Which CMS to choose?

Question

Hi!

I'm making a requirement analysis for a customer who is about to change CMS system. Today they have a tailor-made system, and they now want to pick a standard tool instead. The customer is a medium-size, non-profit organisation. They want a licence free, open source alternative. The organisation consists of one central HQ and about 25 regional organisations. CMS have three MAIN purposes

1) A news site. Published by both the central and the regional organisations

2) A tool for maintaining the register of contacts and memberships.

3) A tool for maintaining a custom database containing "business core information"

4) A public tool for searching in this database

The main user roles:

Administrator. Creates new pages, users, configures main menu etc

Central publisher. Publish central news

Regional publisher. Publish regional news

Public user.

Besides this we need the "normal" features like forum, blogging, RSS-feed, free text searching, SEO, calendar etc. If I try to find the requirements which are specific to this organisation they may be: 1) A "full-grown" and flexible membersship and contact management handling. It should be possible to register both organisations and persons and the relation between these (many-to-many). It must be possible to extend the "standard" fields like name, address etc with many custom fields/tables. Besides the role assignment (administrator, publisher, user etc), it must be possible to assign a user to a region. Becuse these two thing will decide what parts of the CMS hierarchy the user is allowed to edit. 2) Possibility to build a fully customized maintenance system for this "core business data" (a few tables with relations to the in-built contact register)

I'm new to CMS so I'm not sure what features to expect. While looking around the last days I have seen the following alternatives. WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, DotNetNuke (does this require SQL Server?). Most comments have claimed that WordPress is the easiest to start with for beginners. But does it do what I need?

Any suggestion of what product to choose?

/Valle

Answer 1

Check out http://php.opensourcecms.com/ which lets you try out many different open source CMS systems with demonstration sandboxes.

Answer 2

It seems a good choice could be DrualCMS for it's ACL authentication system, at least for the news and the static pages.

For the custom database you'll need to provide a module or a custom application

Answer 3

Wordpress is more a blog engine that can do CMS than the other way around. Joomla has a not very nice history with security matters (and so does about eveything in PHP) and seems to be more limited in terms of database support (only mysql). The one I use, RadiantCMS may be too small for your needs but it is really a nice CMS (that can do blogs).

Answer 4

See if you can get hold of the CMSWatch 2009 Report, which compares and contrasts a number of CMS products, including a number of Community Open Source CMS products.

It lists:

• Drupal - PHP
• Joomla! - PHP
• OpenCMS - Java (+Servlet 2.4)
• Plone - Phtyon (Zope)
• Typo3 - PHP

Answer 5

http://expressionengine.com/ (the free "core" version) would get my vote. It has full support for custom fields, multiple sections (strangely called "weblogs" in EE, even though they can be whatever you want).

I must admit I haven't dived too much into the security aspects, such as restricting access to individual section/pages, however (no need to so far).

For everything I've ever needed it to do, EE has risen to the job wonderfully.

Answer 6

Have a look at WordPress MU (multi-user).

Not only can you manage users, but the regional offices can handle their own and create their own regional publications. You can pool it all under a central page where news is aggregated from all offices.

The best part is you can extend the entire platform by writing plugins and pushing it out to all WordPress users under your umbrella.

You would have to learn the internals of WordPress and possibly hire a some proficient developers. I power Pakistan News using WordPress and everything is an extension/plugin (weather, themes, economic indicators) so upgrades to WordPress can happen seamlessly and adding features is a breeze since WordPress has hooks for nearly everything. It has worked great for me so far with a bunch of plugins (SEO, super-cache, etc).

For search I would like to shamelessly plug my Google Custom Search plugin. Google is pretty quick to update its index on almost a daily basis so the search results are quite fresh and highly relevant.

Answer 7

I'm not sure what expectations you or your client have regarding what free CMS's bring to the table. Reality check - It sounds to me like you want (or they want) to have a heavily customised version.

This spells trouble!

If you are going to modify, and from your description - you are. You are going to need to learn the language the CMS is written in. This is really the core question as far as i'm concerned.

Are you upto speed on PHP? if so then Joomla is your most likely candidate. Lots of free templates and plugins etc

Can you read/write vb.net or c#? Then you might consider graffiti or communityserver.

