CMS Systems Like Joomla

[MajWorks99]

A friend ... well, more like "helpful acquaintance" ... recently mentioned that they were moving from doing their website in html with Dreamweaver to a content management system. They specifically mentioned Joomla, though I understand there are others out there.

Does anyone here use a "CMS" to maintain their site? If so, do these systems allow you to use tools like WordPress blogs, and other things I'm seeing recommended here, in their layouts?

This person said that maintaining his site was a big time-consumer and that this Joomla system would allow him to keep it always up to date and changing with a lot less time invested and a lot less effort.

I'm just curious as to what Warrior forum members experiences are.

Thanks,
**Maj**

[miked]

I have been using Wordpress as a CMS with business clients and with nonprofit groups with great success. I use Wordpress themes that are designed to look like websites not blogs, and they work well as a CMS.

Once business owners see how easy it is to add pages and content, they are sold. And the benefit is that they aren't paying me to maintain their site! And they get to upload images, etc, without needing a website designer.

In fact, because Wordpress as a CMS is so easy to update and maintain a website, I use Wordpress (with CMS themes) to run my business websites.

Why?

Because I want to spend my time creating and uploading content, not messing around with html.

Try Wordpress as a CMS using a Wordpress theme designed to make Wordpress look and function like a website and not a blog.

You will be pleasantly surprised how easy it is to create and upload pages and content!

-Mike D.

[Adaptive]

This person said that maintaining his site was a big time-consumer and that this Joomla system would allow him to keep it always up to date and changing with a lot less time invested and a lot less effort.

That's a great idea. Both clients and website vendors can easily log in and update information without any complexity. Using content management means it's impossible to accidentally paste text in the wrong place, or to mess up the layout code.

A lot of IM Warriors are doing just this with Wordpress. Try the search feature to find some of the great threads on this very topic. Joomla seems second in popularity, but way behind in number of Warriors using it.

Regards,
Allen

[Chris Kent]

Yep, the most common CMS is simply Wordpress. I also like Drupal, it is more similar to Joomla than Wordpress.

Having said that, managing many CMSs can become a pain in the backside. People are quick to praise Wordpress but managing even 20 Wordpress blogs can be a major hassle. To that end, I have let the domains of some low earning blogs of mine simply expire. Even selling them and helping with the transfer is not worth it.

[aboutalhah]

Ok,

I was managing my membership with joomla, and every thing was ok, and it stopped working without any reason. The same for one of my coaching clients.

And if you follow Ryan Deiss, you'll notice that he was using Joomla for some of his sites... now, he uses wordpress.

I'd go with wordpress all day long.

Joomla was fun, but the version 1.5 wasn't reliable IMHO, and I won't use it anymore for a paid site.

Franck

[Jerry Mcvictor]

same here. I used to like Joomla but moved away from it because as I experienced something similar to what Franck wrote above.

Best,

Johan

[~kev~]

Originally Posted by MajWorks99

Does anyone here use a "CMS" to maintain their site?

If you have a website that has more then 5 - 10 pages, you would probably be better off with a CMS.

And to answer your question - YES, I use Wordpress that is hosted on my server.

As for Joomla - stay far, far away from Joomla. If you like restoring your site from back, and wondering how hackers defaced your site - your going to love joomla. Because its one of the most insecure CMSs on the market.

Take a look at either drupal or wordpress. Either of them should fit your needs very well.

If you just need a blogging platform, use wordpress.

[MichaelHiles]

DNN.... Dotnetnuke

[Steven W Johnson]

Blogs: WordPress

Forum: vBulletin, Simple Machines or the new PHPBB3 (ck out the modded PORTAL code..awesome!)

Advanced Community: Xaraya - nothing even comes close.

It's all about where you want to take the site...

[WillDee]

Joomla, Drupal and WordPress are good for a beginner to use, but if you're looking for a system that's secure, easy to use and well supported, do a little research into CMS systems in general. There are a multitude of them available in both the open and closed source camps, free and commercial.

It depends entirely on what you need it to do which one you're going to choose, but also on budget to a certain extent.

I know a lot of the folks here recommend WP (and having used it myself on a number of sites I can concur that it's a reasonable product), however, I suspect that the recommendation of the three or four products here has largely been driven by the fact that they're free.

