I need to find a CMS only for a home page on a site and then attach it to Vanilla Forums (getvanilla.com). For my client, he wants a rich editor control for editing the content in the CMS, such as fckeditor (or wymeditor, tinymce, etc), as well as my ability to insert iframe tags to load my gadgets I'll build him that draw content from the forums, like last 50 posts, etc.
I'd like the CMS to be fairly thin, support XHTML templates I get from my web designer, and hopefully be free or fairly inexpensive to purchase (under $300).
What would you guys recommend?
Recommended CMS
Moderator: General Moderators
- slightlymore
- Forum Newbie
- Posts: 9
- Joined: Sun May 18, 2008 5:24 pm
- Location: Oxford, England
Re: Recommended CMS
I have 3 cms solutions up my sleeve which I normally use: wordpress http://wordpress.org/, textpattern http://textpattern.com/ and joomla http://joomla.org/ (listed in rough order of complexity). All open source and free 
- volomike
- Forum Regular
- Posts: 633
- Joined: Wed Jan 16, 2008 9:04 am
- Location: Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, USA
Re: Recommended CMS
After a lot of research on my own about the differences in CMSes, I gave the client several questions to answer about what features he likes, doesn't like, or is indifferent with regarding a CMS and a forum system. From that, it made it easier to choose something. In the end, that came to either Drupal or Joomla for the CMS, and then phpBB for the forum. So, I recommend that approach with your clients -- learn the differences in the products, build a matrix or find one already made, and then generate a series of questions to see what it is actually that the clients want. Then make your decision from there. And I think it's a good rule of thumb that if the CMS or Forum's website and demo site are both very slow to load, or look terrible or like they were made in the 1990's, then you don't even want to evaluate them as an option.
But now I need to do an even more fine-tuned analysis to compare Drupal and Joomla. I've heard better things about Joomla than Drupal, but the client has used Drupal and seems to like that. So he's asked me to give him a list of the advantages and disadvantages of each, compared together. Doing that now...
But now I need to do an even more fine-tuned analysis to compare Drupal and Joomla. I've heard better things about Joomla than Drupal, but the client has used Drupal and seems to like that. So he's asked me to give him a list of the advantages and disadvantages of each, compared together. Doing that now...