(written by JamesColin)
I’d like to introduce you to my personal favorite CMS, it’s Drupal – Open Source CMS | drupal.org
In my view the best CMS you can use which is free and based on PHP & MySQL is Drupal.
The only reason to use something else would be if you plan on simply doing a blog with a few categories & pages. Then use WordPress – Blog Tool and Publishing Platform
WordPress is the option to choose not because in unable to handle professional blog, IT IS indeed, but because WordPress started as a blog platform and most web services have at least one WordPress module/plugin if they have only one.
So for blogging full force, get yourself the wordpress script.
For everything else, including blogs up to multi users websites, take Drupal.
Never do the mistake of taking Joomla because your friend told you so or because you read on a forum that it is easier and better than Drupal, this is false.
Drupal might be more difficult to grasp at first, but this steep learning curve lasts only a few weeks, and after investing the time to learn Drupal you will never regret it.
It’s been about 5 years I first installed Drupal and I’ve been in lvoe ever since, it has served me very well. Every time I see web awards, made by professionals, Drupal always win over Joomla, and those guys know what they’re looking at, they don’t choose Drupal because they are fanboys, they analyse the code and functionnalities very carefully and objectively.
Next awards is Packt Publishing in november, last years it has always been Drupal the winner, except one year, why? Because this year they’ve put a stupid rule that the previous year winner couldn’t win the next year, and since it was Drupal…
They’ve removed this rule since and then Drupal wins every years over ALL CMS out there, not only Joomla.
But Joomla comes second, yes. It’s not a bad CMS at all. I simply advice you to invest time in the best. And if you’re just starting, you know what? Install Drupal 7.
It’s not yet release as a final version, but the final version will come out around christmas, so start with the number 7, not the 6, by the time you become good with Drupal, the final version will be out and most essential modules will be updated to the 7th version.
This was my advice, what is yours?
I had a big hiphop music project which we put to rest a few years ago.
It had around 60.000 Users with over 100.000 self produced MP3s and the program was self coded from scratch.
But if you don't have an top notch programmer that is your friend like I did a big project like that one would cost you tens of thousands of dollars so it's most likely better to stick with something free or licensed software.
For Forums I use vBulletin. I use it for nearly ten years now and for me it is the best forum software out there.
I just bought a XenForo license for me to experiment because it looks promising.
But for developing a forum with a long future in mind I chose to stick to what I know and that is vBulletin. Like here on AdsenseExperts ;)
admin
I think it is the best thing to do, because boss and customers are never happy, and when they are, you're just selling your limited time on earth against money. You work, you get paid. If you want more money you have to work again.
That is not my ideal. I prefer to work as much as I want for some time and then receive money for years to come.
Joomla IS a mistake. You didn't go far with Drupal because you abandonned after a few tries. Joomla looks better/easier for beginners, then you invest more time into it and finally some day you'll see the limits.
With Drupal you NEVER see the limits, at least I never saw the limits yet after 5 years of using it.
But since you started with Joomla, now your mistake is done and there's no way you'll go back to Drupal, I don't think so, it's very rare and only maybe after some years when you'll get fed up, but that can take time.
You should give Drupal 7 beta 2 a try, download, install on your web server and try. But hey, it's ok if you're with Joomla, I don't mind at all, it's YOUR problem, not mine haha.
Yes it has a higher learning curve than Joomla and at the moment I am using a developer to add code where it is needed however I do not think that Joompla would be able to after all the features that are in Drupal or on Drupal add ons.
Like workflow for example.
However I agree that Drupal is the way to go - I also heard good things about worldpress however. If you look at my website ( Italy | Italy daily News, Weather, All you need to know about Italy ) you can see it is pretty complicated.
We are working on the ads section this week.