The free products have a wide variety of plugins and themes available for free, sure, but the downside is that they're often created by people who are beginners or intermediate level programmers (yes, some pro's code them too, but they're in the minority unfortunately.) You only have to look at the list of advisories and vulnerabilities for these systems to see just how open you're leaving yourself. Go to secunia and scan the list of advisories for drupal and joomla, for example, and then compare that to a list for a commercial CMS like Bitrix - 70-80+ compared to 4. The reason for the difference is that the commercial houses have teams of programmers coding professionally rather than hobbyists and their company is at stake if something goes wrong. Yes, there are obviously exceptions to this generalisation - our favourite software/OS whipping boy MS springs to mind. ;-)

The short version of the rant above is that you shouldn't only consider the short list of GPL'd products mentioned here, but think about what you want to do with your site, and have a look at a more comprehensive list of systems to see which is going to suit your needs, as well as provide you with a stable and secure system that's going to be well supported in the event something goes wrong with it.

[Adaptive]

Michael, I'm a .Net guy so I'd prefer to use an ASP.Net solution. I'm very familiar with the programming and server management functionality in the Microsoft stack compared to LAMP. However, I haven't seen any comparisons of DNN with Wordpress and Drupal from an Internet marketing perspective, in particular, comparing availability of third party plugins & themes to add functionality. Could you please say a few words about all this or point me to a good comparison site?

Regards,
Allen

[Steven W Johnson]

or you can just use the platform lurking underneath linux.org for the past TWO YEARS (can't think of a more robust testimonial for a platform than that group, can you?) when all the B.S. has come and gone, my vote is for what the geekiest dudes on the planet trust...

of course, the WORLD doesn't even know this monster exists (which is actually a GOOD THING, when you think about it) (sly smile)

[tonywarrior2]

I wasted a lot of time trying to get my head round Drupal. My advice is to stay well away from this madness because I think it's really out of control as a platform. Furthermore it has 10s of settings, anyone of which could destablise the site, so goodness knows what the support would be like (I mean, if you were building a site for a client using Drupal and you handed-over the site ... I think there would be a lot of support issues). I worked through a pretty thick text book about Drupal, got my head round it's taxonomy system and learned about most of the relevant add on modules. This platform is for programmers or people with more time than sense!!

We built two sites in Joomla and I found it counter-intuitive for users, slow and clunky. Actually one of our clients found it hard to use. It is slow.

After a lot of research I have settled on MODx. It's very user friendly (the client our first MODx site was up and running in a very short space of time). It's even built with SEO in mind. So easy ... !

Tony

[Tyrus Antas]

Wordpress as a CMS is nice if you want a simple website. For more flexibility check out Drupal and Joomla.

Tyrus

[Adaptive]

Steven, I didn't say that I need to have a debate about which operating system is the geekiest. A good case could be made that the Lisp Machine, IBM mainframes, Solaris, and VMS are geekier than Linux... but how does any of that answer the question I actually asked?

What I asked was, for an Internet marketer, how do the features and third party support of DNN compare to the features and third party support of WordPress?

I could even run DNN on Linux using Mono... but of course, you knew that, didn't you?

Gee whiz, where does the urge to trash Microsoft and proclaim Linux at every opportunity - no matter how irrelevant - come from?

Regards,
Allen

[Frank Bruno]

WP has really exploded in the last 6 months for all kinds of really usefull and cool plugins, themes, etc. that Online marketers can use for either free or very low cost to set up money making sites like squeeze pages, membership sites,etc.

Run as far as you can from Joomla unless you want to waste an extrordinary amount of time learning, tweaking the system, or you want to try to find someone who has extensive knowledge from a marketing stand point to get it running for you. (you will pay a lot of money for this too)

WP is extremmely user friendly and is very stable CMS.

Frank Bruno

[MajWorks99]

You know what they say: ask a simple question.

Only kidding, friends! I really do appreciate everyone's answers, and all the time you took to go into comparisons and details. I'm jotting notes!

Since I'm a total newbie who does not really even have a working budget yet, I'm guessing I should probably start with what will be easiest to set up myself, such as WordPress on my own host's server, and perhaps as I make more money look toward the possibility of a more professional and/or complicated system in the future. (If it's needed.)

I really do appreciate the many warnings about Joomla in particular. I hadn't really started exploring it as any kind of option yet, but it's good to know where not to waste my time!

[Steven W Johnson]

Someone wandering by the WF might think that the ONLY systems out there are Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal. Nothing could be further from the truth. I've been deploying and beta testing community development platforms for over 10 years, dating back to a pre-LAMP CMS called Ecobuilder which ran on cold fusion (eww) and was WAY ahead of it's time, but ran smack dab into Burzi's php-nuke and never recovered (tough to compete against free!).

Some proprietary and non-proprietary systems that thousands, even MILLIONS of users are happily deploying with little interest or regard for what is said or thought in the warrior forum:

Typo3 (somewhat on the decline now, but HUGE a couple years back)

Midgaurd - still popular in Europe, this one is not to be trifled with - better learn PYTHON, though

The *nukes - phpnuke, postnuke (or whatever it's called now), Dotnetnuke, Xoops, et al - still many, many crazed fans of these robust platforms

Memberspeed - from the Gislason/Hodgkinson camp - a near-perfect synergy between a modern CMS and all the goofy things we marketers INSIST we need to work our magic on an unsuspecting general public (smiling) - has it's limitations, but is in a CONSTANT state of development/improvement.

