Which CMS Is Best?

Having never used one before I am considering:

Mambo
Joomla
Drupal

Should I check others out? Which is best? Why?

Please help educate me on CMS systems.

I am leaning toward Joomla - the mambo site is very confusing.

 

WordpressWordpressWordpressWordpress
You should try Wordpress!

 

I think I should try it myself after that Although I'ma big Joomla fan, besides, Wordpress comes as a Joomla extension, too..

 

Heard the most about Joomla.
Installed mabo once just to try it out.
Has lots of possibilites, but it's indeed pretty complicated and confusing.

 

I am interested in housing RSS feeds within a template - does Wordpress handle this?

 

You can dig this information to see if it's what you are looking for. Here

 

Wordpress is quite possibly the best CMS (yes, I'm aware that it is primarily a blogging platform) I have ever come across, followed by Joomla!

 

I installed joomla and am so darn confused - uploaded a new template and made some modifications to it but all the sections, categories, etc are targeted to the default template - looks like I am in for some serious studying

 

wordpress is the best unless you plan on making a huge website.. inwhich case joomla.

 

I was a heavy Wordpress user for the longest time, but found it difficult to implement a latest news + hierarchy-based site with it. Wordpress is good for latest news + single-level static content, but building a mega-site style site was a challenge far beyond my rudimentary capabilities.

I don't wanna link up directly to my sites in this forum for fear of being Google-whacked (for reasons only known to Google) ... so I post below an image with the URL of 2 sites:


The first one was done with Wordpress with a static front page plugin - it wasn't a pleasant experience constructing the hierarchy.

The second was done with CMS Made Simple (many, many thanks to those who recommended this CMS on DP) - can be found at http://www.cmsmadesimple.org.

It took me about a month to get the second site to where it is today - the fly-out menus are available as one of the default features, and it's easy to contruct your own menu styles. I haven't sorted out the news format yet. Each page can have its own look and feel. It's plugin structure allowed me to write my own very easily, say a 468 x 60 Chitika ad that accepts parameters. So, I write an article, and am free to insert a {c46860 prod="Nikon D40"} anywhere in the article, and the Chitika ad appears right there - navigate my site until you get to a Nikon D40 Images page and you'll see what I mean. The built-in breadcrumbs feature is super-excellent too.

Their seo-friendly URL feature allows you to choose hierarchy-based (eg yoursite.com/cars/honda/honda-city.html) or flat (eg yoursite.com/honda-city.html) - and yes, you can easily select the extension .html, .php, /, or whatever else you can come up with. About the only quirk is if you select a flat-styled URL, the URL of news items continue to remain in their non-seo friendly format - a minor irritation that doesn't impact me much since my site is more focused on the content found in the non-news sections.

I have set up a demo CMSMS site hosted on Hostgator for you, and anyone else who wants to poke around the CMSMS software - go to http://www.golfingnotes.com/admin - the login is admin / admin. Once in there, navigate to http://www.golfingnotes.com/admin/listusertags.php and click on the c46860 - that's how we create plugins in CMSMS (they call it userdefined tags or UDT) - then go here http://www.golfingnotes.com/sample-use-of-a-chitika-user-defined-tag.php to see an example of how I embed Chitika in the article, and here http://www.golfingnotes.com/admin/editcontent.php?content_id=51 to see how I actually use the user-defined tag within the article.

I have tried Joomla / Mambo / Drupal, etc and have nearly given up and gone back to Wordpress, but CMSMS is my life-saver.

Hope this helps, and good luck with your quest!

 

Yes via plugin. I'd recommend against Joomla, sure you can do a lot with it, but it's horrible to manage and design for, where as WP is a breeze.

 

Joomla is not as bad as it sounds.
Once you read the Help files, templating and managing becomes a breeze, too
And there's a large community to support you, if you get stuck.

 

Wordpress 2.1 can be used to set any page as a static page now. I think it was harder last time...and we needed plugins to help.CMSMS looks very interesting though...

How hard is it to learn this CMS? How does it stack up in terms of security compared with other more mainstream CMS?

 

if you will make simple web site , you can use wordpress . if you will make a big and big web site , you can use joomla. if you ask which cms are you using on your web sites ? i allways prefer joomla

 

Joomla, Drupal, WP all are very good but lately i am becoming a big fan of ModX, which supports Ajax and is SEF out of the box.

 

Maybe it's improved in the last 12 months, but the back end is/ was clunky and painful to navigate through, I did a big commercial site with Joomla and it was the worst job I've ever done in my life, to the point where I think I'd rather had attempted to write the CMS from scratch. I did play with the backend again recently for another project, it still looked and smelled the same, unnecessarily complicated. I'll agree though that the community side is pretty strong, but I noticed that paid plugins seem more the norm where as WP is 99.9% free.

 

I have tried Wordpress 2.1, but a few of my critical plugins stopped working, so I backed out.

Well, I think it's easy to learn CMSMS, if you're comfortable with hacking Wordpress files and stylesheets, CMSMS is a walk in the park, relatively-speaking. I got a lot of ideas from their forums and wiki documentation too.

In terms of security, I honestly don't know.

 

wordpress All The Way

 

Yep, same here. At first joomla may not be as good or as easy as the other CMS but once you get pass the 'get to know' stage, you'll be good to go. I really like its support forum where there's a specific forum for my country which helps understanding the explanations better.

 

Joomla is the best but Wordpress is awesome!