Free CMS recommendations

November 23, 2004 11:21 AM

CMS recommendation please - I'm looking for a free (or an inexpensive one-time fee) CMS rig that will meet a certain list of requirements. [MI]

My needs are:
1) Caters to a blog-type approach.

2) Fairly customizable, as far as site layout and design are concerned.

3) Member sign-ups, so that certain areas (or the site in general) would be for member's only. I need to have users login in order to gain access to certain areas (using sessions I would assume).

4) Member userpages would be nice, but not required.

5) Web-interface for updating and managing.

6) The option for multiple publishers.

7) The ability for users to upload files.

I think that's it. I've looked all around the web and have seen a few possibilities, but I'd love to hear what y'all might recommend. Thanks!

posted by Necker to computers & internet (9 comments total)

Drupal is my recommendation.

If you need any help, drop me an email. It's on my personal site linked through my profile.
posted by will at 11:31 AM on November 23, 2004

I am a huge fan of drupal.

1) Caters to a blog-type approach.
Yep. I just migrated my blog over from blogger to drupal about a week ago.

2) Fairly customizable, as far as site layout and design are concerned.
Yep. Look at drupal.org, then look at the template on my blog. Pretty customizable, I'd say.

3) Member sign-ups, so that certain areas (or the site in general) would be for member's only. I need to have users login in order to gain access to certain areas (using sessions I would assume).
Yep.

4) Member userpages would be nice, but not required.
Yep. Drupal even supports user blogs.


5) Web-interface for updating and managing.
Yep. It also works with many gui blogging tools (w.bloggar, etc) via XML-RPC

6) The option for multiple publishers.
Yep. You can even set up a K5 type site, where everyone can publish and everyone moderates. Crazyness.

7) The ability for users to upload files.
Yep. Every post can have an attachment. Also, there are file manager add-on modules too.

That's another big feature of drupal I like - being a php developer - it is incredibly easy to write add-on modules. There are tons of modules avaliable on the drupal site as well.

On preview: mmm....yeah what will said.
posted by slhack3r at 11:36 AM on November 23, 2004

I would check out Drupal. Version 4.5.0 came out a couple of weeks ago and is a lot more polished than 4.4. It has all of the features you require and a fairly extensive list of pluggable modules.

[on preview: well, that would be two thumbs up then...]
posted by Loser at 11:36 AM on November 23, 2004

Very cool. I don't suppose there is a plug-in available by which users can collaboratively edit a Word document? I would love for my very low-tech law journal to begin embracing this technology, but we'd need to be able to preserve and edit formatting.
posted by PrinceValium at 12:15 PM on November 23, 2004

Maybe not a word document, but by combining the "HTMLArea" module and the "node_privacy_byrole" modules (on the drupal module page I linked to above), you could have pages edited in a WYSIWYG editor by multiple people. I also believe the HTMLArea WYSIWYG editor preserves formatting when copying and pasting from Word.

There's also a wiki module, IRRC. That might work.

I thought the newer versions of Microsoft Office allowed this though?
posted by slhack3r at 12:22 PM on November 23, 2004

Another vote for Drupal. I don't find it as easy to customize the appearance as with MT or Blogger -- you need to allow for the extra layer of abstraction that dynamically configurable modules and blocks require -- but it's pretty darned cool. Unlike many CMSs, the features in one Drupal module -- like comments -- can percolate through to many other modules -- like the image gallery. Very clever and economical.
posted by adamrice at 2:33 PM on November 23, 2004

Cool... well, Drupal was certainly on my list. So I guess I'll give it a try (not that the thread has to end this way). Thanks!
posted by Necker at 3:25 PM on November 23, 2004

Do a search of AskMetafilter.

Many other people have asked about CMS (including me...).
posted by jpburns at 5:06 PM on November 23, 2004

Thanks jpburns... good call.
posted by Necker at 5:16 PM on November 23, 2004