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

[sigisgrim.livejournal.com]

One of the big reasons for preferring PHP over ASP is that it is just far more responsive. I don't know what it is about IIS, it just seems to suck the life-force out of the server! Have you found similar, or have I just had dealings with underpowered IIS servers?

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I have noticed that, but I don't do a lot with ASP and had assumed that I was just unlucky. Though my friend Rach who was a server admin when Windows webservers were a relatively new idea hated the things and said they were not only slow, they fell over all the time...

I'm sure it can be OK or nobody would use them, but I'm more familiar with php so probably am prejudiced purely because it's easier to do things with systems that you understand better.