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I have the task to build a web-site for a smaller non-profit organization. I have a bit experience with ASP.NET but because ASP.NET hosting is rather expensive here in germany (we will also need a lot of webspace and traffic) and aslo because there are quite a hughe list of features I think I should go with a PHP/MySQL based CMS (correct me if I am wrong). The question is wich one? There are are so many free CMSs out there. If I tell you what I need, can you tell me what would be a good choice?
Here are my requirement (sorted by priority):
Ease of use (installation, configuration, maintainance) for me who builds the site but also for the members of the organisation they must be able to easily change the the content of some main pages, add supages, add a new mailinglist upload a file to the repository etc.
A membership/role management system. Based on the role of a member access to certain subpages, subforums or folders in the file management system etc. must be restricted. Only certain roles must be allowed to add new mailinglists or moderate the forum.
A mailingsystem that allows me or the members of the organistation to add new adresses, maillinglists or newsletters.
A file management system. Members should be able to upload arbitary files on the server and browse them via a web frontent. Access to folder should be restrictable based on the member rights.
A pulbic forum with private subforums.
Localization. As much as possible of the final site (if not everything) that is presented to the visitor of the site as well as to the members who maintain the site should be presented in german.
Good control over design/look and feel of the overall site. I should have good control over how I want the site to look like.
A lively community with enough momentum to find ressources and help when I am lost.
Extensibility. In case there are some smaller features missing or f the behavior of an existing feature is not quite the way I want it, it would be cool to easily add it myself.
As mentioned by others, Joomla might be a good option for you, although Wordpress may also work (and it's easier). However, I highly recommend that you check out OpenSourceCMS.com, which hosts demos for many of the free and open source CMS's, blogs, forums, shopping carts, etc. For most of them, you can try out both the admin and the frontend. Spend some time looking them over and then when you find some that you like, investigate them further by going to their websites.
Concrete5 is a new Content management system that is excellent. Easily themable, user friendly, great little dashboard for management
and it's open source
My vote would be Joomla. It has most fot he features you discussed, if not in the core as an extension, component or theme. I've set several up and rarely have to use any coding during setup, plus there's a vibrant community if you need help. It also integrates nicely with other 'best of breed' apps like BB forums, Coppermine photo gallery's and others.
Joomla! would seem to fit your needs, and I'd also suggest Kunena for the forum (which integrates with Joomla) and DOCman for the file management solution.
Well, I'd suggest Drupal for any sort of advanced web site. While Joomla! and similar systems are a bit easier to get started with, Drupal's a lot more flexible and extensible.
You want full control over theming? Or user authentication? Access control? Database queries? User picture scaling? Tagclouds?
It's there when you need it :)
I would go with Joomla too, even though I'm a ASP.NET developer.
Joomla is very flexible and customizable, so it fills all your need, because of the big community.
As a complete CMS noob, I asked myself the same question. I started with Drupal. Sure you can do lots of things with it. Very extensible and customizable.
But after implementing my first site in Drupal, I decided to create the next one in Joomla, to have a frame of comparison. Conclusion: Joomla is a looooooooooooot easier to get started and takes a lot less time to create a functioning website from scratch. Sure, for very big projects, Drupal lets you customize more, but for the type of project you suggest: I would recommend Joomla...
I found this PDF report comparing WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and Plone quite helpful when I was asking myself the same question recently. Nice comments with a focus on non-profits - find the comparison summary/recommendation on pp 13-14.
Definitely read the report because it talks about the strengths/issues of each package - given your prioritized list of features, I'd recommend Joomla. I think you can do what you want with reasonable effort and good recent modules like DocMan. WordPress is awesome for a blogging site, but lacks a number (2,3,4,9) of your requirements, and though Drupal is powerful and flexible, it definitely has a steep learning curve. Plone even more so.
Good luck!
I'd vote for DotNetNuke, it's ASP.Net but that saves you the overhead of learning a complete new environment, language and tool just to implement a 'free' CMS, realistically how much is your time worth? It meets all your criteria, and there are currently 600,000 users - which means that you can just get on with it, somewhere someone has already worked on your problems for you.
As for expensive hosting, why not host in another country, I get US$5/month for DotNetNuke in the states, and I code from Australia.
Ive had some experience with Joomla. Highly customizable, plenty of plugins and one of the liveliest communities in development. It has a great admin panel also.
