Open source content management systems

[bunn]

Wordpress: lovely. Just lovely. so well written, so useable. OK, it's basically a blogging engine, but you can get a whole lot done with it very quickly, even if there are some things it just can't do, it doesn't do them gracefully.

Drupal: will drive you mad, but SOOO powerful! Almost anything can be achieved in Drupal: it'll take ages and sometimes it would be quicker to simply write what you want from scratch - but still, its power and flexibility is pretty remarkable. Keep away from the civicrm implementation and all will be well - eventually.

Joomla : Don't. Just, don't. OK, there's a lot of documentation and it's very configurable but it's written for idiots so finding the info you want is really hard as it floats in a sea of fluff. The userbase are full of myth and misinformation, and the code's horrible. Not Drupal, stretch your brain kind of horrible, more 'why would they DO this' horrible.

I can see why it's popular with graphic designers because you can dump the whole template into Dreamweaver, but that's not necessarily a good thing.

Comments

[crazyscot.livejournal.com]

The problem with PHP is that it lowers the bar to pseudo-programming so far that it encourages people to have a go, more often than not writing awful code riddled with security holes. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate it is possible to write secure PHP, but because of the dross that's out there I'd sooner see the whole language retrospectively drowned. ASP is also right out of the question for any site I have anything to do with. Give me a perl or python-based CMS any day, or for that matter I hear good things about Ruby on Rails...

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I think that's going to apply to anything that is popular, and therefore, to anything that is affordable for the SMEs that are my bread and butter.

I appreciate that if you are processing confidential data security is paramount, but to be honest for the vast majority of websites, the only confidential data they will ever handle is their own FTP password, and it's hard enough to stop them sending that around the place in plaintext emails. OK, they might get hacked and someone embed something nasty, but that's easily fixed and unlikely to do a lot of real damage.

[sigisgrim.livejournal.com]

I've seen some pretty shoddy code by so-called semi-pro and professional programmers, in PHP and other languages. It's not just the pseudo-programmers.

I'm quite happy (more or less) to program in pretty much any language, provided I can get the documentation I need. I've used PHP quite a lot over the past few years because that was what was available; if perl or python or ruby had been provided and PHP hadn't been then I'd have used one of those, even though my knowledge of them is currently (and at the time) approximately nil. Generally, though I prefer PHP for web pages because it is in-place along with the HTML, that gives it a performance edge over the other languages, all other things being equal.