Best CMS in your opinion?

[BuzzKill]

I have a site that needs a forum, a simple one, I dont want to deal with heavy maintenence , security, or bullshit spammers. I have one click set up for :

geeklog
xoops
mambo
phpwiki
postnuke

I just need to create a place for visitors to start to congregate, a spot to post news articles that are gathered, and of course i need to be able to easily place banner ads and adsense etc.

I used to use postnuke and it did a lot of stuff, but I also remember having a somewhat difficult time with some of the settings, I ended up modifying the templates and eventually did the ultimate bonehead move and somehow managed to lock myself out of the forum then deactivate the login box.

Does anyone have any experiences good or bad with any of the ones listed? They are listed on my server as CMS's but I dont know if that really applies to all of them.

 

[Olly]

I quite like Joomla!, there's loads of skins and mods for it and it has a lot of good features. Can be a bit complicated at first though but not as much as others.

I also like to use Wordpress as a CMS as it's nice and simple to use and has a lot of good themes and mods.

 

[trophaeum]

drupal is my pick but its a bit advanced of a start for many users, after a while though once you get used to it its quite easy to do powerful things in minutes

 

[caretaker2007]

The Ramones are not wrong, Joomla is an offshoot of mambo, but last time I checked the mambo site things were started, or seemed to have started, being membership driven and not so open source. If you can unzip to your hard drive and upload the files use Joomla.

 

[MaestroDelWeb]

If you had a hard time with settings on postnuke, all the other CMSs are just as rough if not rougher. None of them are forums though. If you want an actual forum try phpBB it's free and extremely easy to use. It's not over complicated like some of the other software out there. There are also hacks where you can use it as a CMS/blog type site.

Or the WordPress suggestion. WordPress is super easy to configure and has a million uses and to me is better than any CMS out there.

 

[BuzzKill]

Yes I found this out, its not so much tough, just does much more than I need so I found I was having to spend time dealing with blocks that I had no use for. Too much set up. I decided to not deal with a CMS instead I have a couple pages, a blog and I installed Yabb for people to hang out and discuss.. The site is less about money and more about actually providing a resource. Its a site for people suffering from sleep disorders which have really made my life very difficult, I have been needing a breathing machine and have no insurance, there are too many people dealing with the same or similar situation. Even with two doctors in my family I am still at the mercy of the health care system. I was even going to skip the blog but I noticed today that all my new sites that have blogs have already been indexed within 24 hours.

And I agree with you completely about wordpress, its been very good to me, no reason to look elsewhere.

 

[devi]

I'm actually a fan of Drupal. It's very basic to begin with, but incredibly easy to extend the functionality of (go with the 5.x version, as 6.x is new, and not many mods are ported yet).

It also comes with automatically SEO-friendly URLs and you can easily include HTML or PHP on pages/in articles if you want to. There are also a number of AdSense modules for it. You can easily add pages and have them linked from the side menu and specify permissions based on user type (you can get more specific with mods, but the basic admin/logged in/anonymous subset should be good for you).

 

[artswerdstone]

Wordpress is best if what you need is a blog. Its 5 minutes install is not a joke.

For best versatility and easy of use I can only recommend Drupal.
Try it and you will love it.

Joomla has many fans, but you have to be addicted to it to really like it.

Best functionality and highest security is provided by Typo3, but don't even dream about learning it within 30days unless you have the abilities of a jet pilot.

There are of course great premium CMS programs, just you have to open your vallet.

Best forum ever written is vBulletin. It is worth to buy your licence.

phpBB is a good choice for just a forum.


I have hosts with easy, 1 click autoinstall feature, but I prefer not using it, because I like to have the latest versions for security. Host webmasters are usually too busy to update their autoinstall edition too often.

Choose Drupal, and you can have an all in one solution for CMS, forum, blog, shopping cart, adsense integration, articles, support and much more.

 

[warlock77]

Wordpress is the best option for blogs and cms

 

[BuzzKill]

I am lucky to have a friend that runs one of the larger adult hosts and I have a reseller account so security is not an issue, they are at the top of their game in that regard. I have been using wordpress since it came out and before that I used phpnuke. The CMS systems for the most part seem to give the appearance of a community and the blogs look more like a one man show.

Before anyone starts talking about templates, widgets, etc. I understand all that, my search was to find something that would come out of the box ready to go, I have more sites and more traffic than I do time, and this site is more of a courtesy to people who seem to be looking for a place to go, but its nothing that is going to generate buckets of cash for me in the short term so I am not interested in tracking down themes, plugins, widgets, etc. In the end, as I said, wordpress and yabb will do what I need it to do.

Drupal is the one that I did look at for a while and people do really seem to love it.

 

[berrycorp]

joomla is the best!! nothing better!!

 

[ctrlfreak]

Well, if you take a look around the Google Forum and BHW both use Vbulletin + VbSEO. If I could afford it, I would do the same.

 

[pinnacle]

artswerdstone,

Could you recommend a few of the better premium CMS scripts?

Thanks

 

[caretaker2007]

arts, that makes for sad hosts really, especially with anyone using CPanel with fantastico, which has an auto update cron job. I also disagree with your assessment of Typo3, but that was several years ago and the new version maybe better.

 

[artswerdstone]

artswerdstone,

Could you recommend a few of the better premium CMS scripts?

Thanks

I wouldn't comment them better than the authority site I've used once to learn about CMS.

Please visit site cmsmatrix.org for unbiased reviews about most of CMS available on the market. On cmsmatrix.org you can compare side by side, feature by feature your selected CMS, free or paid versions.

 

[stonewake]

Joomla has released a new version 1.5 recently. The most welcome improvement among other is SEO friendliness. It has got thousands of free and commercial plugins.
Drupal is also great. Though community support is somewhat geeky, the founder has started a commercial company Acquia ro support Drupal.
This means will never go worng with either Joomla and Drupal.

 

[zilcha]

you only need 1 cms - Drupal