Which CMS is best for membership sites?

I would always recommend wordpress as it is very easy to use and joomla and drupal are over complicated.

There are some great membership plugins available for wordpress as well :-)

Danny

Dunc,

I think you should go with whatever you are most knowledgeable about or comfortable with using. Danny raises a good point though. Wordpress is definitely one of the easiest to use and there is also no shortage of documentation on the web about how to use it. (not to mentioned plugins and themes for it). If you are a novice to all three, I would go with wordpress.

Best,

Shawn

Wordpress for sure. I have a few membership sites with 10,000+ members each and they all use Wordpress. Very straightforward and very versatile.

yes

WordPress is best and adding one plugin make complete membership site which is s2Member

If you are not too much of a technical person, then go with Wordpress for the reason that it is very simple and easy to learn. Secondly, there are lots of plugins available which can help you add whatever features you might like to have in your membeship. You are likely to find some plugin (either free or paid) to help you implement the feature you wish.

Thirdly, there is lot of help and documentation related to Wordpress all around.

Wordpress is still getting more popular. Drupal, Joomla, and blogger are all on downhill trends right now, at least according to this graphic.

http://i.imgur.com/t2yvnO5.png

I use to use drupal before wordpress took off it was good but a steep learning curve. I am switching my last site to wordpress next week :-)

Danny

I find Joomla difficult as compared to Wordpress so I recommend Wordpress.

Definitely WordPress as it's the easiest to master, I use the Wishlist plugin to build my membership sites.

WordPress without any question. A plenty of good plugins and easy set up makes WordPress the chosen one.

I would say Wordpress, especially for a membership site. There are a lot of membership plug-ins available for Wordpress. It's also very user friendly and won't take you long to set up and get to grips with. On top of that, the support forums is always packed full of people who can answer your technical questions.

we just setup a membership site with WP and wishlist member plugin which integrates well with simpleperss forum. It was a great setup but for some reason not fitting the needs.

Later we decided to switch to a better forum software which is damn easy to use and just the basic features (We are using vanilla now) and for membership created the usergroups and with it's API connected directly to 2checkout payment gateway.


I still have the simpress forum's membership (they cost 39$) + Wishlist member license (97$) , if you/anyone else need I can pass them off for a fair price.

I've used Wordpress, Drupal and Dolphin.
Wordpress is definitely the easiest and most versatile (there's a plugin for almost anything you can dream up - and if not, someone - a php developer - can create it for you cheaply)

Drupal - omg. I lost a year of my life to this CMS. It's great - has everything you could possibly want and then some. I created a community site and it's so advanced and flexible - you can do anything. But it's a nightmare. With wordpress you can "one-click" upgrade everything whenever something new is out. With drupal.. omg - talk about problems. You can change one thing in WP and if it messes your site - fixed in a second. With drupal - change one thing .. UNDO it.. nope.. your site is still messed up.
Since that year of torture - I have only recommended Drupal to big clients who need hundreds of people to be able to login to the site simultaneously and who can hire a fulltime Drupal developer to have on staff. Seriously. Their community is also rude and unhelpful - unlike the Wordpress community which is awesome, helpful and friendly (and cheap!).

Joomla - I compare with Drupal and even though it seems tempting, and there is an awesome Joomla community "done for you" site (JomSocial), I haven't gone down that path because of my experience with Drupal.

Another one not mentioned is Dolphin. (Boonex.com)

Now - I'm a big fan of Wordpress, and Dolphin sucks (you will not find more complaints anywhere on the web about this because you have to pay for everything).. but .. I'm using Dolphin for my latest community site because I needed something bigger & better. It has a lot of things already built-in (think 'dating site' like features).. forums, member profiles, groups, blogs, classifieds, events, photos, videos, live chat, etc. But their 'marketplace' has a lot of modules that make it really useful for people to collaborate together (tutorials, goals, wishes, video training, etc.). It is for me, an easy way to get a Drupal site - without the painstaking learning curve. But it's more pricey, and you cannot host this on a shared server (the default install didn't last a day on any of my hosts - Bluehost, Hostgator, and Site5). So you have to also get a Dolphin server.

I mention Dolphin only because you have similar goals as me:

Dolphin allows members to upload their own training, files, live chat, etc. There is a courses module but it's 2 years out-of-date and I'm not sure if it's exactly what you would want anyway (more like, a quiz-type course than what we're used to in I.M.)

My suggestion is to stick with Wordpress, but if your community gets bigger and you're making enough to justify the cost, I would probably suggest you at least take a look at Dolphin to see if it matches the type of community you are building.

If you can afford it - Drupal can be customized to be almost anything you want too, but I would never recommend anyone learning it from scratch - I'm not afraid of any technical challenge but I have so much resistance to touching Drupal ever again - unless I could find someone that had already configured everything I needed in a package (like JomSocial did for Joomla), and if I could afford a Drupal programmer to have on hand in case something goes wrong or needs upgrading.