Suitable CMS framework for site projects - advice needed

Question

I will be creating a website soon, and as such I have four projects on the go (or three if you consider the first entry as a full project in itself, not two separate sites):

1 & 2 - Internet radio station

3 - TV episode guide with airdates

4 - News site

I will describe each of them, and how I intend to use them:

Project 1 & 2

The first one I am trying to find a CMS that will work in the same way as this site: http://www.leicestersound.co.uk

where articles are in this format (note the site runs on ASP.NET):

http://www.leicestersound.co.uk/schedule.asp?day=3

http://www.leicestersound.co.uk/sectional.asp?ID=13054

http://www.leicestersound.co.uk/Article.asp?id=765080

(although these are IIS, I assume it could be done with PHP - with addtype directive in a .htaccess file to ensure that PHP is made to look as if it is ASP filename, and the querystring ID parameter as mentioned above).

The CMS should be customisable enough to do this; I've tried Joomla but it's not suitable for this purpose, URLs do not appear as name.php?id=VALUEHERE, anyone got any good ones to recommend?

For the other Internet radio station (which requires a different design, since it's aimed at a different audience), I'm trying to achieve an extension-less URL like this:

http://www.heart.co.uk/eastmids/shows/breakfast/

http://www.heart.co.uk/eastmids/shows/schedule/?date=2010-07-08

http://www.heart.co.uk/eastmids/shows/simon-dale/blog/

Although there are some query strings, all seem to use mod_rewrite in some way. Not sure if the site is written in ASP.NET or not, I can't tell.

Project 3 I am trying to create a TV and episode guide, like this, which has some dynamic updates of the content:

http://library.digiguide.com/lib/programmenextshowing/House-238308

(TV guide dynamically edited, note also alternative URL - original URL is http://library.digiguide.com/lib/programmenextshowing/238308)

http://library.digiguide.com/lib/episode/713448

(episode content from database presumably?)

The following two URLs also show the same effect I am trying to achieve.

http://library.digiguide.com/lib/programmenextshowing/12578&hPage=1

http://library.digiguide.com/lib/episode/714853

Although the above link is an ASP-driven CMS, I am hoping it could be achieved in PHP. I have tried MovieDB (http://movie-db.sourceforge.net/) but could not replicate it, it was ideal for my movie database, but otherwise not so good for the TV one.

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As for the fourth one, it is a lot easier to describe what I want to do, and it just requires simple editing and some image/file uploads - currently using Joomla but am not sure if that's the best thing for a news website.

Apologies if it seems like a lot of links, but it is demonstrating the effect I am trying to emulate with my websites, which I intend to do, and the CMS must be PHP/MySQL based (no flatfile ones there!) and able to work on Windows and Linux (I have a backup on my localhost on Windows, but my webhost runs PHP/MySQL on Apache on Linux!)

Thanks

Answer 1

While SO is a very good place to get answers for technical questions, evaluating which CMS suits a specific project is hard work, part of the project and therefore, your job. All people here can do is give you some pointers, and ask specific questions like "can PHP X do function Y?"

Check out the many "which CMS?" questions on SO:

• What is a good PHP CMS?
• Lightweight CMS in PHP
• and many more

Also take a look at OpenSourceCMS.com, a site that provides dozens of test installations of various CMSs ready for a test drive.