Posted by WD10 on 09/06/05 15:33

I'm looking for a content management system. I've spent many hours
experimenting with different ones over the past year, including Mambo,
WordPress, PHPnuke, PostNuke, Plone and several others. I'm aware of
sites like opensourcecms.com and cmsmatrix.org. I've put those CMS on
servers to try some of the features but have never run a full site with
any of them. I'd prefer a PHP-based one becuase I know some PHP, but no
Python. One that I am considering but have never been able to get
working on my computer or on a remote server is Drupal. Has anyone used
Drupal / Civicspace? It's going to be somewhat of a community site with
a focus on forums, newsletter, and blog (in decending order of
importance). I've tested Civicspace on opensourcecms.com and it seems
like it doesn't have a good forum. vBulletin looks good -- but I don't
know if vBulletin would integrate into Civicspace.

I'm looking for advice or recommendations from people who have actually
put these into production. I expect this site to have several thousand
users. It probably wouldn't ever have over 10,000 registered users in
total at any time, but it could be more.

I need the following features:

1) Users log on and have accounts. Preferably they would only have to
log in one time and they would be logged into both the regular site and
the forums.

2) Forums: I've looked at PHPbb, punbb, and vBulletin. Is there any
advantage to paying for vBulletin over the other free ones? I noticed
that a lot of sites have vBulletin even though there are free
alternatives. The forums are really the central part of the site.
There should be an email notification option when new posts are added to
a thread for people that request it. It didn't look like the
Drupal/Civicspace forums can do this. I'd prefer a forum that
integrates with the site as much as possible.

3) Blog: Ability for admins to post articles to the front page and have
users comment on them. Articles would have RSS feed.

4) Newsletter mailings. Are there any CMS that have a good newsletter
feature, or is this something that would be better to do externally?

5) Search engine friendly URLs.

At the moment I am leaning towards Mambo. I've never tried
Drupal/Civicspace but it also looks like it has good features. I'm
trying to get a little more advice before I make my final commitment.
I'd prefer to keep it all to one MySQL database since I only have two
left on the server. What about Joomla? I'm not sure what happened
because it looked like Mambo was finished but now it looks like there is
still a Mambo. Do you think it is better to go with Mambo 4.5.2 or
Joomla 1.0?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated...

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