I need a suggestion of a CMS...

Hello..

I am going to be designing a new website.

Here is the situation: my wife's family on the one side is spread very far, with some family members being in British Columbia, some on Ontario, and a few strung in between.

I am looking to build a family website. My idea is that I want to have blogs and a forum. A blog for every family, or for whoever wants one, along with picture gallery capabilities and a forum, preferrably all sharing the same userbase.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated....

 

Hello Caydel,
You've really hit a can of worms here, CMS preferences are as varied as anything. You won't really know or be satisfied until you've tried them all.

However, depending on your application:

Joomla: Good for an instant-site-in-a-box, skinning is also a fair amount easier and installation is a great deal quicker (in my honest ) than Drupal.

WordPress: Good for article related sites, perhaps one of the best aspects is the massive number of plugins available.

MovableType: Excellent for blogs, in my opinion the vBulletin of the blog softwares (where WordPress = phpBB)

Those are just a small smattering of what's available, but perhaps the most commonly used.

 

WordPress + Gallery

http://wpg2.galleryembedded.com/wiki/index.php/WPG2:Main_Page

WordPress + Simple Machine Forums:

http://www.lunabyte.net/

Richard

 

Thanks for the replies so far.... WordPress is looking like my best bet!

Anyone else have suggestions....

 

Drupal (http://www.drupal.org/) can do all of that.
It's really a great CMS

 

I've used Drupal for a number of projects. While it could be made to work, I hate the blog interface and the forums... Also, it needs to be a little more user-friendly for my more technically-challenged family members

 

Drupal 4.7 is recently released, and they have addressed several issues for posting articles

 

and 4.8 is right around the corner.... I'm not even going to hassle with upgrading till the dust settles.

 

I personally use WebGUI. It's interface is very easy to use. Joomla is alos nice.

 

I'd keep it simple and use wordpress, although textpattern is good it requires more understanding to use it.

 

Wordpress doesn't have the multiblogging support. MUWordpress does, but it is quite immature yet.

I have decided to go with Lifetype