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

June 24, 2008 10:39 AM

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?

posted by jrholt to Computers & Internet (12 answers total)

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.
posted by ukdanae at 10:56 AM on June 24, 2008

Sorry, i said "as well" too often there.
posted by ukdanae at 11:08 AM on June 24, 2008

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.
posted by zotterdas at 11:41 AM on June 24, 2008

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.
posted by cjorgensen at 12:06 PM on June 24, 2008

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

Although EE is pretty badass.
posted by burnfirewalls at 1:51 PM on June 24, 2008

Another vote for Expression Engine.
posted by clearlydemon at 1:52 PM on June 24, 2008

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.
posted by tmcw at 2:54 PM on June 24, 2008

> 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.
posted by ardgedee at 4:25 PM on June 24, 2008

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

Seconded.
posted by davejay at 6:29 PM on June 24, 2008

Wordpress sucks so much. I am amazed people use it. Stay away stay away!
posted by chunking express at 8:21 AM on June 25, 2008

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.
posted by deern the headlice at 8:52 AM on June 25, 2008

There is this article elaborating how to recreate Flickr using drupal.
posted by BrodieShadeTree at 1:31 PM on June 27, 2008