Well, as told by Tom Deleu, yes, though Drupal is very capable and strong CMS but it is tough and complicated to work on. Coming to another option of CMS that is Wordpress. Though it is very easy to develop a content based websites with wordpress but with very limited scope and flexibility.
As per your requirement my vote will also go to Joomla. It is very user friendly, optimized and a CMS you can rely on. Small applications as mentioned by you like "mailing system", "File system" etc. suits joomla more than others.
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I help make promo/event websites that shoot up and come down anywhere from a month to six months.
Clients ask for minute text edits a lot during the creation period, and during the live period they sometimes like to swap out images or text every few weeks to function as updates. It's inconvenient for the client to do this all through emails and phone calls.
I have been asked to do research to find a CMS that will let the clients do minor edits like this.
I was pointed to big dogs like Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, and Typo3, but these are all very heavy-handed.
I settled on trying ImpressPages because of its inline editing and undo log but it too began to ask for a lot - I tried to adapt an old project to it but it insists all content calls and form submissions adhere to its framework so it's definitely not easy to drop in.
I don't need a CMS that handles page creation or any sort of overhead.
What I need is a CMS that doesn't care about any facet of the page other than editing text, swapping images, and probably a pretty secure login. Since we take care of the backend and it's only live for a few months it doesn't need detailed project maintenance and certainly the client should not have access to that.
Do you have any suggestions for lightweight CMSs that are easy to pop into a project?
11/11/14 EDIT:
Results so far:
I think a good alternative for this problem is Create.js and one of its children ContentBlocks, however they require node.js and REST which I have yet to really figure out. Quite different from what I know. However, this system allows for editing in-line on the page and saving right there, with no overhead menus or settings or anything. Just edit divs. Here's a link:
http://createjs.org/
children projects can be found by snooping the github
There are more CMS options out there than almost any other web technology. That said some are more and less easy to customize. It sounds like you've steered away from most of the common answers, although I really think you might want to look at WordPress again, with a little setup work and customizing the admin page it can be super lean and "dead simple" like Tumblr's interface.
That said there are a few more good options that are very light and yet full of potential!
Database back end
Perch – This one isn't free, but it's not expensive. It is built with the designer in mind (by other designers) and is also built with the end user in mind, thus it is light, flexible and the interface is not daunting to the non dev. And has very very good support.
Cake PHP – A lovely bit of OSS work, that will need some setting up by you or another dev, but once you have boilerplate/templates it should be simple to roll and unroll small sites.
Anchor – Another OSS project that seeks to be powerful but slight in it's footprint, but probably more structured (less pre-dev time required) than Cake PHP.
Flat file
No DB required, the user just puts their stuff in folders (like on their desktop) and then they get webpages - kinda brilliant and maybe just what you're looking for.
Pico – Uses PHP templates, but a simple file folder based structure, so there is very little learning curve to running or setting up the site.
Kirby – While this is not free, it is very well supported by original developers. It is designed with the goal of being dead simple to use and support.
Dropplets – This one is very very simple, possibly too simple, but there is very little to make a confusing interface out of. This one is very blog focused.
Hope that helps guide your search, as this list is far from exhaustive.
I have also been looking something easy and lightweight for clients to use for days. There are tons of options but there always seems to be something a bit off.
Finally yesterday I found two very good candidates:
Really impressed with both of them have been developing with Drupal, Conrete5, Wordpress.. but this is what simple sites need! Wow!
TidyCMS
http://tidycms.com/
Free / cheap license
Static pages hosted on your site + a connector that connects to the hosted editor. Basic package free.
"TidyCMS is a flat databaseless CMS that makes HTML-files editable and dynamic."
A Finnish startup who are creating a super simple product!
It could not be easier you just throw in a static html-template and put a TidyCMS-conector folder and browse to the subfolder. The subfolder connects to the hosted editor. The editor lets you click on page elements to make them editable. The interface is pretty okay. A bit rough though still, with some glithes. Seems to be in heavy development, but it's already pretty usable. The UI hangs sometimes, for instance when saving changes and you have to reload.
Instant Update
http://instant-update.com/
Open Source! Free! GNU General license.
This seems to be more mature. Also handles static html/php -files but the CMS seems to need a database. The inline editing is pretty good and stylish. The system also has backend with simple user and page management. Still in development by a small group of guys. I'm sure they'll welcome more people.
