My experience with the CMSs out there since I had to study them to decide on what tool to use for a site:
CMSMadeSimple - Very simple and easy to setup. Has a few components but not as extensive as Drupal, Joomla, Plone etc. I don't know if it has a Wiki but it has everything else that you have pointed out. Drupal - Very extensible. Lots of components. However, I wasn't too happy with some of the components available. I found it too much like a framework rather than a CMS. But I have heard others who swear by Drupal. Joomla - Has everything you need and it is fairly simple to manage. Lots of components and templates. Plone - As Kg has already pointed out, this is a good choice. Can get pretty complicated if you want to customize it. I use this internally for the intranet and I really like it. Fine grained access control is a big plus. Negative is that it is pretty heavy and also is a little difficult to setup if you need an external database and don't want the ZopeDb that it uses by default. A big plus for Plone is that it supports multiple workflows for content updates with authorization levels, approvals from editors etc. Wordpress - It is essentially a blog software. It can be made to work like a CMS but it is still not a "natural" choice for a CMS. Typo3 - It is apparently pretty good. I didn't end up using it because I didn't have Php 5 installed. ez publish - Pretty good and very mature. Well worth considering. The API is pretty powerful. This is a good CMS to consider if you want a solid underlying framework and you require a content management workflow with authorization levels. Jaws - Seems pretty simple. I haven't studied this in much detail but it seems to be pretty popular. If your needs are more esoteric and if you are comfortable with J2EE, there are some good options from Apache which you can use - for example, Apache Jetspeed. But please be prepared for some elaborate configuration and setup tasks. Jetspeed is more of a portal software. One of the primary considerations for selecting a CMS is the strength of the community behind it. This is particularly important if your CMS is publicly accessible. The user and developer community needs to be active and thriving else you won't get fixes for security vulnerabilities and neither will you get help if you are stuck with trying to customize something. Another consideration would be to select a CMS which is fairly easy for your developer to come to grips with. Else you will find yourself in a place where you have a nice shiny CMS setup with all your content and then your developer leaves and you are now clueless as to what to do when it comes to maintaining the solution. Hope this helps. Regards, PK _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe <password> <address>" in the subject or body of the message. http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
