Best CMS system?

I've been playing with Joomla a fair bit lately but was just wondering what other people think the best/easiest system is?

I just want to build a community village website with it with listings for people who have their own cottage, B&B and hotel as well as the church, local groups etc and give them all rights to amend their own details (to be moderated before being published of course) whilst I am not a total noob when it comes to these things i'm far from an expert on CMS etc and I just kinda scrape by playing with Joomla.

any suggestions gratefully received

Ideally, you need a ready-made plug-in designed for some CMS. However, it can be a right pain searching for suitable plug-ins. Alternatively, you could look at WordPress. This is really designed for blogging but you can customise it for what you want straight out of the box.

I use Joomla myself and find that it's pretty well up to the job AND it's free. I would recommend having a good look at additional plugins that are available from the joomla site as well. You will need to get up to speed with the php code for building your own template if there is not a canned solution on the net. I believe there is an extension for dreamweaver to help with this, although I tend to do most of mine on the back of a fag packet.

Micks suggestion is worth a look as well, I cannot comment myself as I have little experience with wordpress. Here is a list of open source php cms, the good, the bad, and the very ugly: LINKY. What I would say, is do not even think about using Typo3. Not unless you want to learn typoscript, spend 6 months installing it, become a social out cast, and die before ever getting it to do something usefull.

I use joomla for my own web site and I would think it to your advantage if you can do the community web site in joomla, and offer additional bespoke web design to the B+Bs listed on your portal also in joomla.

Just to throw the cat among the pigeons, I'm looking at converting my own site to flash. It's no good for your purposes, but for a bespoke B+B site like mine, I get total control over the design and placement of content that html/css alone cannot give me. By using xml for the content, I can also make it seo friendly and easy to edit. I will probably run this in tandem with a none flash version on a permanent basis. Not as burdensome as one might think, when both versions of the site are complete, I will have one set of content files (xml) to drive them both.

Nice one thanks very much for the advice

Thanks for the advice

I prefer using Joomla 1.0.15 personally. Its easy to use, makes sites quick and painless to do. An old friend of mine thought it was cheating, but I just see it as a handy too to manage a site that can get real out of hand because of its size!

Jealousy struck him I believe!

Joomla by far has the most plugins and the biggest community in case you need any help

I noticed that no-one has mentioned Drupal as a Joomla alternative, if you are already comfortable with Joomla then that is fine, but Drupal is a very viable option, Joomla and Drupal both have a similar market share and both have great community support.

It's worth a look, most designers that I know tend to fall on one side of the fence or the other and focus their efforts towards one which is sensible, if you are still deciding though I would recommend giving Drupal a whirl.

If you google for Drupal 6 vs Joomla 1.5 comparisons you will find quite a lot of reviews of these two.

Regards,

Darryl

cheers

worth having a look here too

http://www.opensourcecms.com/

Post deleted by billford