Be Excellent To Each Other

I don't suppose anyone here has any experience with these do they? I'm looking at setting up some new websites and there's such a lot of stuff people want on there now that doing it all "by hand" isn't looking like the way to go any more.

I've got Joomla and Drupal both installed locally and have begun poking around. But I'm just wondering what experiences people might have had in general but in particular with customising them etc as I've no doubt that I will be getting loads of silly suggestions regarding the layout etc that I'll have to try and incorporate. I'm a total PHP n00b so there's that too but having looked at a few tutorials it doesn't seem too bad and I suspect it'll probably be mostly the CSS side of things that I'll be needing to faff with.

Drupal is probably the most powerful of the two, but also the most complicated.
We tried to use Joomla to make Up To Jump, and it was a nightmare.

Have you considered WordPress? That's my CMS of choice.

Ta Grim..., I'd not really considered Wordpress I guess because I tend to think of it as for doing blog type sites. I shall install it and have a look.

I think it depends on the depth of the requirements. Like Grim, I'd probably suggest Wordpress for a simple site. For something more powerful, I'd use Joomla, but that's mainly because I've spent the most time with it - Consolemad runs on it and I built the company website on it too. However, I've got a subscription with Rocket Theme to get decent templates (they do Drupal and Wordpress too, but I think they're dropping Drupal soon) and one with Anything Digital for their excellent SEO component to handle all the URL rewriting.

What can be confusing with Joomla are the available versions. 1.5 is what I run and is the most stable fork whereas 1.7 has all the fancier new features. However, there's a beta of 2.5 - so no idea what's going on there.

Wordpress is not just for blogs, damn it! I like Wordpress. It's a piece of piss to use and you can pretty much make anything you like with it.

Having just installed it I like it but I don't think Wordpress is going to really do what I'm after, or at least it might be a stretch. It's quite a large site already with all sorts of different types of content and stuff, to move it all into Wordpress would be difficult from what I've seen. I just get the feeling I'd be making something do what I want whereas it feels easier to use something that is already meant to do what I want. Although admittedly the total amount of experience in WordPress I have so far is about 20 minutes. Still just looking at the options though really. Some parts of the site already come from databases and I avoided using tables in the design so I might yet just redesign it all.

Up To Jump is hosted on Wordpress, if that helps you.

And look how successful that was.

Quite. It did work, though.

Yeah, I'm not convinced you could blame its lack of popularity on the platform.

Nah.. I wasn't exactly being serious. It did the job well enough - the only issue initially with it was people waiting to be made contributors/admins or whatever, but you'd get that with any CMS really. Either that or turn it into a wiki and watch it all fall apart.

I used Joomla and wrote user documentation for other members of staff so they could do things with it. it wasn't the most intuitive for me, but got there in the end. Moreso when I realised it wanted to do things different to how I would have arranged things in such a setup. I think the general design was outsourced, so I can't comment on how easy that was, just the databases that it linked to, and how to do it.