About a week ago, I decided to put together a development community web site where developers, designers, and architects would have a place where all aspects of development and design can be discussed. I shopped around for a decent web host, which took about a week of research, sorted through the reviews and purchased my domain and hosting plan. I will say that reading through web hosting reviews is quite a task in itself, and I may post my experiences and all the "fun" stuff I ran across during my research in another article, but I digress.
So anyway, I now had a presence on the internet and our story begins...
Now that I had the land, it was time to build a house and consider the design of the site. Since the main purpose of the site is to have quality content driven by the user community, it made sense to being looking at the different content management systems available. It occurred to me that the most logical first place to look was in the cPanel / Fantastico "one click" installation options that came with my hosting service. I was pleasantly surprised at the number of options that were available for install right from within Fantastico, so I started researching each of the options by visiting their project sites, trying online demos, and researching reviews using Google. My preliminary research produced these notes:
- Drupal (v 6.1.2) - Large number of extensions; good developer and user community; decent themes; looks fairly easy to setup and use right out of the box. Good candidate for further evaluation.
- Geeklog (v 1.5.2) - Small number of extensions; interesting features; somewhat unorganized project site; development appears to be slow. Not for me, next!
- Joomla! (v 1.5) - Large number of extensions; great developer and user community; good themes; looks very easy to setup and use right out of the box. Another good candidate for further evaluation.
- Mambo (v 4.6.5) - From the articles I found, Mambo is actually the original project from which Joomla! had forked and there weren't really that many differences between the two. Given this information, I decided to leave this out of my evaluation for now with a note to take a look at it again later.
- PHP-Nuke; phpWCMS; phpWebSite; Post-Nuke; and SiteFrame - Each of these projects looked interesting, especially the ones that have been around for a while, but they just didn't catch my attention right away (my A.D.D kicked in). Probably not the best way to judge a CMS system, but I had limited time for research and I had to shorten my evaluation list. I would encourage anyone doing extensive research into CMS systems to check these projects out though, and I may do so as well when I have a bit more time to dedicate to the subject.
- TYPO3 (v 4.2) - Well, I will probably take a lot of flack for this, but I looked at the administrative interface screen shots, and literally said to myself "YUCK!" (audibly), and moved on. While this system may well have great features, the back end interfaces remind me of an early build Windows 95 running in 256 color mode. I just couldn't get past how ugly I thought it was, so I didn't even get to the feature set. You never get a second chance to make a good first impression, but I'll check back in a year or so to see if they've cleaned it up a bit.
- XOOPS (v 2.3.3) - Decent number of extensions; good developer and user community; good themes; looks easy to setup and use right out of the box; really nice caching features. An easy pick for further evaluation.
- WordPress (v 2.8) - While not technically a CMS (at least several would argue that point), WordPress is probably the most popular blog / content publishing system in use today. Didn't have to do much research to realize I need to give this one a shot as well.
So now we have our four finalists and I'm ready to get my hands dirty and figure out which I like best for the site. Will it be Drupal, Joomla!, XOOPS, or WordPress? Well, just pretend that you don't know what system we're running here and tune into the next part of this series of articles anyway as I, as a novice to CMS, dig into these four great systems.