Which PHP CMS?

June 12, 2008 3:56 AM

I'm involved with an arts festival, and want to use a CMS. I think one (possibly any) of the following would be suitable, to varying degrees: Joomla, Drupal, Textpattern, Expression Engine, Wordpress. (I've deliberately gone for PHP.) Which would you recommend and why?

Here are the functions that are vital:
- managing several mailing lists, with customisable fields to gather data on subscribers
- a discussion forum
- facility to upload files such as PDFs and Word Docs
- events programme (with dates, times, venues, ideally with option of pictures)
- picture gallery
(I'm aware that some of these things will need plug-ins.)

Design doesn't matter so much - probably an out-of-the-box template will be fine with minor tweaking. One crucial thing is that the users of the site are very non-techie, so will need to have something easy to use (this is to save me having to do it for them all the time!).

Sorry - I know there have been a lot of CMS questions at AskMe already, but I wanted to narrow down the question more precisely. Each package seems to attract love and venom in equal measures. Thanks for your ideas!

posted by hatmandu to computers & internet (14 comments total)

Sorry, I should have added that I've seen CMS Matrix and Open Source CMS, but some real-world experiences would be interesting.
posted by hatmandu at 3:58 AM on June 12, 2008

What's your budget? With ExpressionEngine, you're looking at about $150 for the non-commercial base system plus the discussion module plugin, more if it's commercial venture.

One crucial thing is that the users of the site are very non-techie

What exactly will the users have to do themselves? Defining that might help people give you better answers.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 4:08 AM on June 12, 2008

Also, to complement the above question, consider how much time and how technically adept you are if you are administering the site. In my experience, even moderately knowledgeable web folks sometimes get overwhelmed at the learning curve for the more powerful cms': Drupal, EE, etc. Sometimes power and flexibility are a liability if you don't have the time to learn how to use it.

Whereas I find there to be less of a learning curve with Wordpress, although it's default feature set is more limited.
posted by jeremias at 4:23 AM on June 12, 2008

Thanks for your questions, folks. Budget is ideally zero, which is why EE is the odd one out, but I'd consider paying if lots of people think it's significantly superior.

What will users have to do themselves? Basically (a) be able to send mails out to different subscriber lists (b) upload occasional files and edit a page to link to them (though if necessary I'll do this for them) (c) add in or edit details of events or general standing copy at the site. That's probably thr bulk of it.

As for me: I can write reasonable (though not advanced) PHP myself, and created the current site including a MySQL backend, but I just don't want the hassle of having to create something larger that will be at the limit of my skills and, crucially, time. I'd be happy installing any of these systems (the only one I've used before is WP - very easy, though looks more limited re extra features), though again time-efficiency would be desirable! (People seem to say Drupal is time-consuming, for example... - or am I wrong?)
posted by hatmandu at 4:29 AM on June 12, 2008

Drupal will do all the stuff you want with the addition of some plugins. It's really designed as a CMS for community sites, which is what you've got. Wordpress and (unless I'm mistaken) Textpattern are more for individual bloggers, and don't have the underlying architecture to support some of the functions you'll need. I don't know much about Joomla—from what I know it should work, but I can't say how well.

I've got a Drupal-based site. There is a learning curve, longer than with Wordpress. Depending on how much time you can dedicate to getting set up, and how complicated you want the site to be (Drupal makes it easy to pile on features with all its modules, and this is where administration gets unwieldy, because every time you add a module, you need to set its prefs, and set permissions for all the roles you've set up, and then maybe create a new role or two…), you might want to allow 1 week to 1 month as a set-up and closed-beta period where a few friends hammer on it. Once you get the site set up, it'll mostly run on autopilot (except for dealing with spam comments, spam registrations, confused users, flame wars, etc).
posted by adamrice at 7:19 AM on June 12, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

I would suggest Drupal. It is time consuming at first. The learning curve is kind of steep but I also think for what you want to do, Drupal can do it.

