Best CMS for web site

[wolfhound]

I am looking at switching my current web site www.eaglekeeper.net over to a CMS due to the large amount of pictures I have and for ease in site updating. I have a huge amount of pictures and would like to be able to upload them to a file and have it built dynamically. Maybe even a blog or news related information.

Any ideas?

Thank you.

[Staren]

I'm trying to find the same thing. It's hard to find a middle range CMS. They are either like SimpleCMS and don't handle near enough content types, or huge like PHPNuke that works, but is just massave and has a bit of a learning curve. I tried Mambo for a while. The back-end is as easy to use as your going to get, but the template system is not the best. It feels a lot like it was just tossed together from the rest of the system. There are two for bigger, but not huge sites. One is the one wiki that looks like it can be simple to use, TikiWiki. The other is PostNuke. I haven't had a chance to give either a test run yet, but it's a place to start. You can also try going to www.opensourcecms.com They have reviews of pretty much everything.

[mairving]

The two best ones currently are Mambo and Angeline. Mambo has a very active developer community and has some quite advanced features over the others. It uses modules and components which makes it quite easy to use. A disadvantage is that none of the big galleries like Coppermine or Gallery have been ported over as of yet. Angeline which I don't think is quite as advanced does have Coppermine support.

I would avoid the Nukes like the plague. Too many security holes.

[mairving]

Originally Posted by Staren I tried Mambo for a while. The back-end is as easy to use as your going to get, but the template system is not the best. It feels a lot like it was just tossed together from the rest of the system.

Mambo released a new version last week partly for some security reasons but the admin backend is a great deal better and you can easily assign templates to pages. Everything is also organized better.

[Staren]

You mean Mambo 4.5.1? That's the one I've been testing. Worked pretty good for about a week, then the database dropped dead on me. Plus I like the Smarty template system. What Mambo uses just doesn't feel right.

edit - Mind if I use your sig idea? Whoever thought SmartTags would do anything other then make people NOT want to use their survices, was high on something.

[mairving]

Never cared all that much for Smarty. Curious about the database dropping out. Are you saying the database got deleted or you just couldn't connect to it? There certainly is no perfect CMS out there. I do like Mambo although sometimes in their quest to make every thing components or modules you lose something as well as end up with sometimes undesirable database design.

Feel free on the sig.

[Staren]

What seems to have happened is that the content data was deleted. All the titles and links in the front end where intact and all the tables where listed when I checked PHPMyAdmin, but all content pages where gone. None of the menu links that went to content worked. The Add News, Add Weblinks, edit content, and the front page worked, but anything having to do witth the content data was gone. It could still access the database because I could add new, just not see anything edded before this happened. It was also not a server wide database crash because I still have 3 other MySQL databases intact. 2 phpBB installs, and a story archive script.

[BlindFish]

I'm not saying it's suitable for your purposes but you might want to look at Plone (http://www.plone.org/). Seems to be a CMS that doesn't get much mainstream attention (it's still relatively young) but which is definitely going somewhere! Certainly very flexible, and new add-on products (for instance, for dealing with images and streaming files) are being released constantly (or can be developed relatively easily)...

It does have a steep learning curve, not least as it's based on Zope and uses Python... but definitely worth the effort.

[Staren]

Ya, that's just a little much. Wouldn't work on shared hosting all that well. You'd have to have your own server to run it. Pretty good concept though. Put on the list of projects to look at when I have the time for sure.