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First off please have patience for this long winded post. I wanted to get all the pertinent information (as I see it) out to you.
I have a decision to make and would like your input. I have recently taken on the task of taking over my daughter's skating club's website. They have a custom site written in asp pages and don't have anyone to support it. I want to move their site to a CMS system so it doesn't take a developer to maintain or make changes to it. We also want to add some custom pieces to it like a registration form for the club and some other custom pieces around marking down scores and viewing stats and such.
I am a .Net developer and have been developing in SharePoint for some time, but don't feel that SharePoint is a very good fit for them. Our current web host is GoDaddy. I don't yet have the details of the contract with them yet so can't comment on the service we have with them.
I have been looking at three CMS's at the moment. DotNetNuke, Umbraco, and Orchard. All are good and all have pros and cons as far as I can see. I am currently leaning towards DotNetNuke for the following reasons:
Umbraco appears to be a "create from scratch" system with no templates to apply (I apologize if this is incorrect, but it is based on the information I received). I am not a guy to develop the visual aspects of a site, so would rely heavily on templates and such.
Orchard sounds like it might be a good fit, however I have never developed in MVC before. Most of my .NET has been straight ASPX. I am not opposed to learning MVC and have had it on my list for a while, but I don't know if I have the time to learn and port over the current site.
Orchard also appears to be a bit heavy for a normal user (explaining content types and such). I want something others can take up when I pass on the responsibility.
So I am wondering what you all think. Even with learning MVC would Orchard be the best platform for us based on the information I have provided? Should I stay with DotNetNuke as my choice? I would like to mention that I did consider Sitefinity and would have had it at the top of my list, except we are a non-profit and don't necassarily have the budget for a paid CMS.
Thanks again and I look forward to your thoughts.
Well, the ultimate choice will vary on your business need. They all do the same thing, but how they achieve the goal is quite different.
Umbraco - It utilizes the Model, View, Controller (MVC) methodology. This obviously presents an assortment of benefits. However, the methodology to build a product can be quite extensive and even the layout to modify data can be quite cumbersome.
DotNetNuke - Uses a more familiar technology, Web-Forms. This has an assortment of benefits that go a long with it. Including a market, documentation, permission, and ease.
I've never used Orchard so I can't comment- but I can comment on the other two. To show you how I came to my conclusion to use which Content Management System hopefully it will point you in the best direction.
My project that I worked on required a lot of non-technical people to utilize our new product. It has a lot of functionality and features that were required; the biggest however was ensuring the following:
Ease
Intuitive
Control
Speed
Those were our four primary categories. I'll attempt to outline what each area means-
One of the largest pitfall of a Content Management System is that they tend to do more then you require. So the question becomes which product will bend while maintaining my core goals be. For that reason our company chose DotNetNuke because by nature DotNetNuke isn't a Content Management System it is a very powerful Framework.
What this particular product does is focus on a lot of key aspects so a developer doesn't have to waste a lot of time in maintaining but rather in developing.
Ease - A non-technical user is able to view a page; then edit the content in place on that page. Which allows you to incorporate a What you see, is what you get mentality. For the non-developer they get the all familiar Email or Word Editor.
Intuitive - In DotNetNuke 7 they've modified the menu structure for editing. You can actually disable other users to make it actually show less, do less, and still maintain the highest level of control. The user won't get lost in editing the page.
Control - Now this is what is nice, you can regulate each and every control for your user. So you can allow certain content to be regulated and other data not to be.
Speed - It has a market, so you can implement other developer modules. But it also includes a lot of documentation- it may appear cumbersome at first but is quite easy to pick up. Which makes the initial start time relatively painless.
But what do all of those mean to you?
Simple, it means you can develop a beautiful elegant page quite quickly. But since you can restrict several tiers of access you can ensure the page content can be edited by someone other then you- But it won't jeopardize any of your development / content. As you control whom and what is modified.
If your familiar with Microsoft .Net then it will be quite easy to learn; I'm sure other products can accomplish those same goals. But DotNetNuke did it easier which met our goals. It allowed us to not worry about excessive issues or support to enter our company; as the user understood it in such a way that issues don't arise.
That is why we chose DotNetNuke it will boil down to your preference. My experience with the product, community, and marketplace have made me love this product and not chose another. As I can leverage the Core API when needed; so Development, Maintenance, Administration became a breeze for whatever my imagination may produce. But should a developer ever not be present the site and it's quality will not hinder when I leave.
