iweb and mobile me for a group content management system versus open source CMS

Question

I work at a non profit and we are looking for a web solution to do the following:

1. External facing web site
2. Internal posting board for news, updates, pictures
3. Entitlements around user content

One of the folks at the non profit is a mac person and suggests using iweb and mobileme for this functionality. i have no expereince with these tools but it seems like the following are more appropriate:

• TikiWiki: http://info.tikiwiki.org/tiki-index.php
• Drupal: http://drupal.org/
• Joomla: http://www.joomla.org/about-joomla.html

i am a windows dot net guys so i also would prefer some asp.net solution here but i want to avoid getting religious here as any solution that does the job should be fine.

my question is, are there any thing to be concerned about with using the iWeb and mobileme solutions or any brick walls we are going to run into.

Also, are there PC based solution that will allow you to use these tools or does everyone need a mac?

Answer 1

This is only a partial answer to a multi-part question, but:

Drupal and Joomla are platform-independent. The software itself runs on PHP (presumably on a server, rather than a workstation), but you interact with the systems via a web interface. Drupal in particular lets you choose from many different editing options, via it's Wysiwyg module.

Personally, I think Drupal is an outstanding choice for nonprofit org (this being my own background) that have tech-skilled staff, and Joomla is an outstanding fit for nonprofits that don't have much in-house web expertise.

As for iWeb and MobileMe:

Compare them to Adobe Contribute. They're good software for what they do, but building organizational websites is not what they do.

What you've got is basically a souped-up MS Word that writes W3C compliant HTML. Things like members-only content, interactivity, etc are going to be pretty difficult to manage, and you'll be looking for another solution soon anyway if your site gets larger than a few dozen pages.

Answer 2

Wow! I wanted to use Joomla but the installation is so complicated.
I currently have iweb and mobile me. Its easy and not that hard to work with. I already have my site up for a long time. I also put some ads up and I've made money (not much).

However, I can't control this site the way I want. I am unable to enter my keywords, pages titles, etc... So, the search engine doesn't know I am here.

I really need Joomla and I need a one on one training immediately. I have a mac computer running snow leopard.

Great thread!!

Answer 3

In short - avoid iWeb and MobileMe for this type of implementation. You may have a "Mac person" in the office (for now), but these products are designed more for individual/home use and not businesses/organizations. Eventually you'll run into any number of "brick walls".

A few other options (amongst many) if you don't have a web-designer on staff and want a hosted solution would be to look at Wordpress or Squarespace.

Thanks