Recommended open source content management system for corporate website?

Question

We're preparing to rewrite/restructure our corporate website and are looking for a CMS to back it. I need the CMS to provide a way of giving certain users in our company control over certain sections of the web site (i.e., allow our Marketing department to update press releases, our HR department to update job postings, etc). It should also be reasonably non-techie friendly...

Is there a particular one you'd recommend, and why? Personally, I'd prefer a ruby-based system, as we have a lot of that skill in-house, but I'm not sure the ruby ones have reached the level of functionality and following that the PHP-based ones have.

Answer 1

Joomla is my absolute favourite CMS for corporate intranet websites, it has fine grained access controls, is easy to extend and has a huge community built up around it.

Answer 2

Our company uses Drupal. We chose it mainly because it's as close as we could find to an industry "standard", and it hasn't disappointed us.

Our graphics/UI person (who can't program) has no problem working with the "theme" files and "blocks", although she did have a slight initial learning curve as she figured out how they all worked together. Our blog maintainer (who doesn't even know HTML) can add entries to the blog using Drupal's rich text editor (ie. without knowing any HTML). And us Engineers ... well we pretty much haven't needed to interact with it at all once we got it setup (which was easy), so we have no complaints.

Of course, as with anything like this, your mileage may vary, and since I only used Joomla briefly I can't say that Drupal is necessarily better than it. I can say though that Drupal is more than capable of handling the front-end (our back-end is JSP) of a major website, and that it can be edited easily by non-technical people.

Answer 3

I recommend Drupal since a lot of major corporations use it to power their content sites (see Fast Company, Yahoo! Research, The Onion, 43folders, etc.)

Drupal is proven, very robust and solid. It has a large user-base, very helpful support, tons of modules/plugins and extensions to their code base. For developers, it is a fast setup and very easy to extend. For designers, the Drupal templating system is a lightweight way to integrate their designs.

Drupal also has an extensive role-based permissions system which will allow non-techies to manage rules as well.

As for ruby, the only thing I've seen come close is Radiant CMS. They too have a lot of modules/plugins available but I'm not sure how mature the project is. They have a simple role-based permission system too.

Comatose is another option, but it is a CMS plugin rather than a CMS package itself. It sits on top of rails, which may be a good or bad thing depending on your skill set, preferences and existing setup.

Answer 4

I found Joomla a little easier to understand. A harder alternative, but with more features is Typo 3. Drupal is nice too.

Whatever you choose, make sure it is a well known open source name. Otherwise you may fall in a vendor lock or find no support.

Answer 5

I'm surprised that noone has mentioned Typo3, as every company I've ever worked for has used it.
It's quite extensible and I've yet to see the support for controlled userpermissions in an other CMS.

Answer 6

If you want a Ruby-based CMS, you very likely want Radiant. There are others, but I've found Radiant to be the easiest to extend. It's reasonably mature at this point, and some of my friends use it almost exclusively, with great success, for building client websites. There is also a very good PHP clone of Radiant called FrogCMS.

If you do opt for Radiant, you probably want to run it on top of Phusion Passenger to keep maintenance to a minimum. The other deployment options usually only make sense when performance is a major consideration, which is rare for a CMS.