Best CMS for a corporate web presence?

Question

I need a CMS for a corporate website. The corporation is a $200M company. We have a current site that's flash-based, but we'd like to replace it.

It's not a very complex site at all, mostly brochure-like with press releases and management bios. I'd like a CMS that's fairly easy for a non-technical user, as our marketing department would like to modify text and add releases. It should also be open source, hackable, and Linux-based if possible. We invariably need to modify things

What would you recommend?

Answer 1

Drupal gets my vote. However it's hackable but not an easy learning curve. You probably won't find a decent CMS that does both very well.

Answer 2

Wordpress MU gets my vote. You can even team up with Automattic if you're worried about support.

Answer 3

Drupal is probably one of the highest rated CMS's which would work decently in a Linux environment (due to it running on PHP).

DotNetNuke is one of the most popular CMS's, but since it runs on .NET you might have a bit harder time getting it to work (even if you have Mono properly configured on your host). If you are looking at a remote host, this is probably not a possibility.

Other options include other PHP CMS frameworks like Joomla.

Answer 4

I have to chime in for Wordpress too, for the following reasons:

1. You will have thousands of themes and plugins to use as a base for your custom setup. It won't take long to put something nice, unique and standards compliant together with all of the gizmos that your company wants.
2. Wordpress is remarkably easy to hack, its even easy to bring your existing 'static' pages into the Wordpress loop, this makes it much easier to keep existing links in place if you must. Many people I've talked with feel rather intimidated when hacking at Drupal.
3. Wordpress is very intuitive for the user, those who will be authoring / maintaining the pages. Again, in this respect, many people find Drupal rather intimidating.
4. Wordpress features one click upgrades, one click upgrades of plugins and one click installation of plugins/modules.

Both systems are backed by very well established organizations. Automattic maintains wordpress, Drupal is under the umbrella of SPI (Software In The Public Interest).

Be sure to read up on the differences between standard WP and MU, I don't think you'd need MU for your purposes.

Another popular misconception is that all web sites using Wordpress will resemble a blog of some kind, this is entirely not the case. I've used WP in the past just to organize a dozen or so static pages, never once exposing the blog or typical side bars. Its surely worth a few hours of time to give it a try :)

Disclaimer, I use WP for most of my sites, I may be biased.

Answer 5

Wordpress is not a CMS. It's a Blogging engine. It doesn't offer anywhere near the kind of flexibility a real CMS should offer.

Drupal may not be a bad choice, it's got a lot of support. However there is a bit of a learning curve.

Another choice might be Joomla, which also has a significant open source backing.

Stay away from anything with "nuke" in the name, they tend to be more community oriented, and less customizable.

People may also recommend Typo3, but again it's more of a blogging engine than a CMS.

Go to OpenSourceCms and try out the demos.. there's over 100 of them there. Also go to CMS Matrix and do some comparisons with the features that are important to you.

Answer 6

I vote for Drupal too. I use it every day and it is surprisingly powerful. The core code is pretty compact and quite approachable. Very clean design and evolving constantly. Up to version 7 shortly with continued support going back to version 4.

You can do a surprising amount without writing a line of code. And if you need to cons up a module or template, its all pretty logical and easily grokked. There are loads of resources with a huge number of modules for every use you can image. Endless quantity of themes. Very active community. Books videos. Stop me cause I could go on and on.

I've messed with Wordpress and Joomla and DNN and CMSMS and RoR and and a bunch of others and I keep coming back to Drupal.

If you're on a windows box, you can download & install drupal 6 under xampplite and have something you can mess around and get a feel for in under 10 mins.

Answer 7

Wordpress? Naah! for a $200 M company you ought to do better than that. Wordpress is a blog CMS, not a corporate CMS. Drupal may cut it if you get a great designer to do the job. You could also go for Joomla (with its million+ plugins and themes).

Drupal/Joomla it should be.

If you're looking for ASP.Net based solutions I've heard of commercial ones like Kentico, and cheaper ones like Umbraco.

But seriously, why isn't a $200M company thinking of getting a custom solution done? I am sure they can THINK OF ideas where a custom implementation can add value to their business.

Answer 8

No CMS or CMS like application is going to fit ones needs out of the box. Not WordPress, not Drupal. They will require a learning curve, some more than others (Plone for example). And for certain tasks and/or requirements there may not be a plugin that will do exactly as you desire.

What I would suggest is listing your requirements.Then, going through those requirements while evaluating each CMS noting down how much of those requirements are met. Figure out which CMS fills the most requirements while still providing the most important benefits and features you desire.

For example, the one that fills 100% of your requirements may have a very high learning curve while another, that is close to filling your requirements has less of a learning curve and also has a more active community. Weigh the positives and negatives and decide which of your requirements are most important and which system can provide you with those.

Other items to consider are the community, code base, and the ability to extend functionality via modules/plugins.

That being said, I would recommend Drupal or possibly Wordpress. If those don't fit your needs I would consider looking into custom solution and slowly build it up over time. Using a web framework, such as Django, can provide a good start to custom solution. It provides a nice administrative interface out of the box to your custom modules. I find it is much easier to develop for and modify than learning the ways and conventions of many of the CMSs available.

Answer 9

Take a look at ExpressionEngine.

It seems to me like a more polished CMS than with using Drupal and also, since it is a supported commercial product (with decent pricing), it might be a better corporate solution. Also, EllisLab seem to have a pretty positive vibe around them, so they should be nice to work with.

I wouldn't even consider WordPress for the web presence of a large company. You don't want to come across looking as an amateur blog by retaining any WordPress-specific elements, and you also shouldn't want to spend time twisting a platform to do what it wasn't meant to.

Answer 10

I recently just read this article that crystallizes my feelings on the issue. Every CMS I've looked at has either been too simple or overly complex and none of them would be a good fit for a medium to large organization. Don't waste your time fighting a CMS when a decent framework would let you build one in a matter of days.

Answer 11

Why don't you try this one : Corporate VYMCMS