Best flexible, extensible CMS for large site?

Question

We have a large site (2000 static pages and a lot of .Net-based dynamic pages), all hosted in IIS7.

Currently we are using Dreamweaver templates (and server-side includes for repeated content). It works ok, and allows our designers a lot of flexibility on a page-by-page basis.

However, we struggle with workflow, site organisation, deployment, shared and duplicated assets. All the things that a CMS could help with.

We have a good combination of designers and developers, so want to be able to continue to create cutting-edge pages using totally up-to-date technologies (that will degrade gracefully on down-level browsers).

Can anyone recommend a viable alternative to Dreamweaver for us?

Answer 1

I suppose the first question you should be asking is: 1) What kind of CMS would be relevant to use ? Are you after a .net based CMS, php based CMS or does it not matter ?

You have Wordpress (seen as a blog tool), but is now getting coverage and being seen as a CMS and has recently received a CMS award.

You then have the Drupal, and Joomla CMS as well.

With regards to your dynamic .net based pages, I am assuming these could be converted to dynamic php pages, If so. I would trial Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla to see which benefits you.

Wordpress is very easy to use, has a template system and uses php. You can also customise the template on a page by page basis so that some pages can have a similar layout and others can be different.

Joomla is a more advanced CMS and thus has a steeper learning curve, but if you go through the functionality of Joomla it is quite good.

I don't know much about Drupal so can't comment on it.

Out of these 3, I am not sure which one would be perfect for you, but what I can advise is that you should trial all 3 and see which fits the bill for you and the site.

Answer 2

Pressflow, which is a Drupal fork kindof project, optimized for scalability and high performance (but 100% compatible with Drupal).

If your designers are familiar with HTML and CSS, building themes for Drupal themes won't be a problem, in worst case they have to learn a very little PHP for templating (like variable syntax, if, for, foreach syntax).

If not, then there are actual theme builder modules for Drupal, like http://drupal.org/project/Sweaver.

Answer 3

If you are looking for an open source ASP.NET CMS, I understand that http://www.dotnetnuke.com/ is the leading one... didn't try it myself, though