CMS Noob Curious

Hello all,
I have just recently started looking into some CMS programs like Joomla and Drupal. I am not happy at all with the look and feel of my site, and believe I got way over my head when trying to design my site myself. I just don't have as much time as I'd like to fiddle with coding everything myself. So, I wanted to use some kind of CMS software. I am looking for something that has article, blogging, and forums management, along with some very customizable templates. Problem: I am being hosted on a Windows server and I think this will cause problems as I can't seem to find any free CMS programs that will work well with that. I have played around with Drupal, but I'm getting errors that things have been disabled because of the php.ini, which I don't have control of. I also don't see any theme or module options for some reason. I am using Godaddy (yes, I know, no screaming), anyone know what will work well with them? I really don't want to switch at the moment. I can switch to a Linux server pretty easily. So please give opinions as to what you think would be best to do to get some kind of CMS going so I don't drive myself crazy because I hate my website!!!

 

Joomla! Joomla! Joomla!

Need I say more?

You should give Joomla a try. It will work fine on Windows, Linux or Mac. (It's all PHP, thus it's platform-independent). The newest version of Joomla was just released on Thursday, and even though it's a beta I think you should try it because the previous version was a real headache compared to the new one.

There are thousands of free and commercial templates for Joomla (just Google for "joomla templates") and there are currently 905 extensions on extensions.joomla.org.

Joomla, combined with a few extensions, can deliver any site you can think of. Every template can be customized too, because every template consists of a php and a css file where all the magic happens
You can even integrate Joomla with forums and photogalleries....the possibilities are endless.
[/shameless Joomla rant]

You can create your own templates too, although it can be confusing at first. There are some Joomla/Mambo extensions for Dreamweaver that make it a little easier, and I've come across a few e-books that go over the steps to making your own template. I usually just find a template that's close enough to what I want and start modifying it from there.

Anyway, it's far easier to work on Joomla sites on your own desktop as opposed to a live server somewhere...so you could install something like XAMPP, build your site, and then upload it when it's ready (this way you don't have to keep FTP'ing every time you make a change).
http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html

Hopefully that helps.
PM me if you have questions about Joomla or XAMPP.
Good luck.

~YC

 

Go for joomla and it would be much better if you switch ot Linux

 

Most of those popular CMS's are available through cPanel.

IMHO they look so.... average? although you can always seek for brand new themes

Why don't you try some of the many available through these links?

www.hotscripts.com/PHP/Scripts_and_Programs/Content_Management/index.html
www.hotscripts.com/PHP/Scripts_and_Programs/Portal_Systems/index.html


In my personal experience, I prefer coding my own CMS, tailored to my needs

 

Thanks for the comments guys. I did switch to a Linux server over the weekend, although it wasn't as smooth as I hoped. But, I think I'm going to try Joomla to start off with.

 

If you go with Joomla, I can recommend templates.joomlaya.com. It's an awesome list of 100s of templates, all with live demos of them.

 

If you finally decide to opt joomla then try to make your own template. Its not that hard. Plus you could break away from the mundane looking portal templates. Make any html template, if you use dreamweaver, I suggest you get the dreamweaver extension from mambosolutions. And make your custom template in a matter of minutes.

 

Any other way to create my own template other than Dreamweaver? I don't have access to it at the moment. Is there a way to change some colors on templates I download?

 

Yes! Another member of Joomla! If you want to change the color why don't you just edit it in photoshop?

 

Joomla is fully open source and php so it is very easy to modify the look and feel of it. I use a standard template and I think it looks fine on my site.

I have 600+ pages and tones of info, I rank well for the terms I have been concentrating on and make some adsense money too.

Best I like is that I don't have to waste time on coding, if I want a new feature I just search and someone else has already made a module 95% of the time.

 

www.xoops.org

XOOPS is a very good one also if you need help with xoops, pm me

hundreds of modules, themes etc.. and voted in the top 5 of the best cms awards (voting for the best one is still going, but xoops makes a good chance)