Comments on: If you were designing a website that relies heavily on photos and text, what CMS platform would you pick?

Question: If you were designing a website that relies heavily on photos and text, what CMS platform would you pick?

jrholt — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 10:39:55 -0800

If you were designing a website that relies heavily on photos and text, what CMS platform would you pick?

We're looking for a content management system that allows for more flexibility than our current platform (Joomla). Our site features concert reviews and lots of high quality concert photos. If you were designing a new website where you planned to publish reviews and photos, what's the cutting edge CMS you'd pick?

By: ukdanae

ukdanae — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 10:56:42 -0800

I'm a very big fan of Expression Engine, which has a gallery feature built-in, and you can link blog posts to gallery photos out-of-the-box. I've used Joomla as well and EE is a *lot* easier to template as well.

By: ukdanae

ukdanae — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 11:08:43 -0800

Sorry, i said "as well" too often there.

By: zotterdas

zotterdas — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 11:41:57 -0800

I'll second Expression Engine. It's easily the most flexible CMS I've worked with, and certainly blows Joomla! out of the water in that department (the tech support is also stellar).

As ukdanae mentioned, it's got a bundled Gallery Module that you could probably leverage to manage your photos, and a built-in feature that allows you to set up multiple upload destinations for photos and other files, so you can keep things organized as you add files to the site.

Drop in on the forums, where they've got a board specifically for pre-sales questions like "can it do this...?" where the developers regularly offer their input.

By: cjorgensen

cjorgensen — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 12:06:06 -0800

EE is also cool in that you can run multiple site out of one installation. I currently use it to run 4 radically different sites. It also lets you drop in pretty much anything. If you can do it by hand, you can do it from within EE.

This is a pay option, but is reasonable priced, and you get what you pay for.

By: burnfirewalls

burnfirewalls — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 13:51:10 -0800

Wordpress, as of the last major release (2.5, I think) included a new photo management system.

Although EE is pretty badass.

By: clearlydemon

clearlydemon — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 13:52:20 -0800

Another vote for Expression Engine.

By: tmcw

tmcw — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:54:44 -0800

Drupal if you don't want to fork over the cash for Expression Engine. Also has a larger developer community - it's your decision whether that outweighs professional help from EE. (note: if you use Drupal, send me a message. I can give you some tips on image management)

Oh God No Not Wordpress. That stuff is becoming Windows XP for the web with it's security holes.

By: ardgedee

ardgedee — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:25:45 -0800

> Wordpress, as of the last major release (2.5, I think) included a new photo management system.

Wordpress's gallery shortcode is limited and the media management is a good idea left unfinished. The hooks are available for plugins to extend the shortcode syntax, but if your goal is to efficiently interleave images and text it leaves a lot to be desired.

Wordpress has other things going against it if you plan to use it as a standard CMS in a traditional publisher/editor/author model. If Joomla's already unsatisfactory in that regard Wordpress will probably be unsatisfactory in a different way.

By: davejay

davejay — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:29:25 -0800

Oh God No Not Wordpress. That stuff is becoming Windows XP for the web with it's security holes.

Seconded.

By: chunking express

chunking express — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 08:21:03 -0800

Wordpress sucks so much. I am amazed people use it. Stay away stay away!

By: deern the headlice

deern the headlice — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 08:52:33 -0800

Their custom fields/groups make Expression Engine the most flexible of any system out there. Learning and understanding EE template tags is not really for the novice, though.

By: BrodieShadeTree

BrodieShadeTree — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 13:31:32 -0800

There is this article elaborating how to recreate Flickr using drupal.