 
Try a few out and which you like best.
Wordpress is the obvious choice, the huge range of plugins has made it quite a powerful tool to use and it'd dead easy to set up.

I find Diem to be very powerful but it does have a steep learning curve (which I'm still at the bottom of!)
 
I can easily recommend Wordpress. Very easy to use admin interface. Very easy to customise the theme. Loads of community support and plugins, including Akismet which pretty much blocks all spam bots without the user needing to type a captcha.
 
Another vote for Wordpress, it's easy to use alone or with plugins, but it's also not hard to develop your own plugins or themes. You can start as small as you like and work your way up.
 
Depends on the users needs.
If its simply for blogging or posting a few articles then wordpress will be the easiest for them to use.

If it's more than that then concrete is a a good option.
 
I'm working with Wordpress at the moment. I bought a theme as a quick base and have built from that. It's very easy to customise and powerful enough for what I wanted too.
 
Never heard of Concrete but it looks interesting. Thanks for the link.

Surprised no one advocates Joomla given that it is "probably" the most recognised CMS?. How does Wordpress compare with it?.
 
I looked at Joomla and was literally dumbfounded by its apparent complexity. I'm sure its a powerful and flexible CMS when you know it, but I spent a day with it and didnt feel like I was getting anywhere.

Wordpress on the other hand, was organised relatively logically and has some amazing plugins.. the other day I installed autosuggest.. now all of my sites content is context sensitive in the search so you can see what results you may get. The only thing with WP is, its still blog based, and requires a bit of customisation to get it away from that.
 
gord said:
I looked at Joomla and was literally dumbfounded by its apparent complexity. I'm sure its a powerful and flexible CMS when you know it, but I spent a day with it and didnt feel like I was getting anywhere.
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I empathise with you on Joomla. It's possibly the most famous CMS, apart from Drupal perhaps, but seems so complicated for what people want from a CMS. I tried it a while ago and got nowhere fast.

gord said:
The only thing with WP is, its still blog based, and requires a bit of customisation to get it away from that.
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Isn't Wordpress 3.0 meant to make it easier to use Wordpress as a CMS and not have to "convert" it from a blogging platform?
 
I'd agree with that, Marc and gord. When I tried a bit of dabbling in Joomla a while back it didn't seem very intuitive and confuzled me somewhat.
 
MarcLister said:
Isn't Wordpress 3.0 meant to make it easier to use Wordpress as a CMS and not have to "convert" it from a blogging platform?
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Indeed, which is why I bought a corporate template as a base for my theme. Got that from themeforest.

Don't know how far off 3.0 is meant to be, but indeed it should bring it to a more general purpose CMS base.
 
gord said:
Indeed, which is why I bought a corporate template as a base for my theme. Got that from themeforest.
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Nice one. I might have a look at themeforest. Have been given a "spare time" project by the boss to look at the website and work on it. I could do a hand-coded XHTML/CSS site but I'm thinking a professionally designed Wordpress template and Wordpress 3.0 would look much better, as well as being much easier/quicker to update/re-skin etc. :)

gord said:
Don't know how far off 3.0 is meant to be, but indeed it should bring it to a more general purpose CMS base.
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Not very far off. It came out today. :p

http://wordpress.org/development/2010/06/thelonious/
 
Guys, a question on Wordpress.

I can, via my cPanel and Fantastico Deluxe, install Wordpress v 2.9.2. Once that has been done on my chosen domain, can I manually update to v 3.0?. Or would I need to download and install 3.0 manually itself?. Anyone know?.
 
Draeger said:
Guys, a question on Wordpress.

I can, via my cPanel and Fantastico Deluxe, install Wordpress v 2.9.2. Once that has been done on my chosen domain, can I manually update to v 3.0?. Or would I need to download and install 3.0 manually itself?. Anyone know?.
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Should be able to: http://codex.wordpress.org/Dashboard_Updates_SubPanel and http://wordpress.org/development/2010/06/thelonious/

Wordpress said:
Arm your vuvuzelas: WordPress 3.0, the thirteenth major release of WordPress and the culmination of half a year of work by 218 contributors, is now available for download (or upgrade within your dashboard).
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:)
 
Update to 3.0 is easy, when you login you *should* get an update message at the top of the screen. Before you update backup the db and/or go into tools and export your posts to an xml file just in case there are problems. If you don't get the update message at top, you can manually check by going into tools and then update. 3.0 brings a raft of improvements but can break some themes, notably buddypress which enables facebook like social functions, but otherwise it's a must upgrade. When I start a site up there are a few plugins I always install and I recommend you check them out :

All in One SEO
XML Sitemap
Contact Form 7
Statpress
W3 Total Cache
SEO Friendly Images

Those will speed up your site/blog, add some simple seo capabilities, submit your site to google etc. and allow you to see some fairly useful visitor stats. Any other questions, just ask!
 
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