Fantasos / Contepass - from Turbo Community / Delavera and Co. - if you want a robust marketer's back office, and are prepared to make the commitment, this one is definitely going places, and the NEXT generation, which is lurking just around the corner, promises a 3PD (3rd party developer) open architecture than will be a formiddable competitor to all platforms

Web Wyvern. almost nobody in the world even know this one exists - and it blows away most everything else in it's class.

Xaraya - this one is the sleeping giant of the entire industry - running underneath linux.org for the past couple of years, and largely LOCKED AWAY from the retail customer user base for the past 6 years (I should know - every 6 months I tried it again...nope!) - if you want a tool that is capable of doing almost ANYTHING without even bothering to go write a new extension, and which will happily run on a beowolf cluster, or migrate to big iron and a Oracle database (still in testing phases), then this could be your solution.

Of course, you can always just get REAL GEEKY and cruise down the ROR path of enlightenment (ruby on rails) - nobody is going to stop you (except perhaps your SHRINK!) hahaha

Whatever you do, HAVE FUN LEARNING - it's NOT the goal, but WHAT YOU BECOME IN THE PURSUIT OF IT that counts. All of the above (and DEFINITELY including Wordpress and Joomla, I might add) are worthy of your time and talent. One size NEVER EVER fits all. Get some expertise on your team in the platform (or platforms) you are choosing to deploy, and life will be RADICALLY less stressful.

[Steven W Johnson]

An additional comment to the above.

I use 3 different platforms for building forums - Simple Machines Forum, vBulletin, and now the VERY secure and robust new phpbb3 or modphpbb3.

For wiki sites, consider the one that runs underneath wikipedia, wiktionary, and wikihow - MEDIAWIKI - it's free, it makes "borrowing" content about as tough as kindergarten, and it's really really stable, once you get it set up right.

As MANY have said in this thread - RESIST shoving a square peg in a round hole, and work hard at identifying the solution that best matches the site's needs, while also considering WHO is going to maintain the site (you?, your staff?, your client>, your client's staff?, someone else?) - in some cases THAT little consideration is even more important than the matchup of the solution and the problem itself! Don't overlook it.

[abelacts]

It really depends on what you want from your sites. If you only have a few pages, then HTML is the way to go.

If you have to constantly add content, then you will need CMS as it really simplifies your work. I have tried both Joomla and WP, and I like WP more simply because it's much simpler to master and there are many useful plugins out there. Nowadays, WP designs can look damn professional and nice.

If you want to spend two uninterrupted weeks to learn how Joomla works, then by all means go ahead.

[MajWorks99]

Thank you, all, this discussion has been very helpful in pointing me in the direction of what will work for my needs. I do love to learn new things, but prefer to learn in a way that I'm not tearing my hair out by taking too big a chunk at a time.

Steve, your knowledge is awesome, thank you! I've never heard of half of those platforms, but will be looking them up just because you've sparked my curiosity!

**Maj**

[SoundsGood]

Originally Posted by miked

I use Wordpress themes that are designed to look like websites not blogs...

Can you point me to a few of these (please)?

I've been looking for exactly this.

Thanks!

[MsAngry]

I used to be a die hard hand coder in dreamweaver or visual studio if I was writing a web app...

I moved across to joomla because I CBA coding anymore, it just doesn't float my boat, and there's plenty of plugins for joomla that do most functionality I might ever need.

One thing that has been brilliant with Joomla, and any other of the wysiwyg edited websites is that it really deskills the job and it's easy to farm website edits out to someone else - I just couldn't face building sites anymore, been there, done that commercially.

I have assistants doing writing for me, and 1 person with the passwords doing the website edits..as a work process it's working fine. Outsourcing to coders and writers would have been a bit more hellish I think.

HTH

[CarolinaInvestor]

Allen - Looks to me that nobody answered your question concerning DNN. Though some time has passed, I can take a stab. We have tried DNN with two of our sites and have been pleased. There is a lot of 3rd party module support. I am also experimenting with Joomla at this time. I'm a little disappointed to hear about the security issues and obviously need to check that out more thoroughly. As for DNN, we have been operating a paid site for about 8 months now with no real problems (except I would like to have more people paying). It has forum support, video and picture presentation support via 3rd party modules. Good user managment and contact capabilities built in. Google adsense and analytics support and paypal subscription support. The only reason I'm checking out Joomla is that some of the extensions available look to have more functionality in the video content area. Hope this helps.