These are the modules that you would probably want to use for events:
* Calendar 5.x-1.7 - Creates a calendar that shows clickable events that people have created
** Date 5.x-1.8 - Calendar needs this.
* Event 5.x-1.0 - Allows users to create events.
** Event Repeat 5.x-1.1 - Adds the ability to create repeat events. NOTE: each repeat is it's own separate event.
** RSVP 5.x-1.5 - Adds the ability to RSVP select people (have to provide email address)
** Signup 5.x-2.4 - Allows users to click a "signup" button for an event and then put in their information. They can then get reminders about an event.
** Event Manager 5.x-1.0 - Adds functionality to Event such as allowing people to sign up for roles (ticket taker, coffee maker, usher, etc) or food (coffee cake, steak, hot dogs, drinks, etc.).
I'm not sure if there is a module for venues but there is a places field when creating an event.

Forums is a module that comes with the basic install of Drupal.
You can allow users to upload files and attach them to posts and pages.
* Image 5.x-1.8 - Allows you to upload images and create image galleries and other image stuff.

The one thing that I'm not sure about is managing m ailing lists...
I think you might want to use something like Organic Groups to create the groups of people but then I'm not sure what to do about the mailing list... There is a module called Mailing List Groups that might work but you need "an external mailing list engine. (currently only sympa is supported)"

Hope this is helpful.
posted by crios at 7:22 AM on June 12, 2008

I've enjoyed Squarespace if you're looking for a hosted solution (you can route your own domain through it if you already have a .com/.org/etc). A lot of built in stuff is easy to set up (one click discussion board and photo gallery setup) and all the editing is done directly on the site once a user is logged in (which I find helps people who aren't tech-savvy). Plenty of good looking premade templates as well. You might run into the problem of needing some advanced feature they don't currently have though, but they have a 14 day trial so it might be worth giving it a shot. It's my (hosted)CMS recommendation anytime there are non-tech people involved.
posted by genial at 7:32 AM on June 12, 2008

managing several mailing lists, with customisable fields to gather data on subscribers

ExpressionEngine's a great CMS overall, but it can't do this.
posted by kirkaracha at 7:40 AM on June 12, 2008

If you go with either Joomla or Drupal, consider using CiviCRM to manage the events and mailings. It's well designed for the nonprofit sector. I've installed for a few community events and it's pretty good and always getting better.
posted by advicepig at 7:53 AM on June 12, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

I'm using Drupal for BlogCamp, which is a similar type of event but without as many pieces of functionality you need. There are modules for everything you want but most of them will need some PHP tweaking to modify functionality and some CSS tweaking to modify the look and feel of the default output.

I found the event.module's CSS to pretty bad out-of-the-box and somewhat difficult to edit, but not impossible.

More importantly, you need to choose a default theme that is easily modifiable. I like to use chameleon or burnt as a theme base and build on top of that.

Drupal's forum.module is very good out-of-the-box unless you expect massive, long-term use in which it starts to break down (inefficient SQL).

Drupal's profile.module is excellent and flexible.

The flexible taxonomy of Drupal makes it a very extensible framework for categorizing content, however there is a learning curve for understanding how to best use it.

The CCK module for Drupal allows for extremely flexible content structure, pretty much giving you the ability to define data tables and taxonomy on the fly, when you need it, without having to learn SQL and mess with the database table structure.

Access control within Drupal is fantastic. It allows you to define your user roles, assign any level of permissions to each role and then assign a role to each account/user. Extremely flexible and I've seen very few other out-of-the-box CMS solutions that even come close to this.
posted by camworld at 8:00 AM on June 12, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

I'd never looked at CiviCRM before but you got me interested advicepig. It might be a good solution for a number of the requirements, especially the mailing list function.
posted by crios at 3:03 PM on June 12, 2008

I use Drupal at work. There are some things I don't like about it, but it's got a good community and tons of modules that work out of the box. That'd be my choice.

I don't suggest WordPress. It doesn't make for a good CMS.
posted by meta_eli at 7:45 PM on June 12, 2008

Thanks everyone. Anyone wanna big up Textpattern?
posted by hatmandu at 1:11 AM on June 13, 2008

Textpattern is awesome. I don't know what I can say about it in particular, but it's well put together and fast. There are lots of plugins for it as well, and a pretty active community around it.

Also, Wordpress sucks so much, so don't use that whatever you do. Seriously, how the fuck is Wordpress so popular?
posted by chunking express at 12:54 PM on June 20, 2008