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Closed 10 years ago.
I currently maintain 3 websites all revolving around the same concept. 2 of them are WinForms applications where the website gives a few basic details, and download links. The third is a web application to query data. I also have a forum (SMF/TinyPortal) that has been serving as a tech support/news hub for the three sites. The download traffic is decent, but I don't get a lot of hits on the support forums
I want to consolidate these three entities so that I don't have to duplicate announcements, upload data library updates to multiple locations, and also provide a unified look to the sites.
Fortunately my hosting account has both .NET and PHP support, so I've been looking into Drupal, Graffiti, DotNetNuke, Joomla, Community Server, and more. However, it has been hard for me to discern between what features included, supported, or just not part of the framework whatsoever.
Does anybody have a good evaluation of these projects (and others too) and can evaluate them for features/expandability/customization/etc.? I'm not necessarily looking for a "what's your favorite" but more of a feature set / target end user type evaluation.
If you want to quickly compare features on CMS's, then take a look at CMS Matrix - has practically every cms known to man on there.
Edit
To be a little more precise, from the site
CMSMatrix is the number one content management system comparison site on the Internet. It allows users to evaluate over 950 content management systems in 135+ different categories.
Go with N2 if you want to get up and running in no time with a couple of nice features packed. Also, it is really targetted against extensibility and clean code.
http://www.n2cms.com
"Open Source cms" has tons of them, and running demos with admin logins
DotNetNuke:
very flexible
lots of community around it
community tends to be fairly technical and can be hard to find useful end-user support
can be difficult to upgrade and to keep current versions available
fairly easy to program basic modules for
100s of available modules (free and pay)
documentation can be difficult to find and sparse in detail
easy to skin so your sites can have a unified look
1000s of pre made skins available.
hopefully this is along the lines of what you are looking for.
I've found that CMS Matrix (refer:iAn) can sometimes be a bit out of date but it is definitely a good starting place. Open Source CMS is a good resource (refer:mrinject). I'd lean towards something you can tinker with - closed source could back you into a corner.
If you're looking into .NET then MojoPortal is another option, as is umbracco etc. Search here on DNN and these others. I've found Drupal to be be more intimidating to approach. Also, it's forums are pretty basic. Joomla tends to want money for add-ins, as does DNN although there are freebies for both. Apparently the freebies fro Joomla can vary in quality - I never looked into it too closely.
I think the pick of the PHP crowd is Drupal - if you can invest the headspace for learning it. Drupal tends to be more developer-friendly than end-user friendly so if you're not a developer it is harder to grasp than something like Joomla. Apparently its codebase is better than Joomla.
Have a browse through the communities - you'll spend some time there so make sure they are to your liking.
If the site is quite simple then perhaps WordPress will suffice as it has a plethora of plugins and there are lots of template available for free or
I've been meandering down this path for a while now. My advice is to set up some test installs and roughly configure them to something that has what you want and then try using and and - important - try to break it. Installing them together on the same server is a good way to test the relative speed differences too.
Test drive them - it's the only way to tell which one works for you.
DotNetNuke out of the box contains a lot of features, content management, link management, documents list modules, forum modules, and items of that nature. There is also a very good third-party module and skin market out there for getting the enhancements needed to really get a full solution implemented.
With a little bit of time DNN can serve as a great foundation for a collection of websites. It also supports a multi-portal system that allows you to host more than one site off of the same code base which is very helpful.
The best part of all is that it is Free!
As you mentioned, there are plenty of options available, most of them have all the basic features. If you are looking for a simple setup, most may even be overkill for what you are trying to achieve. Which CMS you choose, may best depend on your preference for the programming language the CMS is using.
For some websites I maintain, I have used Typo3 (http://www.typo3.com/). The reason for my choice was the flexibility of Typo3, with its many (many!) plugins for all sorts of features, and for the ability to develop plugins yourself.
HTH,
J.