There is a selection of starter kits available in the package repository on the community website and also a few of them can be applied directly during installation of Umbraco. Also in the package repository you will find a wide selection of other packages which you can use on your site to enhance and add additional functionality.
It is true that Umbraco does not come pre-installed with "themes" as such like some other CMS's but this is the beauty of Umbraco, you have a clean slate to work from if you choose. It enforces no requirements on your markup or styling so there is absolutely nothing to stop you using a free or purchased template from any one of the template libraries online such as Creative Market, Template Monster etc etc.
Umbraco has an incredibly friendly, helpful and active community on both the forums and Twitter.
I work with all three and would tell you to use DotNetNuke over the other 2. The primary reason is that if you are developer, Orchard and Umbraco are fine... but you may or may not be the final or future content manager in the future of the club and want to be able to hand the site off to someone. DotNetNuke has the larger community and would be easier for the future admins to learn as well as get support for.
DNN will give you the development options you want, but give the content editors the easier system to work work... and keep you from having to support the site if you ever move on.
don't forget that Sitefinity does have a free community edition: http://www.sitefinity.com/try-now/free-asp-net-cms
it does have limitations, but for simple sites like this it might be just what you need, plus if they ever get a budget someday they could upgrade to the Small Business Edition by just buying a license and get more features and less limitations on the content and page limits.
worth a look.
otherwise, in my opinion your choice depends on who is going to be maintaining the site. If that is you and you'll always be in charge, pick whatever platform works best for you as a developer.
If on the other hand you have to make it drop-dead easy, pick the platform that is best for end users, that based on your knowledge of the user, would require the least amount of training (Sitefinity CE has my vote on that one!)
I hope this is helpful!
I would highly recommend going with DotNetNuke for the sheer reason that the community and available modules for the platform far surpasses any of the other options.
If you want to do MVC style development, you can with DNN using the WebAPI approach for services, but if you don't want to, you can skip that altogether.
The amount of Free and Paid extensions for DNN grows on a daily basis, available in the Store or Forge. You can also search both of these locations right from within the product itself.
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I am looking to help out a non-profit get a website up and running.
Only, they don't just want a website with content, they also want to maintain a database of members, and allow those members to register and pay for classes/events/seminars held by the club.
It seems to me, that if all they wanted was to post content, nearly any of the available CMS's out there would fit the bill.
But the registration portion would require some customization.
I have considered just installing a basic CMS for them, and then creating separate web application for the registration section. And this would still work...
But if I wanted to hook into the users/roles from the CMS and use them in the registration side, I think I would have to have some way of either extending the CMS or easily using it's data in the sub-application.
I have been reading about the following CMS's:
Orchard
Umbraco
C1 Composite
All of them seem to have the ability to be extended, but I'm not certain how much "work" is involved to extend each. Given that my requirements are rather simple and the fact that I don't want to spend a ton of time doing this (it is free work, after all), does anyone have a recommendation?
I'd pass on Umbraco and C1 Composite, as they generally aren't user-friendly. I think Orchard is best, as it has the best feedback of them all. Umbraco is aimed more at developers who want to tweak a lot of things.
Orchard - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1978360/anybody-using-orchard-cms
Link - Reviews/Comparison of Open Source ASP.NET MVC CMS
Umbraco would be a very good choice because it:
is mature and has a proven track record.
is very easy to use for most use cases.
has a built-in member system which could (and should) be used for the member registration.
has a Big and friendly community always glad to help out.
has lots of plugins and extensions covering some special use cases.
If you will go outside of .NET and IIS, Joomla is another popular CMS in LAMP. This can be hosted in either Unix or Win environments. There's a large community, lots of implementations and robust API for plugins. I run it on MAMP on my Mac, and it also runs on WAMPServer, for development.
Last year I created a membership style site in Joomla using Mighty Extensions for a bed and breakfast listing service (http://uurehome.com). Mighty User and Membership was enough, this adds custom user fields and subscription plans. You do have to pay for Mighty Extensions. Payment for the B&B listings is done thru Paypal, Mighty Membership enables this.
The subscription plan feature is Mighty Membership is very good. You can have length of time, cost renewals, renewal nag messages. Could have written myself, but why at this cost :-)
Joomla can certainly handle the community side of a non-profit site, there's the usual assortment of content, discussions, news feeds and so on. It's also ok for mere mortals to administer.
