What CMS do you use and why

[AussieWebmaster]

I have tried WordPress, Joomla, Moveable Type and others

My preference is WP.

[dohertyjf]

I use Joomla! for my own personal business website, because it is what I learned at my old place of employment. I use Blogger for my personal blog, and an in-house developed CMS for my new SEO Content Writer post.

I like Joomla! because even though I'm a web developer by trade, I like that you can provide meta tags, keywords, and control the metrics on an advanced level, if you know what you are doing.

[AussieWebmaster]

Welcome to the forums Doherty - keep us informed on how each platform is working and any insights into improving SEO using them

[beu]

Drupal and Joomla are best for interprise but small to mid size businesses can get away with WP as long as they don't have ecommerce....

[seojoy]

I am using Joomla, wordpress for my websites.

[jag]

For wordpress there seems be ecommerce plugin available. Is that worth for small number of products?

[AussieWebmaster]

there are some decent sites using WP and ecommerce

[AccuraCast]

Joomla is good, but the wide range of plugins offered by WordPRess make it hands-down the best

[LucasAnderson]

In my opinion, bloated content management systems like Joomla or Drupal are terrible for the end-user experience and not very developer friendly. Concrete5 is a new powerful CMS that is easy for developers and even easier for end-users. It works on a in-context editing model so you make changes as you're browsing your site. No more portal clones! If you're tired of long training sessions and tons of client support requests, try a demo of Concrete5 here: http://bit.ly/concrete5cms

[AccuraCast]

Must say, we moved from plain HTML / PHP to WordPress on our own corporate site just 2 weeks ago and the load time has more than doubled. WP definitely needs to work on slimming down... and we need to work on the plugis to minimise load times.

[MAaron]

Choosing the right CMS to suit individual needs varies from person to person.

The overall advantages such as easily adding meta-data and adding fresh content without the need for a technical resource to do it make using these systems the right choice for many small businesses, regardless of the system.

With so many developers just a click away, customizing the look and feel of these systems is affordable - and by being open source, future upgrading and functionality make these the logical choice for nearly everyone.

Regards,
Melanie

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[AussieWebmaster]

I agree - open source is the way to go and there a so many good designers that can help with look and feel

[ezestseo]

I have used Joomla and Drupal. Both are good as point view of SEO. For both there are many free plugins also.

[rustybrick]

I should add, I built mine from the ground up after using MovableType for years and also WordPress.

I wanted absolutely full control.

[alan smith]

i am a big fan of Wordpress due to its great features.

[bhartzer]

I agree, I have to say that I've built a lot of sites on WordPress, and have invested plenty of time into learning WordPress SEO (optimizing WP properly). Unfortunately, WordPress is still so SEO-unfriendly when it's first installed--so you have to take time to make sure your theme and the proper settings are in place.

[Jazajay]

Got to admit work wise it's Joomla, easy, well ish if the end users ever actually use it more than 5% after training I would be surprised. But personally a custom solution is the only way, secure fast and as easy to code for without hacking core files.

I always find open source CMS are built for the lowest common web developer they are always just too clunky and so naff when it comes to coding. But hay.

Wasn't there a SEW blog post on this recently could have sworn the outcome of the blogger was to build your own.

Anyhoo pros and cons I suppose of each.

[Cole001]

hey,

i have used Magento, Joomla & wordpress... but i like the most is Joomla & wordpress..... i did work on these ... i had bad experience with magento.... so i would not recomanded any body with magento... infact we had premium version of that...

thanks,

[Dodger]

Originally Posted by beu

Drupal and Joomla are best for interprise but small to mid size businesses can get away with WP as long as they don't have ecommerce....

I don't agree with that. Neither are Enterprise worthy of eCommerce. The OP asked which CMS you would use, and I think from a developer standpoint it would have to be WordPress.

There is not really a good Enterprise eCommerce solution (out of the box) out there, unless you are an expert. Even with Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress ... adding on eCommerce plugins/addons still require a lot of expertise.

For any of these applications, they are all memory hogs and have latent response times, all of which need to be tweaked for the hosting server they are on and for the basics such as caching, image optimization, and all the other stuff that goes along with it. Some have better image optimization and caching than others, while true, they also have more Http requests ... so it is a toss up between them.

My actual preference is WordPress. It does not lock you into a "strict" block type atmosphere like Joomla and Drupal. Kind of reminiscent of PhpNuke or the like. Also, you are not locked into a specific templating engine (unless something has changed since I last seen those two).

From a developer standpoint, I think WordPress gives you more freedom to go outside the box. They have a few basic types of pages (they call em post types) and you can build upon those as you please. It is not for everybody, but it is liberating.

[Dodger]

Originally Posted by AussieWebmaster

there are some decent sites using WP and ecommerce

Yes there are. I would bet they are using a commercial plugin, and a lot of backend development.

But your question about what is the best CMS, crap, that is in the eye of the developer mostly ... but for the client, that is another question altogether.

Originally Posted by Rusty Brick

I should add, I built mine from the ground up after using MovableType for years and also WordPress.

I wanted absolutely full control.

I want full control too. The question now is, what is the best for the developer? How do you control the client?

While some CMS may appear easier in the backend to develop pages, sections, or whatever ... they are not that flexible. I have come to realize that WordPress is loose, loose enough to mold it into what you need it to do.

Originally Posted by MAaron

Choosing the right CMS to suit individual needs varies from person to person.
...
With so many developers just a click away, customizing the look and feel of these systems is affordable - and by being open source, future upgrading and functionality make these the logical choice for nearly everyone.

To a point. There are more of one, than the other. To one extreme, lets look at FileMaker developers (I know, they are not OpenSource) it is a database barely hanging on by their teeth, yet their are customers out there willing to pay the price.

Some OpenSource projects become obscure, loose traction, and a lot of websites are still dependent. Then the price goes up. This is the eCommerce of eCommerce.

Originally Posted by bhartzer

I agree, I have to say that I've built a lot of sites on WordPress, and have invested plenty of time into learning WordPress SEO (optimizing WP properly). Unfortunately, WordPress is still so SEO-unfriendly when it's first installed--so you have to take time to make sure your theme and the proper settings are in place.

Well, use a basic parent theme. Then work your child out from there. Personally, I use Hybrid Core. It is free, and SEO friendly out of the box.

-----------------------------

As for the other things about load times and yada, yada, yada. There is not going to be any solutions out there that will satisfy people. It all depends on the the hosting environment mostly, doesn't matter, shared hosting will suck the life out of Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress .... but you can tweak all of them to perform better. Then that is another story!