[webgeek247]

I agree about vba/vbportal and the like being just portals. I wouldnt class them as a CMS as many have said in this thread already. A proper CMS allows your users to make content like by submitting articles, upload files, make blogs etc.

My experience/opinions:

Joomla - A proper CMS but is 100% mind boggling to use. For me anyway. I just dont get it. The framework used or whatever its called is just weird. Mambots blah blah blah. Very strange imo lol. Maybe I didnt spend enough time trying to use it : s

Mambo - Same as above, obviously.

Anyway, I run a community for djs, producers and music lovers. Not a big community mind but still gets a lot of traffic and ranks well. Suppose its more of a place for info. but id like to change that by offering my members to upload dj mixes and was looking for a CMS that could allow this so I didnt go for vba/vbportal or similar because I needed a proper CMS where users could submit articles, upload music and which would skin my vbulletin forum so they both match. I tried loads of CMS/Portals from opensource as well as from other places but they just didnt offer what I wanted.

I then tried a lot commercial CMS with one being Jamroom, keep in mind I already have vbulletin/vbseo so MUST have forum integration of some kind that like shares usergroups or something heh. Unfortunately, Jamroom was a bit tricky to work with to and I couldnt get the forum integration to work properly.

In the end I put in for Subdreamer CMS Pro even though I knew many say bad things about SD I thought well the hell ill risk $99

At first I found it a complete nightmare trying to position the plugins : s after a while I sussed that. Then I found out of about 200 subdreamer skins available only one of them passed as valid xhtml but the design/template was way too tricky to edit due to the amount of images used etc. Im not very good with the design side of things so left that skin. In the end I found one that had the right layout and was set as strict xhtml which was wrong as it should have been xhtml 1.0 which is a good compromise. I changed it to xhtml 1.0 and fixed the remaining warnings/errors using the w3c checker and customised the design/layout etc and finished the main skin and forumskin and after just skinned the vbulletin forum using Subdreamer and everything work a charm : D

I still haven't managed to setup a proper member uploading/downloading system yet, hopefully ill be able to use the download manager plugin once theyve improved it and just change the code a little. But apart from that am pretty much happy with Subdreamer now. Since I joined theyve constantly been releasing new skins that seo friendly, good design and the support is excellent. Subdreamer CMS is very sef too. Nice neat urls that with vbulletin and vbseo works a treat. No point having a site if it doesnt rank well right.

So…if your after a site that is similar to mine then I recommend you try Subdreamer CMS Pro.

Im still looking into other cms/scripts though to see what extra I can add to my site. Will have to try vbportal/vbdrupal etc on localhost and have a play.

DJ Passion - Dance Music Community - Home

Hope my info helps some out.

Chris.