Not so sure about comparing to Orchard, as I haven't kicked the tires on Orchard. I have done enterprise web CMS for a living in the past, so I am used to evaluating these sorts of products. Orchard looks similar to Joomla in how it works, based on the screenshots I see in the docs. One thing I will say with confidence is that it's easier to standup Joomla (or something LAMP/WAMP/MAMP) than on the MS Webmatrix. However, if you already have a Webmatrix provider, then it's similar. Said by someone that has done a bunch of IIS and pretty much all the web technologies going back to the beginning of time (that's 1993).
Another aspect of using Joomla for me in this project, which is for a small business, was knowing that there's a bunch of Joomla knowledgable web design shops this owner could use if I stop helping her. While I am not going to say there isn't a base of folks doing web design that are doing Orchard, my sense is that its much smaller than Joomla. This is a factor for me in helping non-profits, churches and so on, not leaving them in a place where I am the "only" person that could keep whatever it is running. Still, if there's even a couple of local web design shops that do Orchard, I'd say that's enough to feel comfortable.
We built http://aclj.org on Orchard with a custom membership implementation within to support millions of members. We do form processing through Kimbia for donations and petition signatures. We're very happy with the implementation and feel that Orchard worked out well for us as a platform. It is VERY extensible and we developed 32 custom modules in-house.
For a non profit organization it is unlikely to maintain a costly server where LAMP stack has both low cost server and some decent CMS which meets your requirements perfectly. Some of them are :
Drupal
Joomla
WordPress
Any of them are highly extensible, got a great community support , plenty of themes and modules readily available and you can get awesome things for free though there are some paid once too.
And if you want my recommendation i would go for Drupal as it provides :
Build in role management service.
Very matured and friendly community.
Great scalabilty.
Secured out of the box
And some more .......
Hope that adds a new dimension to your search :)
Best of luck
I would recommend wordpress for your requirement.
Advantages:
1. More forum support.
2. Easy to learn.
3. Very less server cost to host the site.
4. You will have N number of plugins and widgets etc...
Hope It gives some sense :)
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This question is a little subjective, however, it aims to give me a bit of information about whether it is better to build or buy.
My company is looking to enter the world of CMSs for our clients websites, do we provide an open source one, or do we build our own model from scratch?
If you buy, which do you use?
If you build, how does your architecture differ?
EDIT: The CMS we are looking to use isn't to maintain our own website, it is something we can offer our clients and pinned onto websites we are custom building for them, it needs to be something that we adapt and manipulate easily for many different website designs and purposes.
How about using opensource one? :-)
Today the only reasons to develop new CMS are:
1) non-usual requirements (deadly rare)
2) You just like to code "your own CMS" (c)
If none is the case, take opensource one.
Personally, I have my own CMS for all my private & commercial purposes, but this was mostly just for programming fun. If you need to deliver, you have to use existing products.
The company I work for wrestled with this same question recently. This depends a lot on your client's expertise and needs. It's generally not advisable to build your own CMS unless you're using it to offer something very novel.
Drupal has lots of plugins available giving a great deal of customizability. It's handy in the same way that most CMSs are in that you can use PHP files as your templates and code them outside of the CMS.
Wordpress has the best user interface of all the CMS's I've used (Drupal, EE, Wordpress, Joomla). If you need to program plugins it's also very well documented and (when the plugin is finished) provides a drag-and-drop interface for the client to make changes to their own web site easily.
I'm currently in the process of moving our site from EE to WP.
Well I can build a simple CMS in less than a day (and everybody can do that with any good web framework). So it depends on how complex it is and how much the open source solutions can do what you want your CMS to do. I generally avoid to use open source CMS because it is usually an overkill compared with my usual client's needs but that's me. Most open source CMS (drupal, joomla, wordpress) have many features that most people simply don't care and they clutter their user interface, so I prefer to build my own as far as it is simple instead of using an open source and struggling to add a new feature and make it scalable.
First, to address your build or "buy" questions - you would be crazy to build. The resourced needed to support code you write as it changes to meet each clients needs will end up costing you a fortune in the long run. It's hard to beat the resources of thousands of developers that many of the big projects have. Does your firm have a security specialist? How about a QA team that constantly searches for ans squashes bugs? Unless you are trying to do a one off, highly specialized application, pick a CMS and go with it.
