{"id":2719,"date":"2008-06-12T08:28:43","date_gmt":"2008-06-12T08:28:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/gregladen\/2008\/06\/12\/how-do-you-pick-a-content-mana\/"},"modified":"2008-06-12T08:28:43","modified_gmt":"2008-06-12T08:28:43","slug":"how-do-you-pick-a-content-mana","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/2008\/06\/12\/how-do-you-pick-a-content-mana\/","title":{"rendered":"How do you pick a content management system?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Joomla! is a Content Management System that is so widely used and cool that you can buy Joomla logo gear<\/a>, like this shirt. Could that mean that it is a good CMS? <\/em> <\/center><\/span>And why would you want one?Before I started Gregladen.com, I went through all of the content management sites that I had available to me in order to consider possibilities for running my blog. I ended up using WordPress, which is a kind of CMS that specialized in blogs, for a number of reasons. But I did use a couple of different content management systems for private or small scale projects. At the moment, I’m looking again at CMS as a solution for something we need to fix at The U.But how do you pick one?When I was trying different systems, I found out right away that no system could be taken out of the box and turned into a functioning solution without considerable messing around. The different things that could go wrong were myriad and largely unpredictable, and probably change over time. The most useful information for me at the time was in the support forums, where I would occasionally find that some function I was really hoping would work in fact did not work, and the developers had no clear intention of making it work. When you run into that, it is a good idea to back off.But ultimately, I think what makes a content management system work is the documentation. Given two systems, one ‘better’ than the other but with less adequate documentation, you can actually do more with the better documented but otherwise inferior system. Depending. Depending mostly on unknowns. For this reason, Drupal became one of my preferred choices back then. I had a Drupal book (Building Online Communities With Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress<\/a>\"\") which also covered phpBB and WordPress.Now, just as I’m considering messing around with this new project using a CMS, a new book has come out on one of the more widely used packages. Joomla! A User’s Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website<\/a>\"\" has been positively reviewed here on slashdot <\/a> by web developer Michael Ross<\/a>.Joomia! has two other books of which I’m aware: Beginning Joomla!: From Novice to Professional (Beginning from Novice to Professional)<\/a>\"\" and Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5<\/a>\"\"Indeed, the very production of a book about an OpenSource CMS system is a kind of endorsement. It is a reasonable assumption that some thought goes into the process of what systems to write and publish books about. A totally crappy CMS is not going to get a book by one of the major publishers. Then when it does, it gets more use, and as an OpenSource product, more use means more development. An interesting analysis would be to count (with some care … paying attention to publication date and sales?) the CMS after market publications.Which reminds me. Joomla! may be cool, but Drupal has about ten English Language books that are still current. So Drupal must be good too.My upcoming project requires a complex form linked to a database with each user having a different and secured form (invisible to other users, most likely). I have not looked under the hood of any CMS in at least six months so I don’t know yet what I’m going to do. But I’ll let you know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joomla! is a Content Management System that is so widely used and cool that you can buy Joomla logo gear, like this shirt. Could that mean that it is a good CMS? And why would you want one?Before I started Gregladen.com, I went through all of the content management sites that I had available to … Continue reading How do you pick a content management system?<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[130,57],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5fhV1-HR","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2719"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2719"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2719\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}