Please assist in CMS selection: WP, Drupal, Joomla.. ???

S

sharp

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Feb 9, 2003
Messages
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Ok [H], once again I turn to you... AND YOU HAVE DONE IT. Thanks. WP it is... Now I have a new question.. see post 11.

I want my site to have the ability to have:
1) content that looks "the way it is supposed to" crossplatform / scale / browser
2) easy to update blog
3) compliant
4) seo friendly
5) limited e-commerce possible (we have like two products...)
6) ability to have "classes"... not forums, but training courses and such
7) use code from aweber or whatever here or there

I have an understanding of 1-4... but 5 and 6 scare me and I know nothing of various CMS or things like ajax or ruby or asp or whatever... all that stuff will be hired done, but I do want to know what framework I should hire them to use/customize. I have zero issue using/tweaking a template and don't desire to have the "theme" done from scratch.

I'm thinking WP or Drupal... but I turn to [H] before moving forward (esp. as I don't know about offering courses or e-commerce on WP)... what do you guys recommend?

sharp
 
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Depending on your technical skill, I would use Joomla or Drupal. If you want it done quick and easy with little effort, go with Joomla. If you don't mind spending the time to do it right, use Drupal.
 
In my experience, Drupal has a better UI and better customizability right off the bat. I always thought that WordPress was the simplest CMS for standard blog-type sites, but never actually tried it out.
 
Joomla is very good.


The UI customization you can do with it is amazing if you know how to work with basic scripts, CSS and HTML.
 
I use Joomla myself, it's modular and has a ton of community-developed add ons, including a free e-commerce solution.

I tried WP for my site and felt it was aimed squarely at bloggers, both in appearance and function.
 
I've used both Joomla and Wordpress extensively. Joomla is a good product, but I feel Wordpress is better. IMO, Wordpress is more organized and strait forward. It's much easier for a non-techie to understand and contribute. It's also more efficient than Joomla. It's about half the size, 1/3 the code and 1/4 of the files. Functionality wise, they are pretty much the same. Both have extensive community support and plugins.

I used to use Joomla on my company site. We have also developed several Joomla based sites for customers. We moved our site to Wordpress a couple months ago and our traffic has more than doubled because of the plugins we use. We have also moved to developing new customer sizes to Wordpress. Also, our page generation time has been reduced by 50%.

I've posted about this on our blog:
http://synaptecllc.com/tag/wordpress
 
Thank you for responding so fast!

Per your reco I've looked at it and WP can do everything... and page generation being 2x as fast is a nice bonus too. That'll be my path then. Using a handy ready made template as a framework w/ some key plug-ins for courses and e-commerce it looks like I'll be up and going for about / less than $500 counting minor custom tweaking... which is an amazing bargain for what it would have been 10 years ago. wow. I'll be very pleased with this upgrade I think (though I may run the two domains side-by-side for awhile to compare admin on them just because I think I suffer from a special kind of dain bramage).

Thanks all, sharp
 
Ok, so WP it is.. now do I go w/ a theme + plugins or do I use something that is "CMS in-a-box" ...? I've installed plugins before... it was a non-event. Is there a reason to use something like: http://wpremix.com ? Am I just not aware enough to understand why this is better than grabbing a template of WP and just customizing it?

I sure don't mind spending money to do something better... but I don't want to spend money to install was is basically a couple themes with some plugins. Also.. it says the pages are NOT dynamic... is that good? It seems like that'd be bad; but then I really don't know; I just saw another site whose pages were dynamic and they seemed to be glad of it.

Thoughts on bringing the various bits together (for mostly free/cheap) v. paying for this?
 
I just use strait Wordpress + plugins. With a little work, you can set Wordpress up to automatically install plugins via SSH. This makes installation an upgrade of plugins a two click process. With the number of sites we manage, this reduces our work considerably. Also, Wordpress pages are dynamic.
 
And a few recommended plugins:
All in One SEO Pack
Google XML Sitemaps
Smart 404
WP Super Cache
 
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