Next, as far as being able to implement the CMS across many types of sites, that is entirely dependent on your firms developers. If your developer knows XYZ CMS, then he should be able to take any design and make it work for the CMS. Any good CMS has the design layer completely separated from the content and code so the design should not be limited by the CMS in any way. It's just a matter of learning the particular templating system employed by the CMS of your choice.
Last, I am surprised that no one has mentioned the solution to your wanting to limit the amount of control your clients have over their sites. As mentioned you can go the SaaS route and never give the client access to the administrative back end of the site. Any of the good CMS projects offer front end editing. This will allow your client to add/remove/edit the content on the site without giving them access to anything structure or design related. You can completely control the admin, layout, and functionality while the client simply controls the content only, which seems like what you are trying to accomplish.
This depends heavily on what you need, but many CMSs are a platform that you can build upon, getting the best of both worlds.
Wordpress has a very rich plug-in framework.
If you are ok with Windows servers, SharePoint has an extensive plug-in/extension architecture.
I don't think there's any reason to build from scratch unless you are planning to compete in the CMS market.
Do not reinvent the wheel. It takes really a lot of time and money to make a CMS.
If I were you, I would go with an open source CMS, start building custom stuff and contribute back what you can (this is how the company works where I work).
My choice is Drupal, because of the rich set of contribs, excellent flexibility/extensibility and good security.
I think it depends on how many clients are supposed to use the CMS.
We have only one client and built a proprietary CMS which we heavily customize to the client's specific needs.
It also gives us a strategic benefit since this client can hardly migrate his web sites to another company now.
If you have a couple (> 2) of clients who are supposed to use the CMS, IMHO an open source CMS would be the best choice.
Can you develop a new CMS as good as some other ones that have been around for years and hundreds of people have worked on it's development?
That's a question I always ask myself at the start of every website buliding project.
There is surely a good open source platform that meets your requierments and that you can improve.
I suggest these:
Liferay : for large organisations and advanced projects it's written in java. I personally love this CMS. Big places like NASA use it and my company used it for a project, it was great.
Plone : Same as above - language = Python
EZPublish for large organisations but not as advanced as Liferay - language = PHP
Joomla and drupal for normal websites.
As a design agency, presumably with a number of customers with live websites that constantly need to change that are taking manpower away from new projects,
My first question would be if I intend to migrate my existing customers to the CMS based version of their site
Then, What are the commonalities/differences in your customer sites?
If there is a lot of commonality (in the back end code as opposed to the front end design), then maybe integrating a basic article editor is all you need?
Look at how a CMS is going to affect your design flow, Your designs will then be CMS 'Themes', that'll be a learning curve.
I'm not trying to discourage you from Buying or Building a CMS, but the decision will be completely decided by your companies situation.
Personally I use Joomla and DotNetNuke. I'm a developer not a designer, so I buy off the shelf themes and modify them. I also had no existing clients when I started out. I decided to use a CMS specifically because I could buy themes, and secondry to that was the client modifying the articles.
I cant think of an open source CMS that doesn't provide everything that most companies would need.
you get the benefits of bug fixes, little deployment time and ease of documentation.
When selecting the CMS try to use one that is not too bulky or not too popular.
most CMS allow for easy expansion so if a client has special needs then its easy to add functionality.
A reason that you start to build you're CMS could be because the landscape of CMS systems is big (and you can't make up your mind on one system to put in all you're energy).
Do you want a simple CMS for a website, an integrations framework or personalization / social media.
As there are a lot of OS CMS out there, I wouldn't recommend you to start from scratch. Check for research EG:
http://www.slideshare.net/OpenSourceCMS/451-group-future-of-web-content-management-open-source-cms
Also check the OS license of products and how this could affect your projects.
Good luck!
Lots of good responses already, but I don't see anyone talking about the real users, the customer who is paying for this site.
One reason a CMS product is often better is that it can give you a lot of help material, usability refinements and add-ons that you won't get when you build it yourself. More importantly for the end-users, it can mean they extend and add to the site without needing to get IT to give them permission (and the run-around on budget/resources) to do so.
Another issue is that if you build it yourself, then that is the only copy of that software that is being security tested and probed. A product will have been through more penetration tests and probing.
