CMS

[Ted Roche]

Lori Hitchcock wrote:
> Working with a company developing a website in a LAMP environment and 
> starting to look at CMS.  Hearing good and bad about both Joomla and 
> Drupal.  The needs to be very simple for non-techs to add content. 
>  
> Does anyone have any advice or experience with either of these? Does 
> any one have a positive experience with another CMS?
Lori:

Both Joomla and Drupal are fairly capable content management systems, 
and with great power comes, no, no that, comes a bit of overhead. Both 
have made a good effort at user-friendliness, but they're still 
non-trivial. As others have already answered, there are plugins and 
add-ons to simplify some of those tasks, and both products have active 
communities for peer support. For sophisticated sites, it's not 
unreasonable to bring in a consultant or train someone in-house as the 
adminstrator.

What exactly is the company using the CMS for? If they really want a 
support forum or a multi-user blog or an issue tracking system, I'll bet 
many members of the forum will have suggestions. If they're locking for 
a document-management system, there might be other alternatives that are 
better tuned for that, again, depending on the exact situation.

If they'd like to learn more about Drupal and are local, there's the 
first ever meetup of the NH Drupal Group next month at the Concord 
Monitor April 13th (http://groups.drupal.org/node/20441). Note the both 
the Monitor and New Hampshire Public Radio have pretty extensive Drupal 
sites. There are several Drupal practitioners among GNHLUG members, and 
we've seen presentations of Drupal at a couple meetings.

Joomla! has also been presented several times to various GNHLUG groups, 
most notably by Barry North of Compass Design and JoomlaShack 
(http://www.compassdesigns.net/ and http://www.joomlashack.com/) who's 
based in Vermont and offers Joomla! training locally.

-- 
Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com