OsakaWebbie
Programmer
I'm looking for some opinions on which open source CMS might best fit my situation. Background: I have a number of web sites that I built by hand (or in GoLive with hand-done fine-tuning) and still maintain myself - most are static HTML with a consistent look across each site, but there are occasional PHP pages for something specialized. The newest site is fairly pure CSS but the rest still use a lot of table layout because I haven't had time to redo them the "right way" (plus, I'm still having some trouble getting CSS layout to look consistent across browsers - maybe it's just me). Some are Japanese or bilingual English/Japanese. All are hosted on commmercial hosting servers that run Apache/PHP and multibyte-configured MySQL on Linux, but the hosters are on the lower-end, so they tend not to run the latest versions nor include tons of libraries.
Now I'm falling behind at keeping the various sites current, and I'm tired of being depended on for every little change, so I'm hoping that a little time invested upfront to "port" the sites to a CMS will save me time in the long run, because I can then hand the content maintenance responsibility back to the people who asked me to make the sites in the first place (or to other non-techies). Perhaps they will even get inspired to add new features like photo albums or podcasts, once they see what the possibilities are - I don't have the time or inspiration to rejuvenate the sites by old-fashioned brute force methods.
This would be my first experience with CMSes, so each system starts on even ground for my learning curve. Drupal and Joomla seem to be the leading two, and I have seen a lot of discussions comparing them. But all the discussions seem to be just about using them to build sites from scratch, with the same type of person maintaining the site that put it together in the first place. But if I'm an experienced but overworked HTML/PHP coder who wants to preserve the basic look of the sites (and retain the ability to do some custom PHP things in occasional pages) but wants the content management interface to be easy to understand for total non-programmers, which do you guys think I should choose? You are also welcome to suggest other systems, but I'm leaning toward those two because they are very popular, which bodes well for longevity of the systems as well as increases the chance that someday I can hand off not only the content but also the overall management to others (it should be easier to find experienced users of those than less commonly used ones).
One area of particular interest is multilingual support - not only are some of the sites bilingual, but because of that, different users of the same installation of the CMS will prefer one or the other language for their UI, but it has been difficult to tell how well Joomla and Drupal handle UI language on a per-user level (Drupal appears to support it in theory but there are complaints of bugs, and the Joomla site doesn't talk about it at all so it's either easy or unsupported).
When I asked this question on the HTML forum (I was ultimately directed here as a better fit), someone asked me to post links to some of the sites I would like to port. So here are the first few sites I hope to port to CMS, in rough order of priority (don't judge my design taste by these sites - in several cases the appearance was dictated by others):
(fully bilingual; table layout) [Currently it also has, but not yet linked on the main site, Coppermine and Wordpress/Podpress installations in various stages of experimental development - see the "gallery" and "media" subdirectories. But I suspect a CMS will eliminate the need for separate tools, right?]
(mostly Japanese; pure CSS)
(only Japanese, but similar to mostly CSS)
(mostly Japanese; table layout)
(only Japanese; table layout)
I don't have much spare time, so once I get used to using one CMS, I'm not likely to learn a second one unless I run into a big roadblock - I don't go around checking out all the latest software tools as a hobby. And if I go through all the work of learning a CMS and porting the sites, but then the people managing the content still need a lot of guidance from me to use the CMS, it would have been better to just keep maintaining the sites myself. So ease of use is important. Anyway, enough rattling on - what are your thoughts?
Now I'm falling behind at keeping the various sites current, and I'm tired of being depended on for every little change, so I'm hoping that a little time invested upfront to "port" the sites to a CMS will save me time in the long run, because I can then hand the content maintenance responsibility back to the people who asked me to make the sites in the first place (or to other non-techies). Perhaps they will even get inspired to add new features like photo albums or podcasts, once they see what the possibilities are - I don't have the time or inspiration to rejuvenate the sites by old-fashioned brute force methods.
This would be my first experience with CMSes, so each system starts on even ground for my learning curve. Drupal and Joomla seem to be the leading two, and I have seen a lot of discussions comparing them. But all the discussions seem to be just about using them to build sites from scratch, with the same type of person maintaining the site that put it together in the first place. But if I'm an experienced but overworked HTML/PHP coder who wants to preserve the basic look of the sites (and retain the ability to do some custom PHP things in occasional pages) but wants the content management interface to be easy to understand for total non-programmers, which do you guys think I should choose? You are also welcome to suggest other systems, but I'm leaning toward those two because they are very popular, which bodes well for longevity of the systems as well as increases the chance that someday I can hand off not only the content but also the overall management to others (it should be easier to find experienced users of those than less commonly used ones).
One area of particular interest is multilingual support - not only are some of the sites bilingual, but because of that, different users of the same installation of the CMS will prefer one or the other language for their UI, but it has been difficult to tell how well Joomla and Drupal handle UI language on a per-user level (Drupal appears to support it in theory but there are complaints of bugs, and the Joomla site doesn't talk about it at all so it's either easy or unsupported).
When I asked this question on the HTML forum (I was ultimately directed here as a better fit), someone asked me to post links to some of the sites I would like to port. So here are the first few sites I hope to port to CMS, in rough order of priority (don't judge my design taste by these sites - in several cases the appearance was dictated by others):
(fully bilingual; table layout) [Currently it also has, but not yet linked on the main site, Coppermine and Wordpress/Podpress installations in various stages of experimental development - see the "gallery" and "media" subdirectories. But I suspect a CMS will eliminate the need for separate tools, right?]
(mostly Japanese; pure CSS)
(only Japanese, but similar to mostly CSS)
(mostly Japanese; table layout)
(only Japanese; table layout)
I don't have much spare time, so once I get used to using one CMS, I'm not likely to learn a second one unless I run into a big roadblock - I don't go around checking out all the latest software tools as a hobby. And if I go through all the work of learning a CMS and porting the sites, but then the people managing the content still need a lot of guidance from me to use the CMS, it would have been better to just keep maintaining the sites myself. So ease of use is important. Anyway, enough rattling on - what are your thoughts?