On the other hand there are a wealth of CMS' out there and it can be confusing if you do not know what you want. The CMS Matrix is a good site for comparing all sorts of CMS' to find one that suits your needs.
I work for a CMS vendor, Elcom Technology, so I am slightly biased - but I have also used WordPress, SharePoint, DotNetNuke, Joomla and Drupal to various levels of degree and they all offer a big step up over something home-built.
A very important reason why you may want to choose something that is already made (FOSS or commercial) is that someone else may be able to support it.
PS
I've used CMSMS on various projects. It has enough user control to let them edit, but not mess with the layout and stuff.
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Management is thinking of changing out Content Management Systems. What do you use/recommend?
What UCM solution is your company using?
How big is your company?
Are you happy with the implementation?
Current setup:
The company I work for uses Oracle ECM (formerly Stellent UCM).
We have somewhere over 10,000 employees across Australia, New
Zealand and Indonesia.
It works! Having worked with the system for a while now. I can see
where the initial implementation went wrong. Its 3 years later and
it is Rewrite Time! (Three year itch?)
1) CMS: Oracle's BEA Aqualogic
2) Size: 10,000+
3) Experience: As an end user with full community and content admin privileges, I find the tool to be outdated and stifling in terms of knowledge sharing and trying to get the benefits that exist in social networks. Perhaps this is due to the implementation, and not an inherent weakness in the product. Not sure of the future direction of the product either, since Oracle recently acquired it.
Our external business orientated site is running joomla which once you get passed the learning procces of how it constructs sites, is very good for a multi-user environement.
Company = 25+ people
We use Plone open source for the internal site...
We use a DotNetNuke intranet site. I think we need to upgrade or redesign cause I like Joomla much more.
1) We are moving from Microsoft Content Managemet Server 2002 to Sitecore 6.0 though we have internal PHP Wikis and Dot Net Nuke sites that have user content as well.
2) 1,000-2,000 people with about 3500 pages of Web content to migrate.
3) I'm content with it so far. There is still a lot of work to do in the migration and it will probably take a couple of years to move everything over, which includes legacy ASP and ASP.Net 1.1 and 2.0 sites that haven't been worked on in a few years as well. It would take a lot of things going easily for me to be happy with an implementation of this size.
Drupal. I've used it for small and medium sized projects.
1) We're using a CMS that was custom written in vbscript and sucks horribly. We're going to start using MODx for our external stuff, but we're not sure what's going to happen with our internal stuff.
2) A university with about 30,000 students (about 10,000 of which have ties to my department).
3) MODx looks cool, but haven't had much of a chance to use it. As stated previously, our other CMS sucks.
Tridion. And yes, there is that 3-year itch. Is Oracle on a new release or did the first implementation just look wrong now? I remember Stellent being on the development team's shortlist.
Us:
Mid-sized (small?) 700+ employee company, with over a dozen websites, but not all sites have the CMS implemented. In-house development team has worked on, and still support, a few custom solutions. Legacy code never dies. :-)
All of the CMS we researched had compelling features, but for content re-use, cross-site sharing, and programmability we found Tridion to be a good fit (compared to Ektron and RedDot). Our mandate was to stay ".NET programmers" and not have the tool take over the site.
I'm comfortable with and like with Tridion, but admire those of you who've done CMS with multiple platforms.
1) My company currently uses Word Press or no CMS at all. We are however working on a CMS that will work exactly as we want it to.
2) It's me and my friend so 2 of us
3) We're still starting up and finding clients so haven't had a chance to use it.
In my daily work, I use Tridion, and some of my colleagues use Hippo. At home I use Plone.
Institution-wide we see a variety of systems.
A few Plone sites. I'm a Plone fan.
The centre within which I work is somewhat multi-institutional (a good history of collaborative work) (one of two research centres situated within the same building) and the Plone sites that I'm setting up are fitting very nicely with diverse user/group requirements.
Companies I worked for usually developed CMS systems inhouse I've mostly worked for webshops and when cranking out websites is your core business the best way to get an edge is to be on top of this sort of thing.
So custom CMSes for:
Simplicity, just deliver what the client wants and nothing else.
Understanding it, it's developed in house so you can usually just talk to the guy who wrote it.
Profit, it's easier to ask for license fees.
We use the Alterian Content Manager application. It is very robust and suites our needs well.
20000 staff+
Very happy. Developers and business team find the application very easy to work with.