Joomla VS. Other CMS

Looking for opinions!

I've only built one site and that was with Joomla.  Not a great experience and I'm looking for other CMS options.  Not going to be an Ecommerce site, No Blogging….pretty basic text data mainly.  Any suggestions on other platforms and why…..thanks!
 

Most people here will recommend Composr (me included). If you want a simpler site, you can simply remove the addons you don't want (whereas with most other systems you add the ones you do want). You get all the benefits waiting in the wings if you ever get to a point where you may need them, but you could build a site with Comcode Pages (you could even use HTML pages if you preferred) pretty easily.

MikeK said

… Any suggestions on other platforms and why…..thanks!

From “Joomla VS. Other CMS”, 18th March 2016, 12:37 pm

I wrote a number of forum posts on these sorts of questions over at the old OCPortal site and thought there was one that might be worth re posting with some edits.

There are a number of front line CMS systems out there and relatively new players like http://www.woothemes.com and http://www.silverstripe.org/ (Kiwi Company), Expression Engine https://ellislab.com and http://prestashop.com/ and as well lots of others including Wordpress, Joomla (My mates site was hacked recently and is a nightmare to fix), Drupal and as well NationBuilder. I have looked at them all and always come back to OCPortal software and now Composr.

When I talk about OCP I am talking about old software that has pretty well now been replaced with Composr and this post was primarily written a few years back when Composr was a development idea…

OCP at first glance when it comes to skinning and design looks daunting. The others all need either expert PhP coders or use developers to get really good sites or you need a lot of time to get it just right. Wordpress is popular because it has a million plug ins BUT its horses for courses. There is always something that doesn't work or is screwed up or is not designed correctly or there is a significant feature missiing in all of them. So you have to find one that does the job you are looking for. That is the trick to get the right CMS for what you are trying to do.

AS OCP rolls out later versions I am sure it is picking up new followers and old geezers who are finally seeing the light and upgrading. ALL i can really say about OCPortal is the bunch of evangelists who have designed and built this beast of a CMS (and I say that in the kindest way possible) have taken extraordinary lengths to look at key things like site hackability, useful options and are building a terrific CMS. Many people don't realise what is under the hood and it is such a shame as OCPortal has all the armoury in the world under the hood to protect your expensive investment in time and effort when you are running and deploying a mission critical site. The internet is a dangerous place and hackers are getting very innovative. You would have to put OCPortal (Composr) at the top of the list to look just at that aspect.

Current comments
Here are a couple of places you definitely need to view before you look at anything else.

The full list you will find in the documents on Composr or on the Issue Tracker site click 'full issue tracker' to see the complete list. Composr staff have also released a massive upgrade to site documentation that is very much worth a decent look at. Why look here you might say because it doesn't sell me on the features. Well there is a key reason to look at these two places. Firstly how many sites out there have this sort of attention to doumentation and secondly show me a single site out there that has a tracker system for tracking user feed back to components and a published site development road map on ever single software item or feature being worked on or considered. These sorts of things are often glossed over or not considered when getting into software systems.

What I have found with the OCP and Composr software is you can relatively easily build things through adminsitration rather than customisation as in the Admin console there are heaps of functions to enhance and build.

If you want a basic site you don't turn on the features and this pretty well sums it up.

KingBast said

You get all the benefits waiting in the wings if you ever get to a point where you may need them

There are a couple of things I have found over a lot of years in web sites and that is users never know what they don't know until they want it… So today they say they want only this or that, but in a week they will want a lot more as they discovered something or the business changed. The other thing is that technology changes rapidly and you will need a core base system that you can embed other applications or systems. I am pretty confident that is here in Composr although I personally have not yet used the product in a production site and it is near end of Beta. I have run up a development site and suggest you do the same.

Lastly I have to say you only get out what you put in.  If you spend a few hours on looking into it that wont be enough. The best way is to set up a development site and build something and get some of your users trying things out. In one of the two public on line demos take a look at the site map. That will give you a better idea of what is in the application suite.

Take a look at the downloads / publications/ library function in action. Start with looking at the 'works' module under content (home page) and get familiar with what that looks like. A couple of works of Shakesphere.

Then go to the content management zone in the admin console… go to the downloads module  manage downloads then click on choose custom download fields. Create a couple of additional fields and pay close attention to what is in the TYPE field because TYPE determines what that field will do. Create the field (I created two fields to test it is working, an ISBN and a Date published using the ISBN and DATE data elements) go and ADD a new download and you will see your fields created. There are two things to note. Firstly the EXTRODINARY number of field types (data elements) you can add and what functions they perform, the ease of re ordering these on the front end screen and simply the fact you can add relatively complex fields so easily.