WordPress, CMS Made Simple or other?

Question

I'm a Java/.NET developer but on my spare time I've started looking into WordPress (for personal projects). I'm not as good in PHP as I am in Java or C# but I manage. With that said, I accept tips from either language (since it's personal projects I prefer to go open source cause it's free).

What I'm trying to do is creating a small multi-language business web site with standard pages (home, about us, contact us and so on), news, a simple web shop (just listing the products is good enough in the beginning) and a photo gallery.

What I like about WordPress is that it's very flexible with custom post types and so on (since I'm gonna need news entries, products and different content types on the same site). A set back is the admin interface for a "client" with minor computer knowledge, they have to "Create a Post" with post type product instead of the menu saying "Create Product" or "Create News Entry".

So basically my needs are:

• Standard Pages (Start page, contact form page and so on)
• Multi-Language (In both content and pages)
• Web Shop (Really simple one)
• Photo Gallery (Simple as well)
• News
• "Company Admin" (A user that can only access publishing stuff. Create news, pages and so on. Not install plugins or manage layout)
• Simplify Admin GUI ("Create Product" instead of "Create Post" with product as post type)

The question is: What CMS should I use?

Hope I made it clear enough what I'm trying to achieve! Any input is welcome! Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I've had good results with both Silverstripe and Concrete 5. They both have user management and an interface that can be used by novice users. What's more, they are both built upon a custom MVC framework and expect customization to be done by a programmer rather than in the CMS itself. This way, the interface contains less distracting configuration stuff.

If this doesn't work for you, there's always Drupal, which is very customizable and specialized in custom page types as well.

Good luck!

Answer 2

I just read that you chose for Silverstripe. I'd love to hear about your experiences with it as I myself have never tried that one.

However, I too would have recommended CMS made Simple™ if I had seen your post sooner. I have made dozens of sites with it. Compared to some of its brothers and sisters the admin interface is very intuitive and easy to manage. I usually even say "heaven for the digital illiterate end customer".

However, for the person who builds a site powered by CMSMS it's a must to know his/her way around (x)html and css. The same goes for basic knowledge of installing databases and permissions on folders.

The system is basically intended for designers and developers with a professional background and does not provide you with hundreds of ready made templates. It's up to you to make them yourself if you want to create something original. However, if one has the upper mentioned knowledge, freedom is at hand. No restrictions in layout :-)

Last note: if you want to do a multilingual site in CMSMS, I recommend you look here: http://www.i-do-this.com/blog/25/Another-method-of-Multilingual-CMSMS-Page. This method gives you extreme control over SEO and the URL structure. I point you to this as some time ago the MLE fork takien was telling about in his post has been proclaimed unsupported by the core dev team. The reason for this is that they cannot guarantee breakdown on updates to newer versions as it is actually a third party fork of CMSMS. The developer (Alberto Benati) who made the fork has moved the project to his own site.

Answer 3

Modern CMSs with the addition of their plugins and extensions are more or less doing what you need. I've used Joomla before to build up sites with most of your requirements with minimal effort. I also have a Java background and I've found Liferay, which is written in Java, very interesting. At this stage it's a mature product with extensive user/group customization and Portal development in the form of portlets.

Concerning Joomla addressing your requirements:

• Joomfish for multilanguage support
• Home page treated specially, contact and form pages in the form of modules
• VirtueMart for shopping cart
• Lots of photo galleries to choose from in the form of extensions
• I think built-in News functionality as module (not sure) but as well lots of extensions
• "Company Admin" as you describe can be a lower privileged users.For Joomla Admin separation have a look here
• Not sure what you mean by simplify Admin GUI. A user with lower privileges will have fewer settings in the site after they login.

Answer 4

Please don't use Joomla! I've been using it for years and it gets the job of putting together simple sites done quite well, but if you want to change any of the aspects about how your site works, it stops being simple to use. You will end up hacking PHP files to achieve things that are possibly very easy in other CMSses.

I had very good experiences with Drupal, where you can define your own Classes of "posts", so, for example, "Products", which will have special fields that are only associated to products. Joomla will never be able to do that!

Apart from that, Silverstripe is a good CMS that's very easy to handle. Wordpress might not get you far as I'm concerned with building shops, but I haven't looked into it.

Answer 5

for your needs, I would like to recommend yo to choose CMS Made Simple (CMSMS) rather than Wordpress. CMSMS has multi language feature (choose multilanguage package) which is very easy to setup and manage.Don't worry about customization, CMSMS is easy to use, nice admin page, easy to make your own themes. I'm not disfigure Wordpress, but since peoples not good in PHP, their site would be just another Wordpress blog. :D

Answer 6

There has been a new module added to CMSMS that makes multi lingual setup much smoother. More information can be found at this very useful blog:

http://blog.arvixe.com/creating-a-multilingual-cmsms-site-using-mlecms-module/

Answer 7

For the gallery for wordpress, the best solution in my opinion is to use an outside gallery, hosted on Picasa or Flickr for instance, and a simple plugin (you have a few to choose from) for that platform.

For translation, all the plugins I haved tried are very easy to break with other plugins or with WP upgrades if the plugin is not upgraded with it. For just two languages, I would just use a category based language organization. Not a perfect solution, and you will need to tweak the templates a bit, but it have worked for me.

Having said that, I would probably prefer to use Joomla if this were a project for myself, you would only miss the simplicity of Wordpress for plugin or template modifications (or even creation from scratch). And Joomfish is much better than any language support in WP as far as I can tell. And the same goes for VirtueMart, which is simple, easy to install, easy to use and have been there for years (= lots of modules, support, documentation, etc).