Wich CMS is right for you? Here is a complete guide for choosing a CMS, and if a CMS is right for you.

Now. If you want a site with an easy to use content system, and modules and components that save you some time coding it yourself, a CMS is right for you. If you are just going to have a page about your dog poochie, it's not right for you. It's good if you have alot of changing content.

So let's go over some popular CMSes

mambo OS
Joomla
geeklog
php-nuke
postnuke
wordpress

There's a whole bunch of extras. What should you choose?

Open source:
Open source is the way to go. You can modify it, and so can anyone. You can have pre-packaged distros for this, it's neat.

Your needs:
Check for expandability. Can you put in modules if you need them? Can you make your own? is it easy to install them? and avalibility, are the modules you need avalable for that CMS? Some examples: site blocks, music player, downloads, DHTML menu, photo galary, etc. Some come with modules, so watch out.

A good WYSIWYG editor:
I hate having to code HTML to write an article. An WYSIWYG editor is esential. Some let you download more than one so look around.

Is it easy to install:
If you use a CMS, you probably are a small user who wants to get started. I'm not one of those people, but when I first used a CMS, I used PHP-nuke. Then I switched to mambo OS. I still liked how I could install it in fantastico, but I don't use fantastico anymore. All good CMSes let you use a script to configure the database.



So good luck and start writing!

I have used & tested alot of open source Cms, over the past couple of years..and i must tell you..It is a alot of Stress trying to find one that has all the right features that you need.

The thing with most open Content management systems that are being developed today, is that they dont contain all the features you need.

for example I started using phpnuke because it had aviable alot of modules & blocks, but the downside of that was that its security features,layout and organization was terrible i was constantly getting hacked and user complained about the layout of the site.

.this made me changed to joomla i was impressed by its simplicity and how easy it was to change the layout,but on the downside it didnt had all the modules that phpnuke had and integration with my forum & gallery waz a little hard for mee to do in joomla when compared to phpnuke.

I have tried almost all of the demos aviable at www.opensourcecms.com but i always find that for every good feature a Open Cms has theres a down side or lack of another feature. espically if you want to build a large commercial website or Portal.


I think in the End your choice of a cms will depend on how well you want all the features you have the site to integrate with the Cms. Somtimes achieving this means you have to Build Your Own!

Yeah, finding a CM is hard at first. My suggestion: Use Fantastico to install one at a time, and see if you like it. If not, just uninstall it from the same page you installed it from. I used to use Mambo (and still do, for my school's site), but then I either got board, or found some thing wrong (actually, after I moved from my old host, the tabs in the console wouldn't appear, and ehat would be in the tabs were just a long list

Hm i dont know. i havent actualy tried many of these things yet. ive tried mambo but i dont like it a lot. mambo is somehting that isnt good for my type of stuff. my friends band runs their band site with joomla and i really like it from what im seeing. it has all the important things that any site should have.

Right now i am using Minigal2 for my site(miginal.dk) because i have a site with photography and stuff so it works really well. but then again it has some bad things to it. lots of restrictions if you dont know php and you can change the source code to your needs. but a good thing about it is that it is VERY easy to make templates for it. all you need to know is some html and just need to put the php variable in the right place.

ive also seen some very nice sites done with wordpress. i think its easy to make a template for that too. it has some nice features.

As said by the OP, a CMS is a good thing if you want to have a data-based driven web site enhanced with the goodies such as User logins, Albums, Games, etc . Yet do not want to either code the site or program the database yourself.

From my experience, I've coded a site from a empty database to a working data-base site (through ASP) and to be honest, while coding your own may be good to some peoples eyes, personally I hate having to resort to coding the entire site from ground up! But I dont mind either tweaking modules or doing some of my own modules to enhance sites.

As for my experience of uses Content Management Systems, I have used Mambo/Joomla, PHPNuke, Postnuke, wordpress. Out of all of CMS's I used, I'd probably have to find Mambo the easiest one to use, and also the easiest one to modify/tweak/enhance with own code/extensions/etc. The only prob I find of Mambo is probably the lack of components/modules as opposed to the likes of PHPNuke. But hey, it's open source and modifiable.

If you're a beginner, I'd definitely probably have to suggest to start with either Mambo or PHPNuke as personally I find them the most easiest to use, and both have a good administration system. But you may want to explore into CMS's and either find some more modules to expand your site? or be adventorous and start coding your own?. Some examples of modules can be Photo Albums, Arcade game gallerys, or enhanced admin modules such as IP Blocker.

In addition, you may want to use your own template. If you're a beginner,start by using the WYSWYG editors such as dreamweaver.. or if you're intermediate or above.. you may want to be adventorous by doing HTML code (although from my experience I use both WYSIWYG and HTML).

This is just from my experience.. but good luck on whatever direction you may want to take! (either by taking a CMS, coding, and so on)

sxtloverboy: Mambo and Joomla are pretty much the same, except Joomla is the newer versions of Mambo (I don't know the details, look on joomla.org for details).
arnz: Mambo is quite easy to use after a little learning. And yes I have noticed that there aren't many modules and components, but know know how it compares to other CMSs. PHPNuke seems very confusing to me. Coding - I could never (OK, maybe not never, but it would take a while), write my own CMS from scratch. But good luck with your site though.

i used fantastico to setup php-nuke before i think it's the best CMS, i like it.

I have used quite a few CMSs and from my experience Mambo is the best one from that list because of its simplicity. It's very easy to use and adapt an existing site to. Also, if you wanted to write your own modules into it it's very easy because the code is clean and strait forward unlike PHPnuke which is hard to get a handle on.

As for blogging I think that word press is the best CMS for the same reasons that I mentioned for Mambo. It has far less features than Mambo but more than enough for blogging which is what it was designed for.

The best place on the entire internet to go, to find your cms, is opensourcecms.com (not advertising, just a visitor). They have examples up of all the major CMS's and then some- all free, all linked to the original site, with comments from people that have tried them out.

Myself, I would like Mambo if it weren't so darned confusing. I like Drupal, but drupal may be hard to use for those of you who don't know how to manually add its tables to a database.

I think right now my favorite is MDPro, by Maxdev. It is wonderful, and easy to use. You can find themes for it all around (though admittedly many of them are crappy sometimes). But MDPro prepares you for a full-fledged, powerhouse website, and I think its my favorite because of all the modules and things already put in place.

Also, it's not as awful as some others like Clevercopy (I used to use that for a music blog, but there were bugs here and there in CC). Clever Copy is GREAT to instal. Just upload it, tell it where its database is, and it does the rest, checking every step of the way if something is wrong.. (but then again MDPro does this). But the problem with Clever Copy is, there is a HUGE "This was made by CleverCopy" tag on the bottom. It's hard to understand the settings, some blocks and things can't be removed at all, even if they suck for your design. And you can only add 6 blocks besides the preset ones. Say you don't want any of the preset blocks (like shoutboxes, etc.) and want all custom ones, the best you can do is 3 on each side before you have to PAY for more. What?? With so many more flashy and superiour CMS's out there, just go elsewhere.

So on MDPro for example, you can add custom boxes also, but you can add as many as you want however you want. For me it was easier to work with than Drupal (Drupal is great though, comes with better themes and one could say is more customizable) because MDPro's modules are all right there for you in