Which CMS is better
3rd August 2006
When you have a new web-project just about to be started, you frequently face the problem of the CMS selection – ‘Which CMS is better’? There’s a hundred and more various CMS out there. To name just a few – PHP-Nuke, PostNuke, Mambo, Joomla, Drupal, e107, XOOPS, Nucleus, Typo3, Xaraya, YACS! (visit http://www.opensourcecms.com/ for much more and try for yourself).
If you gooogle this problem, you will get loads of forums discussing topics like ‘Mambo vs Drupal’, ‘PHP-Nuke vs PostNuke’ etc. But, to be sure, this ‘source’ of information is not likely to really help you choose. What you need is a good in-depth overview of the systems.
And I found one at IBM’s web-site. I strongly recommend reading it if you need to choose a CMS. It’s fresh (July 11, 2006), and just good. Here’s a CMS comparison table from that address (copyrights belong to respective owners):
If you’d like to, you can also read Part 2, or the whole series of articles on IBM’s web-service design process, titled “Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site”. In the series, there are also articles describing the use of Eclipse, Apache, PHP, MySQL and phpMyAdmin for the collaborative web-site creation.
Update: for some reason :), IBM had taken down parts 1 and 2; now only parts three and four are available.
May 3rd, 2007 at 16:42
[...] Drupal 5.0 beta-1 available since October, 31 [...]
August 28th, 2007 at 22:28
It hasn’t gotten much easier to select a CMS since you posted this article. There are so many to choose from and they all have their strengths and weaknesses. I did want to point out that I found this site http://www.cmsmatrix.org very useful in comparing the current options.
I have decided to give Drupal a try – If you ever come accross a PHP network that integrates well (shares users) with WordPress & bbPress please let me know.
Best Regards,
Jeremy
August 29th, 2007 at 12:48
Jeremy,
I think Drupal is a good choice. From what I learned about it, it has compact core and lots of modules to add functionality. It was also featured on this year’s GSoC (and was popular among the GSoC students), so it appears solid and modern and developing. The biggest problem I had with Drupal was making it easily-multilingual. This is definitely achievable, but isn’t the core functionality of Drupal (or wasn’t? I’m half a year behind the latest version of Drupal).
User sharing among different PHP-based web apps is a relatively easy task, and often requires only a bit of custom programming. However, the effort and time required depend strongly both on the exact level of integration you want to achieve, and on the differences in user privileges system. The easiest thing to do is usually enabling users to cross-login at different CMS-like systems (e.g. WP and Drupal) after registering in one of them. However, such custom solutions might not be easy to maintain with future upgrades, as “linking users” requires some mapping of the user privileges…
There are also such controversial things as OpenID and the like, and if both CMSs support it – it’s the easy and compatible way to go. Though I doubt it’s a secure way to go
BTW, if you are looking for WP-compatible CMS, why not just use some customized WP install? Do you lack some specific features, which are not available as WP plugins? I’m asking because the easiest way is always using less tools, if possible