Assuming you're going open source, strong considerations are:
An active and knowledgeable community. <-- You don't want to be the only person able to support this CMS in 10 years time.
regular and simple updating techniques.
Your skill sets.
As a vendor, I find CMS matrix to be daunting. Its basically a list of every CMS under the sun, with a few generic ratings and reviews. Before selecting a CMS, I'd commit to a model first, then I'd investigate the various options that are available.
Open Source...has lots of user generated support, but often requires the assistance of outside developers for software maintenance and add-on installation.
Private installed solutions...can be easier to work with, but lock you in to one vendor for maintenance.
SaaS Model...still locks in to one vendor, but all updates are included and initial costs are minimal.
Related
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Closed 9 years ago.
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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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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The company I work for is wanting to add blog functionality to our website and they were looking to spend an awful amount of money to have some crap being built on top of a CMS they purchased (sitecore). I pointed them to Telligent's Community Server and we had a sales like meeting today to get the Marketing folks on board.
My question is if anyone has had issues working with Community Server, skinning it and extending it?
I wanted to explain a bit why I am thinking Community Server, the company is wanting multiple blogs with multiple authors. I want to be out of the admin part of this as much as possible and didn't think there were too many engines that having multiple blogs didn't mean db work. I also like the other functionality that Community Server provides and think the company will find it useful, particularly the media section as right now we have some really shotty way of dealing with whitepapers and stuff.
edit: We are actually using the Sitecore blog module for a single blog on our intranet (which is actually what the CMS is serving). Some reasoning for why I don't like it for our public site are they are on different servers, it doesn't support multiple authors, there is no built in syndication, it is a little flimsy feeling to me from looking at the source and I personally think the other features of Community Server make its price tag worth it.
another edit: Need to stick to .net software that run on sql server in my company's case, but I don't mind seeing recommendations for others. ExpressionEngine looks promising, will try it out on my personal box.
I've done quite a few projects using Community Server. If you're okay with the out-of-the-box functionality, or you don't mind sticking to the version you start with, I think you'll be very happy.
The times I've run into headaches using CS is when the client wants functionality CS does not provide, but also insists on keeping the ability to upgrade to the latest version whenever Telligent releases an update. You can mostly support that by making all of your changes either in a separate project or by only modifying aspx/ascx files (no codebehinds). Some kind of merge is going to be required though no matter how well you plan it out.
Community Server itself has been very solid for me, but if all you need is a blogging engine then it may be overkill. Skinning it, for example, is quite a bit of work (despite their quite powerful Chameleon theme engine).
I'd probably look closer at one of the dedicated blog engines out there, like BlogEngine.NET, dasBlog or SubText, if that's all you need. Go with Community Server if you think you'll want more "community-focused" features like forums etc.
You can also take a look at Telligent Graffiti CMS.
http://graffiticms.com/
It supports multiple blogs and authors.
Update: It's now open source and available at http://graffiticms.codeplex.com/
Community Server 2008.5 lets you add several members that can post articles. Also with
Community Server 2008.5 you now have wiki's along with forums and the blogs. This probably has one of the better web based admin control panel's I seen in a while. This let's you easily change several things including the site's theme (or skin). To me it is one of the most scalable applications I have seen in a while. We are using it for our site http://knowledgemgmtsolutions.com.
Skinning is pretty straightforward, and the sidebar widgets aren't very difficult to create (if you don't mind building controls in code). The widgets also allow options for the users to customize them in the control panel very easily. I doubt you'll find a strong community of widget builders for Community Server however. Nothing compared to the dev community for blogs like wordpress.
I recommend starting templates from scratch and adding in CS controls as needed, to get the markup you prefer for styling and to use only what you need.
Setting up different roles for users to post to different blogs is also very easy and requires no coding. You can have blog groups, and allow only certain users to post to certain blogs.
Sitecore's Forum module is powered by Community Server and integrated with Sitecore CMS.
Expression Engine with the Multi-Site Manager works great for that kind of situation.
Have you had a look at the Shared Source blog module for Sitecore?