Your experiences with content management systems

Icecube

Icecube

Up 24h/day
Mar 14, 2007
1,169
9
0
Europe
A lot of times I've been browsing, checking features, reading opinions about several content management systems
I tried to get a clear picture of how hard creating custom modules is ( call them as you prefer, I mean additional features, plugins, extensions...) but you don't understand how hard it would be until you actually try to develop something.

I think a thread with our experiences would be really useful in order to understand which could be a cms for our own development needs and also for our customers ( for web developers ).

I'm interested in a cms that would make reasonably easy to build a website and add features like blogs, forums, ecommerce, photo galleries, additional languages etc

It would be very useful if we posted our impressions regarding the most important aspects: extensions availability, community support, ease of administration, ease of customization and templating, performance, hot features, what we liked and what not, maybe what we were trying to build and how hard it's been or how it's been done.

Joomla, drupal, concrete5, modx, ez publish, contao, silverstripe, exponent, typo3 etc..which would you choose? why?
 


My own experiences:

Wordpress
We all know how easy it is to build a website with wordpress, customizing it is easy and, being one of the most popular cmss, there's a lot of community support, on the support section of their website and in pretty much any online community. Auto updates in a single click, tons of plugins, thousands of free themes.
Latest version includes the possibility to manage multiple websites from a single WP installation.
I never tried to develop a plugin.
Lacking multi lingual support.

Joomla
I used it for one of my own websites which required 2 languages. The administration interface is rather confusing with sections, categories, modules, plugin, components etc. Probably it's just a matter of understanding the differences, but it could probably be better organized.
Creating a template is not hard as it just requires an html file with snippets to call joomla functions, then you can place items in the template zones and order such items from the admin panel. I find this system and its administration panel rather confusing.
I never tried to develop a plugin.
Multiple languages supported via a plugin
Clean URL supported via a plugin ( that had some problems when I built the website )

Contao ( fka Typolight )
You build your template directly from inside the admin panel, there's a not so active support community, multiple languages are supported via a module that can be installed, but switching from a language to another works just with website pages and not with single articles. Many plugins area available and once you understand how it works it's easy.
You can pick the url you want for every page, keywords, title, everything.
I never tried to build a custom module for it.

PHPWcms
I used this cms to build a single small website so I don't have much to say about it, not bad if you're not looking for particular functions. The website can be organized so that multiple languages can be used. ( I've seen many hotel websites created with this cms so it has to be good for that purpose ).

All these websites are small projects so I don't really have huge customizations experiences to share.
 
Joomla 10++
Wordpress 8++ (not overly experienced in WP... dont mind it though... great for blogging...)
others.... forget them...
 
Wordpress and Joomla. Both have huge communities, resources and abilities.

Joomla has a bit of a learning curve, but its well worth it if you are developing multiple sites.

Both of these have extensions for all the features you listed.
 
If you are making a professional website, ExpressionEngine is by far better to manage, maintain, and template for than Joomla, Drupal, or Wordpress. It's not free, but saves more than enough time to pay for itself. Their dedicated support is also awesome. I stopped using open source stuff for client websites because it was so annoying spending a huge amount of time fixing other people's errors when their plugin broke and they weren't obligated to help since it was free.

If you are just doing some affiliate stuff, then Wordpress is the way to go.
 
Rexibit said:
If you are making a professional website, ExpressionEngine is by far better to manage, maintain, and template for than Joomla, Drupal, or Wordpress. It's not free, but saves more than enough time to pay for itself. Their dedicated support is also awesome. I stopped using open source stuff for client websites because it was so annoying spending a huge amount of time fixing other people's errors when their plugin broke and they weren't obligated to help since it was free.

If you are just doing some affiliate stuff, then Wordpress is the way to go.
Click to expand...

I would agree with this.

I personally prefer to develop my OWN CMS's when it is going to be a long term project, backbone, or website. Most out of the box solutions have too much, or too little or do not allow the ease of customization I want.

If you are doing simple networks, and SEO type of things. There are plenty of decent CMS out there. But if you are building something bigger, or have a lot of content. You really want to look at investing in a good CMS. Even if you develop your own, or purchase a higher end solution.
 
I'm actually really close to using expression engine on an upcoming project. I already use codeigniter for all of my medium to large projects, so just seems to make sense to me.

Anyone done heavy development with EE as a base?
 
I would like to add a vote for WordPress. It has an incredible community, a huge variety of paid and free plugins, themes, and other customizations, and is easily customizable. Writing themes and plugins for it is easy and it's very powerful.

Only downside is that it isn't built for CMS, but if you use the right theme (see WooThemes) it's easily made into a very powerful CMS.
 
grassblades said:
I would like to add a vote for WordPress. It has an incredible community, a huge variety of paid and free plugins, themes, and other customizations, and is easily customizable. Writing themes and plugins for it is easy and it's very powerful.

Only downside is that it isn't built for CMS, but if you use the right theme (see WooThemes) it's easily made into a very powerful CMS.
Click to expand...

That's the only downside? How bout every time there's a new releasae it's greedier for resources than the last. Hell I jump over 100MB in ram usage just accessing the admin panel, and I'm not even using more than 3 plugins (wp-syntax, xml sitemap generator and wp-super-cache.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom