Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, etc. Which is right for me?

[RP1America]

I have a very good understanding of HTML/CSS and have been hand-coding for a few years now. I have never used a WYSIWYG program, though I am not opposed.

I also have been writing VBA code for Word and Excel for a year or two.

I need to create an intranet website for my company. This site will contain documentation on how to perform tasks within various applications.

Currently we are utilizing Word, Excel, and PDF documents in a document storage application for our company's procedures. We are looking to move to web-based documentation.

I have teammates within my department (support group for those who use the procedures) that are not necessarily technically minded. Therefore, we will need an interface that is fairly user-friendly for creating new documentation that conforms to the formatting/layout specified during development (by me).

So, the big question...WHAT CMS MIGHT BE RIGHT FOR ME? I hope I have provided enough information to give you a good idea of my abilities and needs.

Thanks!

Ryan

 

[spamjim]

I'm biased. We use Drupal for our intranet because it is more extensible than the others. However, that extensibility might pose more of a challenge to a new user.

One major issue might be searching uploaded documents (DOC/XLS/PDF). Neither of these CMS's help with that right out of the box. You might need a separate server-side indexing solution.

You can make it easy on yourself by using a ready-made Drupal intranet:

http://openatrium.com/

 

[spamjim]

Oops...

I neglected to notice that you appear to be wanting to move from DOC/XLS/PDF to web based docs. So searching these documents may not be an issue if you are recomposing them as articles in the CMS database. Articles in the database are still fully searchable.

 

[RP1America]

Thanks for the reply, spamjim!

In doing some more research since posting this question, I am going to take a stab at using WordPress. I have it on good recommendation that the other two, Drupal and Joomla, may be overkill for my needs.

Thanks again!

 

[EdwardMartinIII]

I admit that I've been exploring WP for the same purpose.

I'm not q-u-i-t-e sure it'll work for our needs, though. At the moment, we're still doing hand-coded pages for the intranet. A little tedious, but it keeps things simple!

I'm curious to see how you resolve this, if you don't mind sharing.

Thanks!


Edward

"Cut a hole in the door. Hang a flap. Criminy, why didn't I think of this earlier?!" -- inventor of the cat door

 

[creativeedg10]

This really isn't enough information to make a recommendation about what CMS is right for you. So many factors come into play, and there are many Content Management Systems out there to explore.

Wordpress is a great CMS from my experience with it, but there are reasons to use it and reasons to use another system as well. There are quite a few questions to ask and things to plan before diving into a web project, but I can't say that I've had a bad experience with Wordpress either.

 

[kjv1611]

I do think Drupal can handle it. However, for a corporate setup, if you are already using Microsoft Office in particular, I think it will be difficult to do better than Microsoft SharePoint. Have you looked at SharePoint at all?

...I realize I'm a little late to this one, haven't browsed the forum here in a while.

 

[RP1America]

Thanks for the comment kjv.

Oddly enough, our company has recently decided to use SharePoint for other areas. When I found this out, it was like "ding, ding, ding, we have a winner!"

I definitely think it is going to meet our needs (and more)!

Thanks!

 

[kjv1611]

One thing that makes SharePoint great for corporate stuff is the version control. Check into that for certain.

There are also wiki pages you can setup, however that does not offer version ccontrol. So for that reason, our company tends to stick to keeping things in Word docs (documentation) and PDF files, and use version control to keep a historical record. Not for everything, but in some areas, that's a real winner.

 

[artnethouse]

Drupal is first to develop in imho

But why not to check something already capable to do such job?
Check please Bitnami stacks for different applications.