CMS For a Tech Site

[Mr. Mooney]

Hello everyone,

I'm planning to launch a tech site next month. It will have news, reviews and of course a forum. Right now I'm trying to figure out what the best CMS for a tech site would be. Right now I'm looking at Joomla but am trying to look at all possible options. What about ExpressionEngine?

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks

[kevcj]

Originally Posted by Mr. Mooney

Right now I'm looking at Joomla but am trying to look at all possible options.

Are you using Joomla right now?

My opinion based on using joomla for 6 months - its bloat ware.

If anymore then 15 people got on the site, no more connections were allowed.

Asking for help in the joomla forum is like begging for help. Their support forums looks like a bunch of kids run it. Support issues are repeated over and over again, with one thread pointing to another for help. While looking for support on certain issues I found myself following links that led in a big circle. Its a big freaking mess.

Some of the joomla developers have a problem with their work tying into commercial software. Several months ago, the joomla developers even asked that other developers stop making commercial (paid for) software for joomla. Seems they wanted everything to be free.

Because of what the joomla developers were asking, some forum developers like SMF stopped offering bridges between their forum and joomla.

A lot of the software is connected to joomla by a "Bridge." Sometimes upgrading joomla broke certain bridges. Then parts of the site did not work. Upgrades turned into a 3 phase step for everything. Upgrade joomla, upgrade what ever is bridged, upgrade bridge.

Then, when a new version of joomla was released, it might be a few weeks before an update to X was released to work with the new version. So it might be days / weeks before you could install that patch, or it would break something.

While I had my site, I bought some expensive add-ons. Talk about a waste of money. Even the commercial add-ons for joomla are bad. I have seen free stuff on vbulletin.org that is 10X better then $100 add-ons for joomla.

The admins in the joomla forum can be heavy handed. After posting in one forum for support, and waiting a week or two for a reply - I posted in another forum that was kinda related to my problem. One of the admins sent me a nasty message and deleted my second post. When people can not get the help they need, what are they supposed to do?

Anyway, after about 6 months of using joomla, I left the community and bought Vbulletin. Now I just have a forum.

I look back on my joomla experience and wonder how can that software be so popular? I guess misery loves company.


I have never used this on a production site, but take a look at MKportal - http://mkportal.it/support/index.php

[Mr. Mooney]

Thanks for your help kevcj. Does anyone else have any suggestions?

[scott pruett]

ExpressionEngine is flat out awesome. It lets you do almost anything you can think of. I have two sites in development running EE, well worth the $$$ IMO.

I'm working on a vB + vbAdvanced Dynamics site now & it seems like a decent setup too... all depends on what your needs are.

Even the recent versions of Wordpress can do some great CMS stuff. It's a little more limited if you have lots of different sections of content, but it's a powerful platform not to be disregarded. Go look at some of the showcase sites @ www.revolutiontheme.com

HTH...

[Mr. Mooney]

In the end I want something similar to the way that:

http://www.notebookreview.com/

Works. You have the main article with links to the forum articles and the post is there as well.