Good CMS for porting existing sites?

[OsakaWebbie]

I'm looking for some opinions on which open source Content Management System 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 most common example is a "human test" of my own invention for Contact Us forms). 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. 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 (albeit they mostly talk of older versions like D5 and J1.0). 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?

Please don't get into any Joomla/Drupal wars - there is no need to bash either of them, as I have seen happen on other forums. If you feel there are shortcomings that I should be aware of, please explain them in technical rather than inflammatory terms. [One area of particular interest is multilingual support - not only will some sites be 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).] And 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). 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. Thanks!

 

[ChrisHunt]

I've no experience of either Drupal or Joomla, but I have (re)built a couple of sites using Wordpress. It's easy for end-users to use, very extensible, and goes a long way beyond just blogging.

Could you post the URLs/more details of the sites in question? It might help us offer useful advice.

-- Chris Hunt
Webmaster & Tragedian
Extra Connections Ltd

 

[OsakaWebbie]

I've no experience of either Drupal or Joomla, but I have (re)built a couple of sites using Wordpress. It's easy for end-users to use, very extensible, and goes a long way beyond just blogging.

I have begun to dabble in Wordpress/Podpress just for posting sermon recordings on one church site, but I have trouble seeing how it could go very far beyond blogging - I can't even figure out how to control the date (the date the entry was posted is not the date the sermon was given, so it's confusing). But I'll admit that it is barely "out of the box" for me.

Could you post the URLs/more details of the sites in question? It might help us offer useful advice.

Okay, here are the first few sites I hope to port to CMS (in rough order of priority):

http://oicjapan.org

(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 - that would be better.]

http://gdopjapan.com

(mostly Japanese; pure CSS)

http://japan.deafmin.org

(only Japanese, but similar to

http://deafmin.org;

mostly CSS)

http://prayersummitsjapan.net

(mostly Japanese; table layout)

http://budounoki.org

(only Japanese; table layout)

I'm a little embarrassed to show you these sites. Don't assume the designs reflect my personal tastes - some are not my style, but dictated by others. And like I said in my first post, the absence of CSS is due to age of the design.

 

[ChrisHunt]

I can't even figure out how to control the date

Simple - on the write/edit post page, look down the right hand side for an area headed "Post Timestamp". There are drop-down and text boxes there that let you change the date to whatever you want.

Don't worry about table/css layout at this point - once you've moved to a CMS you'll have separated the content of your site from the layout and presentation of each page - it'll be easy to redesign and update your methods once you're up and running.

-- Chris Hunt
Webmaster & Tragedian
Extra Connections Ltd

 

[OsakaWebbie]

Simple - on the write/edit post page, look down the right hand side for an area headed "Post Timestamp".

Thanks, Chris!

Now, I'm still hoping for some others to jump in on the original question about CMSes. Anyone with personal CMS experience reading this thread? I sort of expected this to start an avalanche of bantering back and forth, but y'all are pretty quiet so far...

 

[Stretchwickster]

I had a go at learning Drupal a couple of years ago, but unfortunately I don't have any experience of multilingual support. I found it a bit of a learning curve but it seems fairly straightforward to add custom code. I have no experience of Joomla.

You may be better off asking this question in the following forum:
forum1246

Also, I remember researching the best option via these 2 sites:

http://www.opensourcecms.com/

http://www.cmsmatrix.org/

Hope this helps!

Clive

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer." (Paul Ehrlich)
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To get the best answers from this forum see: faq102-5096

 

[OsakaWebbie]

Ah, there is a forum for that! I searched by "cms", "joomla", and "drupal", but didn't try spelling it out - duh... Okay, I'll try my specific questions over there. Also, thanks for the links - they were both helpful (the matrix to compare functionality and the other one to see a bit of the interfaces in action).

 

[OsakaWebbie]

I posted on the CMS forum, but that forum is not very active - about one post a week or so, and no response to my question so far. So I wanted to let you guys know, in case someone here still might have some input. After reading more, I'm kinda leaning toward Joomla for ease of use, but if it doesn't have good multi-language support (which I have yet to determine), that is a concern, and there could be other blind spots.

 

[dwarfthrower]

I find Joomla very good. Easy to set up, and more importantly, easy for end users to use.

[sub]Never be afraid to share your dreams with the world.
There's nothing the world loves more than the taste of really sweet dreams.[/sub]
Webflo

 

[OsakaWebbie]

Just an update, for the record: I went with Joomla, and although I'm running into some bugs related to extensions and patches I decided I wanted (probably because Joomla 1.5 is very new, so the third-party stuff isn't thoroughly debugged yet), overall I'm quite happy with it. It was indeed quick to learn, once I got the hang of some of the terminology.

As for the multilingual capability, it seems to have what I need. So far I'm having trouble getting the Japanese language pack to work (as I said, new version blues, perhaps), but it looks like it will do what I want when I get the kinks out of it, and there is even an extension in the works (exists for 1.0 but not yet for 1.5) that will automatically manage bilingual content for a fully bilingual site - that will be sweet.