Either way, I can't think of any CMS which off the shelf gives you more than a hand full of your wish list.

Good luck.

Answer 8

If they've already narrowed it down to a "a licence free, open source alternative", just make sure that they understand that the cost of ownership for a CMS is usually much more than the license fees. Are they expecting to pay for support? Will they be expecting to invest in development and customisation?

Answer 9

There are literally thousands of CMS's out there. Many are quite small, and have specific purposes, but there are hundreds of major ones. Each has their own benefits and weaknesses. Each has their own design and implementation philopsophies. Each are based on different technologies and platforms. Each have different levels of integration with other products.

I've been involved in several CMS evaluation projects, and they're never easy. You have to evaluate all your needs and wants, requirements and requests, etc.. plan for the future, where you want to go, etc...

A limited, but good first start is to go to CMS Matrix and do some side by side comparisons of features. Someone else mentioned Open Source CMS as well, but you should probably narrow down your choices first before you go there.

Eventually, though, you're going to have to deploy some products and see if it works the way you would like it to.

Most importantly, don't listen to anyone that says "Use Blah", because anyone that tells you what to use without knowing your requierments is just telling you what they have used, and while it's possible that whatever system they recommend will work out for you just fine, you may also have a miserable failure.

Answer 10

I would suggest that you go with Typolight CMS www.typolight.com

here are its features

Full feature list

* Accessible XHTML strict output
* Meets W3C/WAI requirements
* Uses Ajax technology
* Web 2.0 support (mootools-based)
* Live update service
* Accessible administration area
* Multiple back end languages and themes
* Generates search engine friendly URLs
* Multi-language support
* Powerful permission system
* Versioning and undo management
* Advanced search and sorting options
* Front end output 100% template based
* Automatic e-mail encryption (spam protection)
* Supports SMTP in addition to PHP's mail function
* Supports multiple websites in one tree
* Supports GZip compression
* Print articles as PDF

Cross-browser CSS framework

* Creates columns automatically
* Existing CSS files can be imported
* Supports custom layout sections
* Supports static and liquid layouts
* Includes important IE bug fixes

Editing features

* Clipboard feature
* Edit multiple records
* Built-in rich text editor (TinyMCE)
* Different content elements and modules
* Multilingual spellchecker
* Insert tags (similar to server side includes)
* Manual or timed publication

Page features

* Different page types
* Multiple websites in one tree
* Manual or timed publication
* Hidden pages
* Password protect pages

News/Blog features

* Blog functionality
* Multiple news archives
* Syndication via RSS/Atom feed
* SPAM protection
* Require login to add comments

Newsletter features

* Subscription via double-opt in
* HTML and plain text format
* Sent newslettes can be listed on the website
* Synchronize subscriptions with member accounts
* Import recipients from a CSV file

Calendar features

* Multiple calendars
* Calendar and mini-calendar
* Supports syndication via RSS/Atom feed
* Multiple views (day, week, month)

File manager

* Multiple file uploads
* Image thumbnails and file preview
* Edit uploaded files with the source editor
* File operation permissions
* Copy, move, rename files or folders
* Delete folders recursively

Form generator

* Automatic input validation
* Store uploaded files on the server
* Send form data via e-mail
* Send uploaded files as e-mail attachment

Search engine

* Automatic page indexing
* Search indexing on protected pages
* Phrase search, wildcard search, AND/OR search
* Search result caching and pagination

System features

* Open Source (LGPL)
* Web-based administration
* Platform independent
* Over 150 third party extensions
* Multilingual documentation

Answer 11

It seems like you've got quite a few requirements on the project for functionality and don't want to reinvent the wheel with most of it. I would recommend Joomla only because the community is so large and they have a huge amount of extensions that will likely take care of all of your requirements: http://extensions.joomla.org/

Installation of these extensions are dead simple and something you could pick up in no time.

Answer 12

http://umbraco.org/ if you wan't to go the .Net route. I was at a lectue with one of the developers of it, and I gotta say, he managed some pretty cool stuff in a few hours :)

Answer 13

I would suggest SITEBOX

Sitebox is web-based and therefore always and everywhere available.

• You do not need to install separate software all you need is a PC with Internet access
• The uniform user interface of all modules, even custom modules are build in the same intuitive way.
• With one Sitebox license you can manage multiple websites