Best CMS for a magazine?

Question

Hello! I am looking for a good content management system for a magazine. Main features I am looking for are (1) good content editor (preferably WYSIWYG) that would handle footnotes, tables and other content intricacies and (2) good templating system, so that I could change the site without too much hacking. Bonus points if it is written in something else than PHP (no offense).

Update: Please do not simply submit the name of your favourite CMS. There are dozens of content management systems and I know most of them could be used to run a magazine. But does it have a good content editor? Do I have to insert markup by hand? How about footnotes? How about tables? Can you share some experience running something similar to a magazine?

Answer 1

Drupal

Like every good CMS it has add-ons for content editing similar to what's on Stack OVerflow. You can also specify a process whereby an article has to be subitted, edited, and signed off before it's actually displayed.

Answer 2

Hello.

I am not an expert in this subject, but I think that Joomla is an excelent CMS to use. It has a lot of interesting features, and it is free :D.

Answer 3

Although is not a ready made CMS, but a framework, Django might be a good choice. It was initially designed by some journalists for an online newspaper. Django is written in Python.

Answer 4

If you have the budget, you could perhaps purchase a copy of the CMS Watch Report, which attempts to address your questions. I think you can also get a couple of sample chapters to get an idea of what the report contains from here

Also, see the CMS list on Wikipedia.

Depending on the size of your organisation, you might even want to consider a hosted CMS solution, as detailed on the wiki page?

Hope this helps.

Answer 5

I prefer to use Joomla for some noticeable number of website types. Plus I've never heard about something similar to Joomla-Builder for other kinds of CMS. Drupal is good, but with Joomla I can do faster deployments of pre-built solutions for my clients and they are happy.

Answer 6

Hi there zoul!

I am putting together a Travel Magazine with my team, and we do journalism/design. Thats when we found Joomla!, installation, hosting and template provider by +Joomla!.

Why joomla is the best?

• Dynamic structure management - when you are running a magazine you will have different people writting about different issues all the time and you dont want to end up having unorganized or hard to trace. Joomla is very good because you can define your articles, sections and categories and related with pages on your site or modules

• You mention good content editor (preferably WYSIWYG) - thats what joomla uses, you can build pretty much anything in there since tables, links, footnotes... I do advise you to keep an eye on the code generated as all the content editor tent to build trash-code if not used right.

• You have amazing modules for design, multi-language so you can easily boost up your website by just instaling and trying it out.

Nothing better than joomla! for daily information upgrades like any working magazine.

Hope i could help, if you need anything else just ask at +Joomla!.

Answer 7

Actually, depending on your needs, I've found WordPress (sorry, PHP) to be a good platform for a magazine. Multiple authors, WYSIWYG content editing, ability to specify contributors and editors (among others), and extremely flexible theming.

Before anyone objects to a blog platform as a magazine, here's the key to it: it's all about the theme. If your theme looks like a blog, then it is not a magazine. If the theme looks like a magazine, then it is not a blog (in general, anyways).

I found it very easy to convert the WP Arthemia theme from a good magazine-looking theme into an actual magazine front-end for WP - the big thing was getting WP to publish by Issue instead of solely by date (which was much easier than I thought it would be).

So in the end, using WordPress and a modified Arthemia theme, I was able to setup a magazine-style site that has multiple authors and editors, publishes monthly (will be adding a "Hot News" section that publishes like a normal blog, though), and all in about a day and a half.

Worth considering, at least.

Answer 8

Have a look at Krang.

Its geared towards magazine style content and has over 220 magazine websites using it (see sites using Krang). From Krang's about page:

Krang provides a simple story and media editing environment for magazine editors as well as a complete template development environment for web designers.

Also it gains the bonus point for being written in Perl (Apache/mod_perl & MySQL) ;-)

/I3az/

Answer 9

Using open source will run you the risk of being exploited, versus proprietary solutions. Although a lot of people are doing well with wordpress. But keep it updated for security!

Answer 10

Try Vivvo CMS (www.vivvo.net), news content management system, designed for newspapers and magazines. Lots of news websites use it.